Matt Rife Netflix Crowd Work Special ‘Lucid’ Is a Snooze

“Next time you see some haters in my comments saying, ‘All he does is crowd work, it’s so easy’ — is it?!” the comedian Matt Rife asks his audience. The 28-year-old social media star has clearly retained the defensiveness that marked so much of “Natural Selection,” his debut Netflix hour from last fall best remembered for an effectively rage-baiting, if groanworthy, bit about domestic violence. But in “Lucid,” his latest hours, Rife’s typical hobbyhorses — dick jokes, mostly, plus the aforementioned chip on his shoulder — are refracted through his audience, a few hundred fans gathered at the Comedy Zone in Charlotte, North Carolina for what Rife proudly and repeatedly stresses is Netflix’s first all-crowd work special.

Rife is not the first stand-up to source an entire act from spontaneous reactions to his own paying audience. (A decade ago, Todd Barry conducted an entire tour with no prepared bits, synthesizing the shows into a special directed by Lance Bangs.) It’s likely the phantom haters Rife is so irked by are responding less to his time-honored means of forging a connection with the crowd than the impression that Rife is more influencer than observational master, using TikTok as a shortcut to the upper echelons of his field. With his full lips and square jaw, Rife certainly looks the part.

To that end, Rife is careful to emphasize that he’s been performing at the Comedy Zone since he was a teenager, even though his mainstream success is relatively recent. Whatever one thinks of his Gen-Z bro schtick, “Lucid” — directed by frequent collaborator Erik Griffin — showcases Rife as a seasoned MC. He knows how long to dwell on an interesting response without wringing it dry (a woman who runs a business selling blow job tutorials), and how to pivot away from an obvious dead end (a disjointed ramble about being single). Besides, incorporating other points of view helps temper the exhaustion that comes with Rife pantomiming a high-octane sex toy. He’s more palatable as a garnish than the main course.

“Lucid” is, in practice, not as spontaneous as its premise implies. Though Rife opens with an expected bit of outfit-based roasting — a gentleman with a ridiculous pair of bedazzled, curly-toed boots is “dressed like Santa’s favorite elf” — most of the hour is a guided conversation on the subject of dreams. The first half is about dreams in the aspirational sense: a woman who’s left a career in marketing to become a pilot; a gay man who knows what his stripper name would be if he were a woman. (Brandy Jameson. Pretty good!) The second, weaker half is about more literal dreams. Rife has a recurring nightmare about his teeth falling out; one audience member keeps getting chased by a faceless witch.

Though he’s a competent facilitator, Rife never generates the electricity of true, transcendent spontaneity. The framing itself is fairly trite. Rife introduces his subject by acknowledging he’s lucky to get to live his own dream, so he wants to know about others’ — but by the end, it’s become a setup for more juvenile sex stories. (Naturally, the nightmare chat is followed by a survey on wet dreams.)

In the last few years, Netflix has undertaken the same pivot with comedy as scripted programming, shifting focus from prestige or at least diversity to pure populist plays. (Critics certainly aren’t the intended audience anymore; no advance screeners of “Lucid” were made available for review.) The onetime home of Maria Bamford’s wacky, ingenious “Lady Dynamite” now partners with the likes of Rife, Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis: plainspoken men who are sometimes controversial in an exhausting, culture war sort of way, but mostly offer low-effort laughs. “Lucid” is just the latest stage of a broader game plan. 

“Matt Rife: Lucid” is now streaming on Netflix.