‘Matt Rife: Unwrapped – A Christmas Crowd Work Special’ Netflix Review: Stream It Or Skip It?

For Matt Rife‘s second crowd work special for Netflix, they’ve decided to go the holiday theme route, so everything is coming up Christmas as the comedian asks his audience members to share stories of weird family traditions and gift exchanges. But beware: This not going to be family-friendly, even without the level of TMI from one couple and their parents!

The Gist:  Rife’s star soared out of the pandemic, thanks in large part to his crowd-work clips on TikTok and Instagram, along with prodigious sharing of material on YouTube, propelling him to arena-level status last year. He followed up his 2023 Netflix debut, Natural Selection, with a crowd-work special last summer, Lucid.

What Comedy Special Will It Remind You Of? This kind of special is so mapped out that’s it less like regular crowd work for a stand-up, and more akin to something you’d find in the Dropout series, Crowd Control, where the audience is intentionally part of the act.

Memorable Jokes: Rife deliberately puts himself on the naughty list while asking a woman to explain Kwanzaa to him, wondering aloud which day represents “the N-word” and then wondering how much trouble he’ll get in for alluding to it. He’s not quite so worried, however, when questioning two Muslim men about Eid, replying to their exchange of money as “so, very Jewish?” and then, upon learning from them that Eid and Christmas will occur on the same day in 2030, suggesting off the top of his dome: “That hasn’t happened since 9/11.”

The one time where Rife does second-guess himself doesn’t get edited out, as he suggests in the moment, acknowledging that perhaps making fun of a man’s partner by suggesting she got injured for not doing housework might land him in the same hot water he almost drowned in following his first Netflix special.

He has no trepidation, on the other hand, about recalling that on one of his early specials, Matthew Steven Rife, he once bought his grandfather a “pocket pussy” for Christmas.

And he’s willing to cede the stage for a few minutes to a young man in the audience named Gino who reveals himself to be a professional magician, complete with card tricks at the ready to wow Rife.

Our Take: Not long after Rife takes the stage in Tempe, Ariz., where the weather never even begins to look even a little bit like Christmas, the comedian, adorned in Santa pants, makes light of the filming location, and kind of shrugs: “Why not, right?”

I mean, if you’re pulling in big enough viewing numbers for Netflix to continue to demand more crowd-work specials out of you, why not do it, even if in your first special, you tried to make the case that you were more than just the crowd-work guy from TikTok.

The thing is, these manufactured crowd-work specials never quite match up to the seemingly organic moments in the clips that went viral for him in the first place.

It’s all lazily going through the motions. Rife goes with the first base-level instinctual response to almost every audience prompt. And those instincts always go to the most stereotypical racial or gender cues. The 9/11 and N-word jokes referenced above are followed by many more such tossed-off attempts at jokes. When he learns a woman presented her husband a sexy photoshoot calendar, Rife immediately asks what she did for February and wants it so badly to be Black History Month related that the real answer gives him nothing he can work into an actual joke. When one man says their family tradition is “we come together,” Rife immediately makes it sexual, complete with a jerk-off motion with his hand. Which essentially is the reaction this entire special might provoke.

This is self-indulgent, and not even in a way that allows Rife to be the butt of the joke.

Even when his interstitial attempts at stand-up to segue from one topic to another lead him astray, of his own choosing. Take his theory that “you only get to believe in Santa as long as you want to.” OK, go on. Where is this going? “I bet the Kardashians still believe in Santa.” OK, that’s funny, even if he may have said this before the recent clip of Kim believing the moon landing was faked. But even then, he’s got to turn this moment into a transphobic gotcha by claiming at the Kardashian house, every year a man comes down the chimney “dressed as a woman.” The Arizona audience rewards him with an applause break. And for a moment, Rife is self-aware.

“An applause break for Trana Claus?” Rife replies. “That’s awfully telling, Arizona.” Yeah, Matt, but you told the “joke.” You’re the one in control.

Which just makes the whole thing disingenuous. After guessing that a woman’s father must be black because she didn’t know him, he tries playing it off by saying: “now you made me racist for no reason.” No, bro. That’s on you.

Much like the woman who balked at getting roasted by Rife for the sound of her voice, claiming she was nervous.“You put me on the spot!” she said, only for him to counter: “You raised your hand.”

Rife wants the audience to be responsible for their participation. But when he is going to take responsibility for his part in the act? 

Our Call: Not to be a grinch, but this hour is so lightweight it would blow away even with some light flurries of thought. I know there’s an audience for anything Matt Rife does, and they’ll STREAM IT no matter what, but we deserve better than this. Don’t we? SKIP IT and keep your crowd-work-surfing to TikTok.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.