Evolutionary misstep

• Published date: 05 December 2023
• Publication title: Signal

BECAUSE I am a middle-aged man, I am not on TikTok. This is why I had not heard of the hot new comedian Matt Rife before his comedy special Natural Selection popped up on Netflix late last month. Apparently, his TikTok videos are very funny. I’m having a hard time believing that

Rife was a journeyman comic before he began posting crowd-work videos to TikTok. These snippets of impromptu banter with members of the audience took off on the video-sharing social network like a rocket and exploded his career like it was made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He now boasts an incredible 18million followers.

Whether through calculation and design or merely the almighty algorithm recognising that Rife is a very handsome fellow and subsequently feeding his vids to a receptive audience, I do not know. But Rife’s crowd-work...