Matt Rife, the comedian who became big on TikTok

One-night parties were starting to get confused.

After 11 years in comedy clubs, Matt Rife was selling around 70 tickets per show, sometimes earning as little as $150 per night.

He wasn't famous enough last summer to earn an invite to the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, an annual showcase for established comics and up-and-coming newcomers. But he decided to go anyway.

During this trip, Mr. Rife underwent a surprise transformation from intermediate road comic to star, a change he described last week during a cheeseburger lunch in Syracuse, N.Y.

"Last July, I was in Montreal for a festival that I wasn't invited," he said. “I had to fly away, put myself without pay. I was sitting there having dinner with my friend and my manager. I'm about to post this crowd work video. I looked at him and I was like, this is so stupid. Why am I even doing this?"

The video in question showed him on stage in Phoenix, Arizona, going back and forth with a woman in the audience who said she broke up with her boyfriend because, as she put it, "he didn't do anything" when he got home from work.During the exchange, Mr Rife learned that the woman's ex was an ER doctor.

"Oh, I'm sorry, you broke up with a hero< /em>?" he said, laughing.

Despite his reservations, Mr. Rife posted the two-and-a-half-minute video on TikTok, to which he had joined a few months earlier. He titled the clip "The Lazy Hero".

"That video got 20 million views in two or three days," he said. "It became this massive chain reaction and an explosion in viewership. From then on, every video I posted went viral."

When he announced his "ProbleMATTic World Tour “Last month, it sold out 260 dates in North America, Europe and Australia in 48 hours. The flurry of sales — 600,000 tickets in total, each ranging between around $50 and $95, according to Live Nation — crashed the Ticketmaster website. Some resale tickets are over $500.

Although Mr. Rife has developed an easy stage manner, thanks to the countless hours he has spent on the mic, her popularity may have as much to do with her cheekbones as her comedic chops. Tall and strikingly handsome, with blue eyes, a chiseled jawline and full lips, Mr. Rife is something rare in the world of comedy: an idol.

He played his appearance to his advantage. A glossy black-and-white photograph on his website shows him shirtless and tattooed in a bad boy pose. His hair is still artfully tousled like a member of a boy band. He wears rolled up T-shirts on stage that show off his toned biceps.

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