In stand-up comedy, crowd work is an important skill to have, especially when starting out at open mic nights. Matt Rife went viral for his crowd work on TikTok — especially among women.

Some found him attractive or charming or funny, or maybe a mix of the three. Regardless of how the Matt Rife fan pipeline operates — it really works. Last year, Rife signed a two-special deal with Netflix. During the 2024 Netflix is a Joke festival, he became the youngest comic to sell out the Hollywood Bowl — an amphitheater with a whopping 17,500 seats.

Yet, it seems like Rife is not satisfied with his success.

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Before the premiere of his first Netflix special, “Natural Selection” (2023), he spoke with Variety about his plans.

“That’s one thing that I wanted to tackle in this special, showing people that, despite what you think about me online, I don’t pander my career to women. I would argue this special is way more for guys,” Rife said in the November interview.

By “for guys,” it appears he means domestic violence jokes, featured right at the start of his first special.

There was obviously backlash from both fans and non-fans alike, both for not valuing his women fans and the gross joke about domestic violence against a woman. To apologize, he posted a link to special needs helmets, furthering his misogyny and adding ableism in one fell swoop.

Rife marks just another comedian who focuses more on so-called cancel culture instead of being funny.

Despite his attempts to be offensive, his career has moved on just fine, once again proving some comic’s obsessions with the phenomenon to be completely pointless. “Lucid – A Crowd Work Special” was released on Netflix just earlier this month. He again places too much emphasis on trying to be offensive rather than creating actual content. Shock value can only get you so far.

He also still feels he has something to prove. His viral TikTok clips were mostly crowd work, so during the special, he complains “Next time you see some haters in my comments saying, ‘All he does is crowd work, it’s so easy’ — is it?!”

The thing is, pretty much every comedian worth watching will have crowd work skills along with joke and storytelling skills. John Mulaney’s “Baby J” (2023), which focuses on his struggles with addiction, features a bit where he points out someone he deems too young to be hearing his stories — an off-the-cuff interaction that adds a lot to Mulaney’s performance. Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel” (2022) relies heavily on audience questions and comments to create the entire, very intimate scene.

For the stand ups who do reach Netflix-level success, their sets are often tighter and leave less space to veer off into the crowd. After all, comedy is all about timing.

While “Lucid” may technically be the first Netflix crowd work special, it isn’t even Rife’s first of this kind. He tries to fight against what he thinks people are saying about him — that he only does crowd work and that he is only popular because women think he is attractive.

But, late last year he released his own crowd work special, “Walking Red Flag,” on YouTube. A look at the rest of his YouTube channel shows he almost exclusively posts crowd work content with such titles as “SPITTING GAME TO A VETERAN” and “HANDICAP CROWD WORK COMPILATION.”

The latter is over 30 minutes long and has 2.8 million views. He’s doing completely fine with popularity; there is no reason to rebuke the women who support you aside from misogyny.

Unfortunately, Rife is just the next in a long line of men who try to separate themselves from the image of being “for women.”

During a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, the band 5 Seconds of Summer shared similar thoughts of a women-dominated fan base not being good enough.

“Seventy-five percent of our lives is proving we’re a real band,” the band’s drummer Ashton Irwin said. “We’re getting good at it now. We don’t want to just be for girls. We want to be for everyone. That’s the great mission that we have. I’m already seeing a few male fans start to pop up, and that’s cool.”

What about having “girl” fans correlate with not being a “real band?” Why does having a largely women audience mean you have something to prove? Why are the opinions of women not enough?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to expand your audience, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of your current audience. Celebrities don’t owe anything to their fans, but there is a concerning pattern of disregard toward women.

Women are able to appreciate comedy, music and art just as well as any other person. Success with women comedy fans should be understood as regular success — not something less than.

Kimberly Aguirre is a senior writing about comedy. Her column, “Comic Relief,” runs every other Tuesday. She is also the editor in chief of the Daily Trojan.