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The Shark Deck. Johnny Mack with Your Daily Comedy News Deadline profiled Matt Rife and said, Hey, Matt, your success with social media and self produced specials seems to highlight what’s so exciting about the world of stand up today. Rife said, the idea and route of traditional success in comedy doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s so much fewer and far further between. Now you’d get a late night show for five minutes than you do Montreal.
You get a TV series and Netflix or Comedy Central picks up for full special. That really doesn’t happen now. The entertainment industry has gotten so lazy via social media, and social media does provide everybody with kind of an opportunity to get seen and build an audience. Now a lot of it is luck. I can’t tell you what I did the first time to get my first couple of tiktoks to pop.
I could tell you what that is. Apparently, Rife used to hate social media. He said, I’m a fifty five year old man like I grew up around forty forty five fifty year old comedians who taught me the roots of success. That’s how I saw their careers blossoms. So I’ve built my entire career in life thinking that’s how things are gonna work.
But now social media gives you the opportunity to get in front of people. The entertainment industry is kind of screwed itself over and that they’ve lost the power of accessibility that’s now in your phone. Will Matt Rife start acting? He said absolutely. I love acting just as much, if not more than stand up.
I just haven’t been doing it as long and I’ve been able to get my foot in the door as well as I have with stand up. But now that I have the freedom and success via stand up, it opens up avenues in other areas that I’m passionate about, like film and TV that I’m hoping I can make the transition over too, because it can only feed itself. I’ve done a lot of independent work. I’ve done a lot of MTV Disney style stuff, so I’m really looking forward to the next project that I work on and acting to be something that I’m really proud of and enjoy doing. Matt Rife is working on some new material.
He said, his new Hour is so much fun for me because the first half of it is so silly and ridiculous and fun. And the second half is some stuff I actually got to pour some thought into, which if you’ve watched either of my previous specials, I kind of like to end the last of it with something people can think about and put some thought behind and given some real perspective on something I’m generally passionate about, as well as making it funny with a fun story. So I’d say it’s my most fun hour yet. I think people are going to really like it. Mark Norman spoke to The eight hundred Pound Grill about with Bert Kreisher.
Norman said, it’s a blast. It does take a special kind of comic. You gotta be willing to rally. A lot of comics are lazy, pot smoking, pajama wearing people, and this is like, you gotta drink all night, do the shows, and you gotta wake up and go slip and sliding at noon. It’s not easy every time.
Once you’re in it, you’re all right. I partied my ass off in college. I’m from New Orleans. I’m a drinker, tried and true, so I could do it. It’s not for everybody, but yeah, it’s the best.
Mark Norman said, when he meets fans, they’re basically expecting him to spend all night partying with them. Mark said, it’s awkward. I’d like to drink but chit chat. It’s like, hey, what are you up to? How you been these days?
And I’m like, okay, I’ll take the shot, but I don’t want a small talk. I’m an introvert. At the end of the day, I just feel guilty. So I had to stop doing it because people get so disappointed and I feel like I was letting them down. They’re like, what the hell, man, you don’t want to hang out with us, And I’m like, I don’t know you.
You know me, I don’t know you. I don’t want to sit here and hear about your dog. Jessica Kerson was talking about the importance of social media and said, nowadays, unless you’re a regular on a TV show, you have to play the game. Many people don’t want to do it and don’t know how. It’s a lot of work.
I need to bring someone a film every performance and pay people for editing, adding subtitles, whatever is needed. I have a team of people who do this and they send me things for approval. Because I hate watching myself on video. I can’t, so I let them choose what to edit, and then I uploaded. It’s so wonderful.
People watch it and said it to their friends, and they also follow me and come to performances. Jessica Kurson calls her a current tour the endless tour. I simply can’t stop booking more performances and more and more places. This is the first time I’ve been having performances that are sold out, and it’s also the first time I’m appearing in theaters. It’s wild and exciting.
She was asked if there was a time she thought it wasn’t gonna happen. She said, you’re kidding a million times. When you do things like this night show, I think afterward everything is going to work out. It doesn’t. Year after year.
There were one hundreds of times I wanted to quit, so many rejections, so many things they said I’d get TV shows deals on them fail. It happens to everybody. I’m now at a point where things are really happening, but it’s taken me time. Jessica had talked about the gap between male and female stand ups in the US. She said, when it comes to being a headliner on a stand up marathon.
As a woman, you earn less than a man. Now that my shows are in theaters and they’re selling, I’m earning one of them man does. But for years, if they slotted me in as the headliner in a stand up club, I earned less than a mail headliner. Jessica, is there or anything you won’t talk about on stage? She said, yeah.
I don’t bad mouth my parents, my family, my relationship. I’m private. Though it seems like I’m so open and revealing myself. They’re parts of my life that I’m very private about. And I don’t talk about politics.
I don’t think it’s funny. I have to find something funny in a topic I talk about, and there’s nothing funny in my opinion about what’s happening in politics in the United States. It’s disgusting. While f Tompkins spoke to Variety about therapy, and Paul said, I think, like a lot of people in comedy, I thought my fear was if I become a happier I’m not going to be funny anymore. And really I was just afraid of therapy.
I was afraid of what if I found out terrible things about myself. What if I found out I’m a monster? What if I have ever recovered memory. It’s really just the fear of the unknown. It’s the fear of finding out stuff about yourself that’s not pleasant or it’s sad.
It’s not like, oh my God, I’m gonna be a hannibal lecter. It’s somehow knowing in the back of your mind, I’m gonna have to talk about stuff that I don’t want to talk about, and that’s going to be uncomfortable. I feel like what I do here? Buy me a coffee, Buy me a coffee. Dot com slash Daily Comedy News.
The Milwaukee Comedy Festival is returning to Wisconsin for it’s eighteenth year. They’ve announced the lineup the festivals October one through the eighth. Let’s take a look at the lineup. On the first at the lake Front Brewery, Kelly Ryan and some more comedians TBA. On the second, it’s the roast of Milwaukee that sounds fun.
On the third, Gray West, Christine Ferrara, Paul McCarry, and Ryan Mason will play October fourth at the Great Lakes Distillery. Lot of drinking at this festival, I like it. John Naim Danny Lang and Joe Eames and Johnny Beaner. October fifth, that’s Shank Hall, It’s Todd Barry. Let’s see some other folks you probably haven’t heard of other than Kyle Kinane.
Who is your headliner on what day is this one? On the seventh, Nina Gee has released her first solo comedy album. It’s called Stutterer Interrupted. Nina said, the first time I did stand up, a woman in the audience laugh, like, genuinely laughed about a joke I made about my experience as a woman with a stutter. I asked her if she stuttered, knowing the odds werelow that she did.
When I asked her, she said, no, it’s just funny, and I was like, oh, people can laugh up my jokes on my perspective on this, recently, someone who I don’t think really listen to my act said that I make stuttering the butt of my jokes. But it’s like, no, I make the people reacting to me the butt of my jokes. It’s really hard with any art form when you put it out there and people can interpret it anyway they want to. What I do have control over is what I say. So I’m pretty deliberate about my jokes.
Nina has been part of the Comedians with Disabilities Act. That’s a comedy troop started by Michael O’Connell made up an entirely of comedians with apparent and non apparent disabilities. Nina said, Originally it was Michael, who used a wheelchair, and Steve Danner, who’s a little person. And when I saw them, I knew as a group I wanted to be involved in. And I saw them they needed somebody with a non apparent disability and a woman, so they welcome me in.
I believe it was their second show when I joined, and I quickly became an active member. I think it was George Corland who said the best way to get through to somebody is humor, and the Comedians with Disabilities Act does that. Usually when you present as a person with disability, people are afraid to ask stuff, but they’re not afraid to ask comics. I’ve also seen people’s attitudes change about themselves and other disabilities, and it’s been really cool to see that. That’s your comedy news for today.
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