The Banality Of the Crowd Work Phenomenon In Stand-up Comedy
Matt Rife is a 30-year-old American comedian with two Netflix comedy specials, several self-produced specials, and 25 million YouTube followers. If you like comics interacting with their audience, he's your guy. Rife can work the front row like nobody else. “Are you wearing jorts,” he asked one man, who responded, “Why not” The comedian came back, “Why not? How about why?” This cracked up his audience, which is often a major arena or an amphitheater. It also cracked Rife up.
This growing form of comedy, called “crowd work,” has been around for a while. Don Rickles was a master of it, but his style was confrontational instead of conversational as it’s usually now. He'd roast audience members, keeping a straight face, with insults to their appearance, race, and religion. If an audience member tried to make a conversation out of it, Rickles would cut them off with an insult about their lame attempt at amateur comedy. It was his stage, and he wasn't sharing it.
Today's crowd workers try to engage with their audience. Unlike Rickles, they want an extended conversation. And why not? It's much easier than writing jokes. Coming up with original comedy material is a painstaking process. It can take years for a comic to create a one-hour comedy set. The first part is writing the jokes, which must then get refined in smaller venues. Words are tweaked, timing’s adjusted. The smallest of refinements are crucial in producing laughs out of raw material. Compare that to a comedian pointing out the guy with a funny-looking mustache. As comedian Brian Callen put it, “Don't show up in the front row with a mustache if you don't want to talk about it.” That's why the front row of comedy venues is the last one to fill up.
Big Jay Oakerson’s 2025 comedy special, Them, is all crowd work. The comic starts with about a minute of his own material, and then goes to the crowd. “I see we've hit our flannel quota,” gets a solid laugh. An “interracial couple” in the second row catches his eye. The husband looks “whimsical,” like he “came to the show on an airplane bicycle.” More laughs, from the audience and comic. There's no poker face after telling a joke for Big Jay or Matt Rife.
The audience then learns about the jobs this couple has in the aerospace industry. “Damn,” Oakerson responds, and then pauses. That's just his setup for the “punchline”—”I’d have thought that you two guessed people's weight in a carnival”—but the audience, for some reason, thinks the setup’s hilarious. The carnival line isn’t apt nor witty, but the comic’s audience isn't a picky bunch. They gave it up for him when he asked a woman in the audience, “As a hairstylist, do you have a full bush”? Why write jokes when the mindless, salacious approach works so well?
Crowd work’s thriving for a number of reasons, including the fact that it's well-suited to social media. While comedians are loath to put original material online because they want it to be fresh in their live act, they can release a minute of crowd work on TikTok and Instagram. It's an easy way to gain thousands—maybe millions—of fans. Comedians no longer rely on their appearances on late-night shows to gain an audience. Shane Gillis, perhaps the hottest stand-up in the business now, has never appeared on one of these shows. It's all done online.
Todd Barry’s another crowd work specialist. In the documentary he made from a series of shows he did without preparing any material, he points out that a guy in the front row is wearing a Marc Maron t-shirt. “I didn't know those existed,” he said, which provoked raucous laughter. Maron’s a comedian who’s spoken witheringly about crowd work. Barry then spends time talking to a guy who used to be in a punk rock band. While the conversation wasn’t humorous, the audience thought otherwise. Then Barry went to another guy and said, “I see you're wearing a Black Flag t-shirt. It looks like you bought it about two days ago.” Once again, not funny, but it got a big laugh.
Comics who reach the levels of success attained by Barry, Oakerson, and Rife attract audiences that’re primed to laugh at everything they say. If a comedian who was trying to make it made lame t-shirt remarks like this, they'd bomb. So even though crowd work, with its improvisational nature, is risky, the most popular crowd workers don't have to be at the top of their game to succeed. It's like laughing gas is being pumped into the room.
Crowd work is an important tool for any comedian. It's useful when an audience member is causing an uproar. A witty putdown of a noisy drunk is often enough to embarrass them into silence (although it can also egg them on) while also producing some good laughs. It's a plus for a comedian to demonstrate they have off-the-cuff wit in addition to prepared material.
Comedians often fall back on stale, generic approaches—e.g. “What do you do?” On a more important level, crowd work robs comedy of its unique potential to make people see things in a new light. There are comedy bits that are remembered for decades, like George Carlin’s bit about the seven words you can't say on TV—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Comics can take big ideas and make them manageable. Crowd work produces disposable, cheap laughs with material that's forgotten by the end of the night.
Crowd work’s algorithm-friendly, meaning it's good business that's not going out of style anytime soon. There's no structure to a crowd-work comedy set, if it can even be called a set. There's no rhythm to it. It's the comedic equivalent of musicians noodling on stage. When I go to a music concert, I don't want the audience involved in any way, especially with the corny singalongs some performers encourage. And that's how I feel about crowd work. I don't care about how long a couple in the audience has been together, if anyone in the audience is going through a break-up, or where that accent’s from.