Crowd work is the hottest thing in standup comedy – and not everybody is laughing

The poster boy of TikTok crowd-work comedy … standup Matt Rife. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Crowd work. For some, it’s the fun bit when standups cruise the front row asking: “What do you do for a living?” For me, it’s the scary bit where I avoid eye contact with said standups – because they don’t want to hear, and I don’t want to say, “comedy critic”. That terror aside, crowd work can be comedy gold in the hands of some acts, the most in-the-moment and authentic section of their whole show. Elsewhere, it’s filler: so much so-so throat-clearing before the good gags, the ones the comic has bothered to write, begin.

That is how crowd work has always been considered – until now. In 2024, it’s increasingly the main draw – for which we have social media to thank, or blame. If you’ve noticed your socials clogged these days with crowd-work clips – this or that standup engaging in oh-so-spontaneous bantz with someone in row C – you’re not alone. And it’s not happening by accident. Clipped-up crowd work is standup for sale to the TikTok generation, a phenomenon changing not only how comics tout their work, but the work itself – and the nature of live comedy.

Behind the trend is the squaring of a circle for acts who must use the internet to promote themselves, but who don’t want to ship all their best jokes for free. Post your finest scripted material online, and the surprise is much diminished when those audiences pitch up at your live show. Post crowd work online, and nothing is given away – save a glimpse of your wit in flight, of the uproarious good fun your gigs guarantee. It helps too that crowd work can be more clippable than most comics’ actual acts, requiring less context to make it fly.

That’s what the US standup Matt Rife found. The poster boy of TikTok crowd-work comedy, Rife’s career took off when he started posting audience participation clips two summers ago. He now has 18 million TikTok followers, a recent Netflix special and sells out arena dates worldwide. What’s not to like? Well, Rife’s act, according to traditionalists, who call him “the It boy of shitty comedy” (Marc Maron) and fret that the crowd-work fashion foregrounds underqualified comedians – standups who can banter, but not necessarily write jokes or craft whole shows.

To the established divide between old-school comics who cut their teeth in the clubs and arrivistes doing so on social media, we can now add a schism between those who think of crowd work as an hors d’oeuvre to comedy, and those who think it’s the art form’s purest expression. What unites both camps is their exposure to the effects of the craze on live comedy, which include a new audience that demands interaction – and a generation of talent bent on engineering moments of faux-spontaneous hilarity for online distribution.

I’ve not (yet) witnessed that – but I’m told it’s happening. The standup Todd Barry, who once toured with a whole show of crowd work, recently protested at a new cohort of comics touring with film crews and audience microphones – the better to capture their strategically planned moments of impromptu interaction. That’s not the point of crowd work, surely, which is meant to be opportunistic, out-of-the-blue and, crucially, a special treat just for this audience in the room.

When I think of the best examples I’ve encountered – the clowning of Doctor Brown, say – it’s about liveness and presence, not (just) witty repartee. When I consider the worst (think of Paul Currie’s recent tirade at a Jewish audience member) – well, you wouldn’t want that anywhere near social media either.

But maybe that’s an old-fashioned view, in a world where comics spend as much time orchestrating TikTok-friendly interactions as they do writing jokes. And where, weaned on a social media culture that encourages (over)sharing and invites you to see online personalities as friends, some comedy-goers now arrive at shows expecting to be part of a dialogue. This is quite the handbrake turn after years in which heckling became increasingly stigmatised. It can also leave standups who don’t do crowd work feeling inadequate. “It felt wrong to just do my jokes,” the comedian Mo Welch told the New York Times of a recent gig. “It felt like the crowd wanted [me] to talk to them.”

But there’s no need to be alarmist – not yet, at least – about this phenomenon. The performing arts have always adjusted around, and accommodated, new technologies. If standups can multiply their audiences by, er, doing pointless tasks on TV, or hosting hit podcasts, why shouldn’t they profit from their cleverly edited crowd work? The cream will still rise to the top. And if in the meantime it reintroduces some jeopardy into comedy, a doubling-down on its liveness, then TikTok may even be offering a boon to the art form – if not to shy comedy critics, who’ll now be clutching their notepads more fearfully than ever.

Brian Logan is the Guardian’s comedy critic