Staying Golden (And Not Too Exhausted): Matt Rife Goes Global

Comedian Matt Rife relaxes — as best he can — in Christchurch, New Zealand. It’s Thursday where he is. It’s still Wednesday for his interlocutor across the Pacific. Rife laughs at an old hacky joke from a ’90s TV show about keeping what happens on Thursday a secret from the Wednesday-bound. He’s never heard the joke. He’s only 30, after all, and could have only seen the sitcom in question in reruns.

It’s days — or maybe one day; no one knows how the International Date Line works — from the first show of the 2026 dates for his “Stay Golden” tour. The 76-show run, which goes through December, will take him across Australia and New Zealand, into Singapore, back to the U.S., over to Europe, into Canada, back to the U.S. again. There’s a mix of arenas and large theaters; many of the shows will be in the round. It’s a daunting schedule, especially when coupled with Rife’s other projects, which include film and TV. Rife must have some great secret to keep from being exhausted all the time.

“Trick question because I’m never not exhausted.” he says.

Still, it’s a definite slowdown from 2023 when he absolutely exploded onto the scene, fueled by crowd work videos shared widely on social media — Pollstar declared the very handsome Rife a “TikTok Comedy Hottie” — and a rapid rise that included shows at the Hollywood Bowl and Madison Square Garden. But there was a lot of work before that.

“This year’s tour schedule and last year’s are such a relaxing relief in comparison to 2023, 2024 where I was doing 40 to 50 shows a month,” he says. “It was absolutely insane — an amazing experience, but God am I lucky to be alive. … I actually have so much more time off, but in the midst of that, I’m flying to different cities and then we’ve got film projects and stuff, so it’s not a lot of time off. So I’m tired every day but I’m so happy to be busy. I hate not being busy.”

Staying busy has been worth it — Rife is No. 3 on Pollstar’s comedy tour chart with 47 reported shows grossing more than $33.5 million — but his manager, Christina Shams of Avesta Entertainment, says her “main job” is checking in to make sure it’s not too much.

“Every time an offer comes in, I think, ‘How does that fit in with the whole picture?’” she says. “We have TV and film coming in too and I know what happened before” — in 2024, Rife took a hiatus for exhaustion — “So I ask, ‘Is this what we want to do or can we wait?’”

Rife’s ability to play bigger buildings has helped ease the schedule, though in many markets, particularly overseas, he’ll run multiples at theaters instead. 

Taking the tour global was a risk, but an exciting one. Going international can be trickier in comedy than it is in music. It’s an art form that’s bound to language and inflected with cultural references that don’t always transcend borders. Rife did have worries.

“I’ve always worked my entire career on trying to be as universally funny as possible. You don’t want to just pigeonhole yourself. It’s why touring is so necessary to a comedian’s development because you might crush in New York City, but can you do those jokes in Alabama or Texas or Nevada or Oregon?” he says. “International shows are definitely the best test of that so when we did Europe really for the first time, I was nervous, but I didn’t have to change a thing from my show.”

Even in the markets with the biggest language barriers — Spain and Italy — “they would get maybe 85% of it.”

“Playing off of that was really funny,” Rife says. “Whether that was like spelling out the joke for them in a very humorous way or just bailing on the joke.”

Shams said despite Rife’s big wins stateside and plenty of data that showed he was popular overseas, his team — which also includes UTA’s Nick Nuciforo (see Q&A here) — was intentionally conservative on venue size when they went international.

“First, their venues are more expensive, believe it or not,” she says. “The rates for making sure the show is going to be productive are a little bit higher, so in the markets that weren’t English-speaking that we were going into for the first time, we went in smaller theaters and then built multiple shows based on demand. … But we took risks here and there in places we’d never been, like Copenhagen, because there was a good chance based on the data it would do well.”

Rife’s also performing more shows in the round, which provides the double advantage of allowing for more tickets while reintroducing the intimacy of a theater into an arena.

“It feels like a very intimate hangout where I’m hosting, I’m hogging the mic at this party,” he says. “In an end-stage show, there’s a disconnect with the last 5 or 6,000 people. … In the round, everybody’s half the distance, and there’s not a bad seat. … That’s how comedy should feel. Comedy is an intimate art form, and you want that to feel as close as possible.”

And Rife always wants to be excited to perform, a flicker that went out when he was on the 50-shows-a-month schedule.

“I caught myself saying, ‘Oh, I have to do this show tonight.’ There’s something wrong with that. ‘I get to do this show tonight’ is the energy I should come in every single night with, and luckily that’s what scaling down is letting me feel again.”