Matt Rife has no intention of slowing down. In fact, the hugely popular, controversial comedian has already lined up 32 arena and amphitheater dates across North America for 2025.
His Stay Golden Tour, as he’s titled his latest Live Nation-produced foray, will kick off March 8 at Dallas’ American Airlines Arena. From there, Rife will hit the biggest venues of his career, including his first-ever headline show at Madison Square Garden.
It comes on the heels of his ProbleMATTic World Tour, which saw him sell over 600,000 tickets across 250-plus shows in less than 48 hours back in 2023.
To date, he and Taylor Swift are the only two artists who’ve inspired a level of pandemonium so intense that the Ticketmaster website broke down following their respective tour announcements. Whether that happens again when Rife tickets become available later this week — on Nov. 20 for artist pre-sale; two days later for everybody else — remains to be seen.
In announcing the new tour, Rife shot a short, arguably NSFW video, which leans into his bad-boy image. At one point, he can be seen in bed, sifting through insults that’ve been hurled his way, while seemingly masturbating under the covers. When asked about his decision to wrap himself in said image earlier this year, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “Fuck the haters … it doesn’t matter how good [a special of mine] is, I could win an Emmy for it, and they’d still say it’s trash.”
The primary focus of the minute-and-40-second video, however, is the meteoric nature of Rife’s ascent, including the nearly 700 shows he did in two years. At one point, he references both the “extreme highs” (notably, the records he broke on the road) and the “extreme lows” (presumably, being hospitalized for exhaustion) of what he characterizes as a “crazy” period.
If you’ve somehow missed Rife’s rapid rise, the now 29-year-old was catapulted to selling-out-arena-level fame after his now-famous crowd work went viral on TikTok. In the two years since, he’s amassed over 39.4 million followers across social media and more than 3 billion views globally. He also released a wildly popular, controversial Netflix special, Natural Selection, which kicked off with a domestic violence gag — and garnered over 10.3 million views in its first two weeks when it dropped in 2023. The streaming platform swiftly signed him up for two more, along with a gym/workplace sitcom that he intends to write and star in.
More recently, Rife delivered the first of those specials, Lucid, which marked Netflix’s first-ever crowd work special. It dropped in August, and quickly entered the 10 top in 37 countries. Looking ahead, he has a memoir, which he’s titled Your Mom’s Gonna Love Me, and the beginnings of a film career. The latter includes Rolling Loud, an R-rated comedy co-produced by Live Nation Productions and American High, which is set for release in 2025. Oh, and he’d also like to collaborate with his hero, Ricky Gervais.
