Comedian Matt Rife has had a seemingly meteoric rise to fame – and the 28-year-old is garnering just as much attention for his looks as for his comedy skills.
The American comic, who this week courted controversy with the material in his new Netflix special Natural Selection, started performing professionally as a comedian at the age of 15.
His fame started to grow in 2015, at the age of 20, when he made multiple appearances on the Nick Cannon-hosted stand-up show Wild ‘N Out.
And those early appearances show Rife looking almost unrecognisable from today. His drastically different appearance has led some to speculate Rife’s good looks are perhaps due to surgical intervention.
Rife himself has addressed the speculation in numerous interviews, explaining that he didn’t really go through puberty until the age of 22, around the same time he had extensive dental work to fix his teeth.
“I’m wildly insecure with my looks. I would never in a million years say ‘Oh, I’m good looking.’ I had 12 minutes in my first special about how ridiculous it is that people think I’m good-looking, when my entire life I wasn’t,” Rife recently told the BFFs podcast.
“I had to be funny – I was ugly as f**k for 22 years. Until I got my teeth done? No-one would even look at me.”
In one viral clip from his stand-up, Rife tells the audience: “I’m good looking … I don’t like it any more than you guys do. My looks are so confusing to me. This s**t just happened.
“Puberty hit me so disrespectfully late – I was ugly as s**t for the first 22 years of my life.”
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But despite the hundreds of model-esque shots Rife’s posted to his now-6.4m Instagram followers over the years, he recently insisted his looks have actually been a hindrance in his comedy career.
Earlier this year, in a TikTok he did on the Men’s Health Magazine account, Rife claimed that being “physically attractive” meant he had to work harder as a comedian.
“People don’t want to laugh at physically attractive people. You don’t want to walk on stage and people are looking at your arms rather than listening to your jokes. I think it just makes me work that much harder,” he said.
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