Matt Rife, a comedian known for his crowd-work, has a new special on Netflix called Matt Rife: Unwrapped—A Christmas Crowd Work Special. The performance is as advertised: Rife sits on a festively decorated stage wearing Santa pants, asks the audience questions, and riffs on their answers for comedic effect. At roughly the 32-minute mark, Rife gets this answer from an audience member about Christmas gifts people have received: “Sixty decks of cards.”
The person who said that was 21-year-old Geno Ploeger, and after that answer (they were a gift from his mom), it will surprise no one reading this that he is a professional magician. Rife was excited about the revelation—“I love magic, dude!”—and asked Geno to come onstage to do a trick. (It will also surprise no one reading this that Geno had a deck of cards at the ready.)
When Geno joined Rife, the comedian did the obligatory joke about dudes who are way into magic when they’re young, but also went off on how much he loves magic. “It’s one of my favorite fucking things,” Rife said, “I have this whole theory in my head… that magic’s real, right? And there’s like this other realm, like a Harry Potter, but the No. 1 rule is you’re not allowed to do magic in front of normal people, you’re not allowed to monetize off of it. So you see all these famous magicians, my theory is like they were like, ‘Fuck that, I’m gonna go make bank.’”
Or not!
But back to Geno. “I was just shocked,” the magician told THE EYE, even though he made sure to have that deck handy, just in case. “I was with my girlfriend at the show, and before we left, I was like, ‘You know, there was an old viral video of a magician going up onstage.’ And I was like, ‘I should be prepared, because it is a crowd-work special.’”
Geno, prepared but still surprised, performed an Ambitious Card and pulled the same chosen card out of his baseball hat. “I knew I had to do something visual enough onstage that everyone could see,” he said. “I knew I was going to do the hat trick for sure, and I was going to originally just do the hat trick or Ambitious Card, and then I just did both.”
Geno, who currently attends Arizona State University in Tempe (Rife’s special was shot at the Tempe Improv), is also a recent graduate of Academy of Magical Arts’ Junior Society. “I only have a year left of college,” he said. “I’m double majoring in acting and marketing, so the dream is to do magic full time once I graduate.”
Photos courtesy of Netflix