Review: Matteo Lane and Friends Kiki in Can’t Stop Talking Tour

Matteo Lane is a rising star of stand-up comedy, and he proved why during a recent performance at Cleveland’s Connor Palace. Even in a 2,800-seat auditorium he conjures the intimate feeling of a gossipy brunch. “I shouldn’t be telling this story, but…” he prefaces a bit about R. Kelly making an appearance at a 2016 Mariah Carey concert. And we all lean forward. All that’s missing are the mimosas.

With over 1 million subscribers on YouTube and another 1.6 million on Instagram, Lane has leveraged the power of social media to boost a career that started 16 years ago with open mics in dingy basement venues. Many a comedy career has languished and died in those very cellars, but stand-ups with a TikTok account can now bypass the traditional gatekeepers of comedy and take their material straight to the people.

Being a fixture on social media is a lot like being a late-night host: You come into people’s homes (or flash across their screens) every day and, if your content is any good, viewers develop a parasocial relationship — a somewhat alarming phenomenon that works particularly well with Lane’s style.

He’s everyone’s gay best friend, confidently expounding on topics as diverse as dating Italian men, TikTok food influencers, regional Uber culture, and his own Mexican-Italian-American family.  “I bumped into the most famous woman in the world in Rome,” the native Chicagoan shares about spotting Oprah Winfrey (not Taylor Swift) at a café. Apparently, he told her, “You better werq,” a salutation the queen of media returned in kind. We all laugh and privately envy his glamorous life of international travel and celebrity encounters. He’s like the gaymer love child of Mario Cantone and Kathy Griffin — a regrettable hookup he would surely love to tell us about had it actually occurred.

He tempers his more exotic material with tried-and-true stand-up fare: airline headaches (apparently volcanos are a frequent nuisance for flights to Mexico City) and tales of the snoring husband, all delivering with his trademark sass. “The only way is to hit them,” he says, “then you have a good 30-50 seconds to get to sleep.” It keeps the show relatable, a challenge for all comedians once they’ve reached a certain level of fame and spend most of their time on the road. Lane insists that his leisure time in not spent rubbing elbows at exclusive nightclubs, but playing Pokémon and Fortnite, “the gay Call of Duty.”

He does describe a rare night out at the club with a close circle of friends, including his podcast co-host Nick Smith, who, upon seeing a man taller than himself reportedly said, “Who let Frankenstein in the door?” Lane delivers the line with pitch-perfect mimicry, which we know as we’ve just seen and heard Smith for ourselves.

Smith opens the show with five minutes of solid ice-breaking material in which he describes his transition from a “girl’s gay” to a “gay’s gay.”  What’s the difference? “I now have friends that I’ve slept with.”

The second opening act in Cleveland was River Butcher, who delivered what was indisputably the edgiest 10-15 minutes of the evening, much of it centered on his transition from lesbian to straight man, and how he now looks very much like someone who might storm the Capitol or vote for J.D. Vance. An Akron native, Butcher shrewdly caressed the laugh points of the Ohio audience, a crowd that knows the primary ingredient in any salad is cheese.

He also valiantly persevered through a heckler who cropped up during a bit about trans athletes. “They never get angry about trans men in sports,” Butcher observed, which was quickly answered by a woman’s voice from the balcony: “Because they don’t win.” Without really answering the point, Butcher easily rallied the audience to his side. Nevertheless, she persisted: “Where’s Matteo,” she cried, like a drunk girl in need of a ride home from her gay bestie.

But that’s the thing about fostering a parasocial relationship with millions of strangers via social media: Not all of them are going to be people you would actually want to invite to brunch.