Culture has always had room for renegades who tell inappropriate truths, stunning us with the kind of fearless candor that is first alarming, then funny, and then, ultimately, persuasive. Standup comedian Matt Rife is not one of them, but he has put immense effort into projecting this persona — and this helps to explain a certain professional success that his detractors find baffling.
Rife, a TikTok megastar currently on a world tour that is sold out through October 2024, went viral this week for a minute or so of tasteless material at the top of his first Netflix special, Natural Selection, which premiered earlier this month. (He self-produced his first three specials for YouTube, where they have racked up tens of millions of views.) The backlash concerned Rife describing a restaurant hostess with a black eye and speculating that she’d received it for not knowing how to cook.
There’s nothing original to making light of domestic violence — you might hear as much in some middle-school cafeteria where Andrew Tate is a figure of renown — but when it kicks off one of the top-watched shows on the biggest streaming service around, people are going to vent their disgust. Rife took the opportunity to court further outrage by posting a link to an “apology” on his Instagram Story for anyone offended; it directed to a page on a medical supplies website offering helmets for people with special needs.
Again, calling your critics intellectually disabled is the kind of juvenile response that can surprise no one, especially not from the impish Rife, who at 28 is technically a millennial but has the haircut and mannerisms of an unfiltered Gen Z influencer. Except he is quite filtered, to a canny degree. In fact, the black eye joke, if you can call it that, was merely the setup to Rife’s actual point of interest: audience management. After getting a substantial laugh from the crowd, he toes the stage daintily and says, “Testing the water, seeing if y’all are gonna be fun or not. Just wanted to see.” Based on their reaction, he adds, “the rest of the show should be smooth sailing.”
This rhetorical move has also become familiar — a comic playing to both a packed theater and the entire Netflix subscriber base by daring them to cancel him (it’s always a him) for being offensive, insensitive, edgy. What’s remarkable about the rest of Natural Selection, though, is how Rife never again takes a risk like the one used to take the temperature of the room. Instead of growing more daring after he’s gotten away with the misogynist cliché, what he dribbles out over the next hour is relatively safe (fat people and the mentally impaired, alas, remain fair game according to the moral compass of the average viewer). Yet he continues with the winking suggestion it’s stuff he could get in trouble for saying, even when there’s no hint of pushback from his thousands of giggling fans.
During a riff about his fear of supernatural entities, an agreeable enough topic that veers into light homophobia when he imagines a monster coming out of the closet both literally and figuratively, Rife observes that child ghosts from movies are typically British, and wonders what “an American kid ghost” sounds like. “I hate this school!” he squeaks, waits for a laugh, then mimics the sound of a gun being cocked. The crowd explodes — as Netflix’s closed captions have it, “laughing hysterically” — and Rife once more strikes the toe-in-water, ain’t-I-a-stinker pose, to rising applause. “Just seeing if y’all are still fun,” he declares. It’s an indication that his bits are only built through to particular line they’re meant to cross, and no further. The genuinely surprising proposition of a ghost with a gun, something a more capable comic would’ve used to extend an already absurd thought experiment, is immediately cast aside in favor of this question on whether we are willing to indulge him.
In this way, Rife sands down any sharp corners to make his supposedly provocative comedy rather innocuous, all while congratulating himself and his ticketholders for their bravery in breaking taboos he barely touches. If this is cancelable comedy, it’s surely the most sanitized and least confrontational of the genre. Take another moment that’s calculated to feel perilous and challenging but isn’t: Rife recounts visiting his grandmother in a hospice in his youth and listening to amazing stories from an elderly patient whom he gradually realizes is senile. “He told me he fucked Rosa Parks,” Rife says, “in the front of the bus.”
Presumably, the shock value of placing a civil rights hero in this crass context is intended to serve as a punchline, but what’s the joke? That people had sex in the 1950s? There are no stakes, no commentary, no bite — Parks is a throwaway reference, flashing into the story like a cutaway gag in Family Guy, to let Rife nod toward racism and segregation without engaging in these fraught subjects. The toe-dipping metaphor is more apt than he knows: Rife seems to have amassed his huge following by telegraphing that they are witnessing a bold and transgressive performer as he nonetheless retains a comfortably middlebrow style, almost a throwback to what you’d watch on Comedy Central in the 1990s. It can’t be a coincidence that the final, extended narrative of Natural Selection concerns the indignities of airline travel.
There are many off-putting elements in Rife’s routines, including the multiple references to his own talents as an entertainer. There’s his code-switching into an unfortunate blaccent (explaining that he wears a cross necklace “just in case,” Rife envisions Jesus telling him he’s not allowed into heaven, responding in a suddenly gruff, streetwise voice, “I paid for this meet-and-greet. Where yo’ dad at?”). But it is the self-conscious grasping for a bad-boy image, combined with his insistence that haters and trolls want to drag him down just for spreading smiles and joy, is what truly tanks his mainstream debut.
Because the airplane story, you see, isn’t really about the argument he got into with a flight attendant regarding how he had improperly stowed his backpack. This is merely the backdoor into his account of an inconvenience at least twice as banal: a Twitter flamewar that begins when he uses the platform to vent his frustration at the incident, only to be met with replies telling him to quit whining and obey the airline’s rules. Rife assures us he is immune to any emotional damage from “hurtful” comments he receives online, but is a “defensive” person who is “gonna fuck you up verbally” if you strike first.
As a case study, he goes on to detail how, after a prolonged back-and-forth with a Twitter user who eventually called him a “little bitch,” he started to mock her weight — a line of attack he continues to advance, much to the delight of the crowd. At last, he anticipates someone expressing concern that this woman may hear of this body-shaming segment and “do something drastic,” like hang herself. He gives an incredulous chuckle and asks, “How’d she get up there?” The audience roars.
You can call it derogatory and cruel, and you can be perplexed that Rife went there, considering that his own father died by suicide when he was a baby, as he’s discussed. (Shortly before this, he tells “any internet shit-talker out there” to “fucking kill yourself.”) Yet it would be a mistake to say he’s pushing the envelope, or that what he says marks him as an audacious heretic of our political moment. That “anti-woke” activists have embraced Rife as a reactionary culture warrior because of his sneering response to the black eye controversy is likewise no evidence of nonconformity. Rife’s is a garden-variety strain of American contempt: cheap, lazy and sure to find broad agreement.
Which makes his mic drop at the end of Natural Selection arguably the funniest part of the special. Clearly rankled by claims that he’s merely famous for small comedy club sets where he talks to audience members — these provide the bulk of his TikTok clips — Rife concludes his scripted, long-form show on a triumphant note, saying, “But what do I know, I only do crowd work, right?” He wants us to believe he showed up the doubters. Too bad it reads as painfully insecure, the taunt of a comic who indeed manipulates his fans by telling them they are a different breed, the “fun” ones, connoisseurs of dangerous and unspeakable facts. The truth is, you can hear this shit anywhere.
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