I watched Matt Rife’s crowd work on TikTok and located him charming and humorous. After watching his new Netflix particular, which has brought on him to be extensively and sharply criticized, I remorse giving him my consideration. If you do not know who Matt Rife is, take into account your self fortunate. Vox has an awesome fast primer on his Netflix present and the way it went so rapidly off the rails:
Rife’s opening joke — wherein he makes enjoyable of a girl experiencing home violence with the punchline, “I really feel like if she might cook dinner, she would not have that black eye” — is the one getting all the eye, however it may possibly’t be overstated that the complete present is a bomb. The home violence joke is an element of a bigger distasteful joke about how “ratchet” the town of Baltimore is (Rife, who’s white, leans closely on AAVE all through his work). He follows this up with a protracted part mocking girls for beliefs in pseudoscience, portraying this development, bafflingly, as one thing solely girls are into, and one thing that appears to present him carte blanche to make enjoyable of all girls. (“You’re in full management of how your future seems,” he insists, whereas scolding girls for believing in “crystals.”)
Then there is a deeply cringe prolonged phase about kids with mental disabilities, together with a horrible joke allegedly stolen virtually verbatim from the late comic Ralphie Might. That is adopted by a straightforwardly homophobic riff teleported in from the ’90s about (homosexual) monsters within the closet. If you can also make it by all that you just’re handled to … a protracted description of Rife masturbating within the bathe. And so it goes. None of it’s remotely humorous, and the response from the general public has been overwhelmingly detrimental. At present on Rotten Tomatoes, simply 16 % of the viewers gave Pure Choice a positive evaluate, with the phrase “unfunny” popping up time and again in person reactions.
Rife responded by liking tweets from folks coming to his protection, even when their defenses solely made him look worse. He additionally responded, extra publicly, by doubling down on the offensiveness. On November 20, Rife posted a response to the backlash in an Instagram Story: “In case you’ve ever been offended by a joke I’ve advised — here is a hyperlink to my official apology.” The hyperlink, which learn, “Faucet to unravel your downside,” led to a hyperlink to buy a protecting helmet for youngsters with particular wants. This response inevitably led to extra backlash.
I by some means thought Rife could not get any worse than that terrible response, however he has since doubled down, and now’s totally turning into the darling of the manosphere that I assume he all the time aspired to be. He has not too long ago sealed his destiny by showing on the Jordan Peterson present. Episode 401, which was posted yesterday, known as “Rife For Cancellation,” and is described this manner on Peterson’s YouTube:
Dr. Jordan B Peterson sits down in-person with not too long ago “canceled” comic Matt Rife. They talk about the incident in query, his viral response, the prominence of crowd work in his act, his early profession begin on the age of 15, the modern use of social media to construct his identify, and the true purpose he stays unapologetic for having a humorousness. Matthew Steven Rife was born in 1995 and is an American get up comic and actor. He began early, getting into a college expertise present on the age of 14 after being inspired by a pal. Discovering this to be successful, he went skilled the subsequent 12 months at age 15. Utilizing TikTok, he managed to constantly go viral together with his get up and “pink flag” crowd work. He then entered the sector full time, utilizing social media to develop his identify earlier than producing three straight-to-YouTube comedy specials from 2021 to 2023. This 12 months, he debuted his first Netflix particular, “Pure Choice.”Â
If you understand something about Peterson, then you definately already know precisely how this interview goes—they deride “cancel tradition,” they reward “free speech,” they usually even make appeals to evolutionary biology to debate masculinity, gender, and “sneaky rape” (due to course they do). Watch right here, when you should.
