Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Matt Rife responds after a Plastic surgeon joked about creating the greatest jawline ever seen on a star that got canceled: “Lying about medical history is illegal FYI”
Matt Rife replies on Twitter: “Lying about medical history is illegal FYI”
Matt Rife opened his debut Netflix special Natural Selection with an unoriginal domestic violence joke as a way to weed out watchers who wouldn’t fully appreciate his brand of comedy. In hindsight, he probably should have been using that bit at the beginning of his photo-ops.
The topic of whether and how comedy can be “fun” if it comes at the expense of vulnerable groups of people has increasingly become a larger cultural conversation. Rife pushes the question in a thoroughly regressive direction for most of his special, with the majority of his jokes arguably punching down against various groups of vulnerable people. Even when he’s not riffing on offensive topics, the rest of the special is painfully mediocre, drawing overwhelmingly negative feedback from viewers and spawning a cultural discussion about whether Rife’s popularity is primarily due not to his humor but to his pop idol good looks.
Rife’s opening joke — in which he makes fun of a woman experiencing domestic violence with the punchline, “I feel like if she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye” — is the one getting all the attention, but it can’t be overstated that the entire show is a bomb. The domestic violence joke is part of a larger distasteful joke about how “ratchet” the city of Baltimore is (Rife, who is white, leans heavily on AAVE throughout his work). He follows this up with a long section mocking women for beliefs in pseudoscience, portraying this trend, bafflingly, as something only women are into, and something that seems to give him carte blanche to make fun of all women. (“You are in complete control of how your future turns out,” he insists, while scolding women for believing in “crystals.”)
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