I Know Exactly What Matt Rife Is Doing on Netflix, and So Should You

Remember Matt Rife? Some of you might recall the 28-year-old comedian who trended on Twitter (now X) in June for selling out his comedy tour at Taylor Swift–level speeds, prompting you to ask—and me to answer—Who even is this guy? Well, Rife’s trending again, but for more controversial reasons, after the release of his Netflix special Natural Selection, which premiered Nov. 15 and is currently, as of Wednesday, No. 2 on the streamer’s most-watched list. Plenty of his fans, a group comprising mainly women, were surprised to witness the teen-idol-handsome former Wild ’n Out star and TikTok-famous comedian open up the special with a joke about domestic abuse. Rife begins by telling a story about a time he and a friend went to a restaurant in Baltimore and the hostess greeting them had a black eye. When his friend expressed pity for her, commenting that they should’ve put her in the kitchen, “where nobody has to see her face,” Rife’s punchline was “Yeah, but I feel like if she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.” Yeesh! (Or, depending on who you are, I guess, LOL?)

This opening joke kicked up a storm after clips circulated online, and fans and internet personalities lambasted the zillennial comedian. Of course, some defended Rife, but nobody did it as trollishly as Rife himself, who posted on his Instagram story a supposed link to an “official apology” that instead directed visitors to a website selling helmets to those with special needs. Oy vey.

It’s understandable that this latest development feels like a slap in the face for many of Rife’s fans. He took his career to sold-out tour levels by posting segments of his crowd work on social media, and those segments have mainly featured him asking women in the audience about their relationships, dating experiences, and sex. Ordinary women being asked by an incredibly handsome man what they think? It’s not feminism, but it’s not not. Combine that specific theme of his TikTok and Instagram pages with good looks so intrinsic to his image that they recently became the subject of a piece in the New York Times, and bam! An internet-viral comedian with a predominantly female fan base. He became something of an internet boyfriend, a role that broke the parasocial boundaries when women would show up to his shows with gifts.

Naturally, given all this, for some women, the opening joke feels like a deep betrayal. It’s not the only part of the special that sets off the misogyny alarm: Rife, not for the first time, also puts down young girls who believe in crystals and astrology. As plausible deniability for this bit, he claims that he simply hates all young people, not just women. That’s because, he says, young kids are “rude,” and, he implies, ignorant, using an example of when youths confused his tattoo of John Lennon for Harry Potter. Men are rarely the butt of the joke, except for one bit in which he commends women for figuring out where the clitoris is, because men never would—a type of male-bumbler humor that merely lets men off the hook.

Responding to the domestic violence joke, at least one X user hypothesized that Rife’s insecurity about the female-skewing gender breakdown of his fan base has led him to try and imbue his content with more machismo, misunderstanding his appeal and ruining his “big break” with Netflix. But Rife has often made this kind of joke. It’s clear now that dubbing his current comedy tour the “ProbleMATTic” tour wasn’t a clever riff, as I had hoped, but a clue as to what was in store: material written from a boring anti-woke stance. Rife has presented himself as an equal-opportunity jokester, meaning that he rags on people of all backgrounds. But that doesn’t make nonsensical jokes about, say, Sikh people and 9/11 necessarily feel good (or funny). Then there are the times he’s stepped in it offstage, like when several old tweets with racial and homophobic slurs resurfaced in 2016, or when he made some off-color COVID-related jokes on Twitter in 2020 about the cast of the Korean film Parasite attending the Oscars. He has never apologized, even doubling down in some of these situations, and he is quick to get defensive when someone in the comments even gently suggests that his jokes might be offensive. I hoped he had learned from his mistakes. I gave him too much credit.

Rife hasn’t entirely stayed away from squicky jokes about women in the past, but it’s true that such blatant quips as the Baltimore hostess bit are rare on his social media pages, if they exist there at all. In one video, he compared late-thirtysomething women to a perfect bowl of the cereal Cap’n Crunch, saying that there’s a small window of sexual desirability between when younger women, like the cereal, “tear your mouth up,” to when they’re past their early 40s and become like “oatmeal.” We can’t be sure what the interstitial parts of those older sets include, outside the TikToks and reels he chooses to share, but I’ll let you be the judge of whether his trajectory from comparing older women with oatmeal to making jokes about domestic violence is that big of a leap.

Whatever the case, it’s true that in a more traditional stand-up setting with less audience interaction, as in this Netflix special, Rife seems to be trying to broaden his field of support. He even says so, remarking, about halfway through his special, “I’m realizing right now, I need more guy fans.” He notes that “if this room was 70 percent dudes the way it is women,” the joke he is telling at that moment, about, as a teen, ridding the shower of evidence of masturbation, would land a lot better. And this is likely true; though women can be heard cackling throughout the special—at one point, the closed captions in fact read “[Women squealing hysterically]”—the majority of Natural Selection is geared toward a rather juvenile male point of view.

According to the special, Rife finds humor in domestic violence, hates young people (“Anybody my age or younger, you don’t have anything to offer me”—except, perhaps, his career), loves old people, is fond of dick jokes (he expresses jealousy of a special-needs schoolmate who was well endowed), is afraid (relatable!) of ghosts (a fact he, less relatably, uses to make both a KKK joke and a school shooting joke), and hates social media, even though he made his career off it. Oh, don’t worry: His explanation of his hatred of social media ends in a self-deprecating joke about how he justified body-shaming a woman who instigated a beef with him online.

As a fan of Rife’s crowd-work clips, I had high hopes for him. But his comedy was never entirely mature, and it was never respectful. Of course, that was easier to overlook when consuming his work as blurbs delivered by a pretty face. The traditional stand-up format on Netflix’s premier platform would have made his rougher moments harder to ignore even without the additional sensational material. After the domestic-violence punch line, Rife voices his assumption that if he starts the show at such a drastic point, then “the rest of the show should be pretty smooth sailing after that.” But what follows instead is a perplexing mix: We’re seeing Rife try to have it all. It does feel as if the comedian is trying to broaden his audience to include more men, older people, and whatever else is more indicative of a more “serious” comic. In pursuit of that goal, he pushes the envelope of anti-wokeness further than he ever has. But he was already intimately familiar with the envelope—now he’s just licking the stamp.