Gag definition joke1/17/2024 ![]() (“You are in complete control of how your future turns out,” he insists, while scolding women for believing in “crystals.”) 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. 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). 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. Matt Rife has been trying to be famous for over a decade It’s worth asking how a relatively low-tier comedian like Rife wound up landing a high-profile Netflix special to begin with - and what it means for comedy and for culture when a standup comedy “hit” on Netflix provokes this much derision. 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 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. 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. “I just wanted to see if y’all were fun,” he tells the audience afterward. The controversy started with Rife’s opening joke: The TikTok-famous comic chose a gag about domestic violence to kick off his set. Comedian Matt Rife’s debut Netflix special Natural Selection may be a hit - the show premiered in the top 10 on November 15 and has stayed there for two weeks - but it’s also causing plenty of uproar among audiences.
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