Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | November 30, 2023
For those unfamiliar, Matt Rife is a stand-up comedian who grew his audience on Tik-Tok through his crowd work with his predominantly female fan base. With his new Netflix stand-up special, however, Rife decided to turn on his audience and court, instead, the anti-woke crowd by beginning his set with a domestic violence joke, which he later apologized for by making a joke at the expense of disabled people.
In the other corner, Marc Maron is among the increasingly few older comics calling out “anti-woke” comedians. Here’s what he said about the anti-woke movement in comedy last year:
I’m just saying that they [anti-woke comics] are hacks, and it’s an angle. That’s really the big unsaid thing, is that anti-woke is the new hack. You’ve got like-minded people who fill these rooms because they don’t know how to assess funny unless it’s bullying, or unless it’s in totally bad taste. There’s no nuance to it. A lot of people who are not innately that funny become comics, and they can become good comics if they can figure it out. But this is just an excuse to ride the momentum of an audience that’s been built on these premises. For a bunch of freethinkers, they all think the same thing, and it’s like three things that they poke at, and it’s hackneyed. They are the hacks, and they are the groupthink victims. It’s really kind of profound.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that Maron has turned his ire on Matt Rife, who cynically took to anti-woke comedy essentially for marketing reasons. Last night, during a New York Public Library event, Maron was asked what he thought about comedians like Matt Rife, who “stir outrage to become rich and famous.”
“Well, first of all, like, don’t jump the gun on Matt Rife. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the new It Boy of sh**ty comedy. And he’s taken a big chance in his career right now to sh** on the mostly female audience that he accumulated through social media to sort of kiss up to these pseudo edge lords. And personally, I don’t think it’s going to go well for him. And ultimately, my producer Brendan McDonald, the genius, made a good point in saying that he thinks that Matt Rife is actually mobilizing a new generation of comics to push back against what that stands for in much the way that Dane Cook did at a different time to once again, you know, be creative and bring a new energy and voice to what that doesn’t represent. So, maybe within show business, there is hope.”
Interestingly, it turns out that Matt Rife is, unsurprisingly, a lifelong fan of Dane Cook, so perhaps it makes sense that — like Cook — Rife can provoke a backlash to sh**ty, lazy, misogynistic hack comedy.
via The Daily Beast
