Since late November, TikTok comedian Matt Rife has faced criticism on social media for a domestic violence joke he told in his most recent stand-up special, “Natural Selection.” His response, an Instagram story with a link leading to a website for special needs helmets, reignited an ongoing conflict surrounding comedy, cancel culture, and accountability—a debate Rife has been complaining about for years. 

Rife is familiar with the internet’s ire. Past scandals have surrounded his homophobic and racist tweets (including one in which he used the n-word), some bizarre comments about women’s bodies, and his public attack on 11-year-old Mason Ramsey, aka the Walmart Yodeling Kid, in 2018 (an incident he hasn’t seemed to learn from, as he publicly tried to dunk on a six-year-old last week). Otherwise, he has lived in relative obscurity for years, better known as the guy who grabbed Zendaya’s face on “Wild ‘n Out” than as a comedian. 

Ironically, Rife has not previously faced much fallout for his jokes despite spending a significant portion of his career complaining about getting canceled for his self-described “edgy humor.” He mentions his disdain for cancel culture in all four of his specials, using it as a transition into long diatribes about how nobody should take what he says seriously. 

Following the backlash against Rife’s bit about domestic violence, he’s heavily doubled down on the “just a joke” portion of his defense, but stand-up comedy is more of a story-telling art form than it is a series of one-off jokes. Bits get planned well in advance and while they may be inspired by true events, they’re usually heavily edited, embellished, or completely fabricated to highlight an emotional truth, personal or otherwise. Comedians such as Hasan Minhaj, John Mulaney, and Taylor Tomlinson are prominent examples, but it’s a common element of the art form. Critiquing stand-up is more similar to applying lenses to a book and analyzing characters than simply saying a joke is problematic. 

So how much of the scenario surrounding Rife’s domestic violence joke did he make up?  “It’s a completely made-up story. I went to one dinner and a girl had a little bruise under her eye and it was like a conversational joke that happened at our table,” Rife said on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. The joke features Rife and a friend asking why the restaurant couldn’t have hidden their waitress in the kitchen before Rife quips that if she knew how to cook, she wouldn’t have gotten the black eye in the first place—and yes, that was casual sexism too. To clarify, Rife doesn’t deny the misogyny in his joke; he just doesn’t think it matters. It’s his opinion that because his sole intent is to make people laugh, any negative emotional impact is irrelevant. 

This worldview exists in stark contrast to the reason Rife tells jokes in the first place: high school bullying. Rife told Peterson that, to cope with being the butt of other people’s jokes growing up,  he “developed this sense of false confidence where [he] went ‘Hey, if I also make fun of myself and I get it on your guys’ joke, it won’t hurt or people can’t tell.’” 

With that moment of vulnerability over, Peterson and Rife move on to discuss cancel culture again. Blissfully unaware of the irony in what he’s about to say, Peterson asserts that when the comedian Russell Peters “tells racist jokes non-stop…you can feel that there’s a palpable demand in the audience from the ethnic group that he hasn’t yet skewered to be skewered so that they can show that they can take a joke, that they’re in on the joke.” Rife agrees. It occurs to neither of them that Rife’s high school story, which used the same “in on the joke” wording, might parallel what people of color feel when Russell says something racist, or what women in the audience feel when Rife (and decades of comedians before him) decide to make a domestic violence victim the butt of their sexist joke. 

That dynamic Rife experienced in high school is exactly what is being criticized when comics get called out for punching down. Yet Rife seems unaware that his audience might feel the same pressure he did and might be facing the same choice: either speak up for yourself and get derided as a humorless loser, or bite your tongue and laugh at a joke that, let’s face it, is probably an unimaginative variation on old prejudiced tropes. Regardless, Rife seems to have learned the wrong lesson from his high school days; his bullies might have had the same intentions to make people laugh that he does—and he’s just as quick to shame his audience for feeling hurt.

This story was originally published on Zephryus on December 15, 2023.