Cancel Culture Comes for Two New Victims
30th November 2023
A couple of weeks ago my husband and I plopped on the couch for a quiet evening in and turned on the new Netflix comedy special Natural Selection by Matt Rife. We were both vaguely aware of Rife because he’s posted some videos of his crowd work that have gone viral on social media. Young women in particular seem to like him because he can be quite charming on stage and will openly flirt with female audience members (Gen Z would describe Rife’s charisma as “rizz,” I think).
The set was fine but not super memorable, so I was caught by surprise when I recently saw an article on BuzzFeed explaining that Rife’s fans were furious with him over a joke he made regarding domestic violence. In the special’s opening, Rife recalls visiting a restaurant in Baltimore where the hostess had a very obvious black eye. His friend mused that they should probably reassign the woman to the kitchen so that she wasn’t greeting diners. Rife replied, “Yeah, but I feel like if she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.”
Now, that’s obviously low-hanging fruit and maybe a bit groan-worthy, but Rife’s critics are now trying to full-on cancel this man over this joke! Social media mobsters have accused him of betraying his female fan base and, as they often do during these cancelation campaigns, are “resurfacing” old videos of Rife that they also find objectionable and believe justify their hate. The mainstream media has also, of course, picked up on the controversy and are dutifully publishing story after story egging on the cancellation campaign. Rife has responded exactly how you should in the face of the “woke” mob, which is to tell them to go pound sand. He posted a link to an “apology” for the domestic violence joke, which actually redirected followers to a page where they could purchase a special needs helmet. Funnier than the original joke, if you ask me.