Grandpa [REDACTED] and the state of comedy
Some thoughts on Matt Rife's special and what people are saying about it
Est. Read Time: 10 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
Subscribed
New to the SternJourn? Check out the best of 2022, 2021, or 2020.
SHOWS
Friday, December 1st: Comedy Confessional @ The Crow
Saturday, December 2nd: Fictional Roast @ LA Comic Con
Thursday, December 14th: Hai Comedy in Denver
Saturday, December 16th: Julian Stern Keeps starting in DENVER
Wednesday, December 20th 7pm: Julian Stern Keeps Trying in NEW YORK (Free!)
Wednesday, December 20th 9:30pm: Also hopping on a show at Tiny Cupboard!
Hello Sternal Journalists,
A week ago, a friend of mine who other friends and I affectionately call “Grandpa [REDACTED]1” because of his behaviors and preferences resembling those of a grandpa since we met him at the age of 18, texted me a New York Times article that was timed to the upcoming release of crowdwork TikTok sensation and classically hot guy Matt Rife’s new Netflix special, Natural Selection.
Other than getting very, very famous off of crowdwork clips on TikTok and being a handsome guy, things to potentially know about Matt Rife are that he’s been doing comedy for 12 years, he was on Wild ‘N Out, and he got very famous off of crowdwork clips (like if you’ve seen crowdwork clips on TikTok, they are probably either clips of him or clips of other people (present company included) who are hoping to catch a break like he did).
The article isn’t super important, but you can read it here if you want. What’s more important is that Grandpa [REDACTED], who is (among his other Grandpa-ly attributes) generally pretty out of touch, was speaking to a somewhat of-the-moment cultural conversation:
I informed him that he was about 30 months late to the conversation, but still, I perked up. If Grandpa [REDACTED] is aware of a cultural phenomenon, you know it’s reaching peak cultural awareness.
So I was less surprised than I might have been when a few days later, after the actual release of Natural Selection, I received this text from Grandpa [REDACTED]:
He was referring to the conversation happening on the internet about the special. The conversation went a little something like this:
Matt Rife got successful off of building a female audience via TikTok that showcased his crowd work and good looks
He resented that his audience was mostly female
Now that he got his biggest break yet (the comedy brass ring of a special presentation from the streaming service that brought you Lillyhammer), he set out to intentionally reject his female audience and woo a male audience by opening the special with a joke about domestic violence.
That is a shitty thing to do because it is shitty to (a) dislike having a female audience, (b) not know your place, and (c ) make jokes about domestic violence.
The only problem with that narrative is that it’s pretty much made up.
PAUSE!!!!!! Let’s clarify really quickly that I am not here to defend Rife. Or rather, I’m not here to defend that joke. I think a lot of things about the joke in question. The things that I think about it include but are not limited to:
It’s not funny
It is hacky
The reason it’s not funny is not because of it’s subject matter
The reason it’s not funny is because it is hacky.
You don’t actually need to know the joke, it’s so boring. If you heard it, you would probably say, “Wait, I feel like I have actually heard that one before.”
It’s not funny enough to earn its offensive-ness in my opinion, but it’s also so hacky that it’s something you’ve heard a thousand times and is therefore not that offensive.
If a friend told me they wanted to open their special that way, I would say, “I know some audiences love it, but I think you have more original stuff.”
If the friend said “I know I have stuff that’s more me, but it’s been destroying and I really want to open with a pop,” I would silently judge them but not stop them from living their life.
So okay, I hope I’ve cleared up that I think the joke people are talking about being mad at isn’t that hot of a joke. But what I really wanna talk about is bullet number 2 from section a (really should have numbered them):
“Now that he got his biggest break yet (the comedy brass ring of a special presentation from the streaming service that brought you Lillyhammer), he set out to intentionally reject his female audience and woo a male audience by opening the special with a joke about domestic violence.”
The primary source people are citing when they say this is a Variety interview, where Rife said:
“And that’s one thing I wanted to tackle in this special was showing people that like despite what you think about me online, I don’t pander my career to women. I would argue this special is way more for guys.”
That quote would maybe support the above point if it weren’t taken out of context:
That quote which people are using to imply that he is intentionally writing off his female audience is cherrypicked from an answer where he’s literally saying that the special is “for everybody.” Not that he’s pandering to a male audience, just that he’s not pandering to a female audience.
Moreso, Rife has always been as offensive and oftentimes as boring as his opening joke is. I could be wrong about this, but I genuinely don't believe there are real fans of Matt Rife who were turned off by the offensiveness of this joke.
It’s more possible there were fans that were turned off by the hackiness of the joke, but I honestly doubt that also.
Matt Rife has always been very good at one thing: crowd work. Since his superstardom (and likely well before), he has excelled at being quick on his feet and firing off quips that feel funny (and often are funny) in the moment.
But the thing about crowd work is that it lowers the bar for how good a joke needs to be. I am not denigrating crowd work here, it is a genuine talent and skill and has high entertainment value for an audience. But when you laugh at a crowd work joke, half of the laugh is “holy shit, they just came up with that out of nowhere! We’re all experiencing this moment and they’re adding hilarious color commentary!” When you laugh at a non-crowd work joke, the magic has to come fully from the joke and its delivery.
This is all to say, Matt Rife didn’t open his special with a hacky joke about domestic violence because he’s trying to lose audience members. He did it because he’s not especially great at writing jokes at this point in his career. A part of me of course wants to omit that “at this point in his career” part of the phrase, but that’s the mean part of me. And I’m not trying to be mean here.
The man put out two YouTube specials in the past year and then got a Netflix deal. This is not his A material. It’s not even his B material. His A material is all crowd work. His B material (his written stuff that he had been doing for a long time) was in the YouTube special he already put out in the past year!
I’m lost in my own sauce here, but what I’m really trying to get at is… this is like in the movie Heat which came out 30 years ago, but I watched last week. In Heat, Al Pacino’s cop character has a chance to arrest Robert DeNiro’s bank robber character, but DOESN’T because the only thing he can (at that moment) presently arrest him for is breaking and entering and “he’ll be back on the street in six months” or something like that.
The internet is being Al Pacino’s character if Al Pacino’s character was dumb and happily nabbed DeNiro for the minor offense. Don’t go after him for a joke being kind of offensive. Go after him for BEING HACKY! Go after him for supposedly being a marketing genius, but then getting a Netflix special and completely fucking up the opportunity.
If he had done a thoughtful, well-produced crowd work special, every Vulture and NYT headline would be about the rise of the crowd work special. I’m glad that’s not the case because I don’t do crowd work, but I can still wish the best for everyone; and I think the most savvy and artistically sound decision Rife and Netflix could have made would have been for them to partner up and produce a product that was emblematic of what he is best at.
Ultimately, I think my beef at this juncture is with comedy criticism.
(Yeah, of course I feel all of the things that comics feel about Matt Rife: boredom, jealousy, resentment. But those are about me—the boredom is about my unwillingness to learn from whatever’s objectively working for him, and there are things about him that objectively work; the jealousy is about my not having his reach or audience or paycheck or ability to do the thing we both like to do as often as he does it; the resentment is about the fact that he seems to enjoy himself while he’s getting all of that.
If I knew him, I would tell him that his crowd work is much stronger than his written jokes, but I wouldn’t tell him to never tell written jokes because how else is he supposed to get better? And I do hope he continues to have fun and make people laugh, but also gets better at written jokes. That would be good for comedy and I’m sure he cares about improving.)
But comedy criticism, which is currently being founded by the Jason Zinomans and Jesse David Fox’s of the world, kinda needs to step up its game here. Comedy started being talked about in a breathy and self-important way as an art form in like the past decade or so. It was a long time coming. It is deserved. But I think we skipped some steps.
For stand up, I think the step we skipped is forgetting to subdivide the art form into genres. Stand up comedy is the only art form that is also its own genre, in an Australia-continent-country kinda way. It’s confusing. Matt Rife releasing this special was treated as a crowning moment in his career in an art form in which he’s dominant. But that’s not what it is. He is dominant at crowdwork. This special isn’t a crowning achievement, it’s more like an actor trying to direct, or a musician trying to act, or a rapper doing a flute album. We know this person is talented, but not at that thing!
Criticism (in the journalistic sense) is necessary for an art form to be taken “seriously,” and the critics will of course always miss the mark because they’re engaging in their own art; however, a critic is nothing if not a steward of the culture and conversation around an art form and I think, between this and Hasan Minhaj-gate (another conversation that I think mostly missed the mark because of our lack of genre-within-art-form subdivisions), they’re kinda out to lunch.
In short and/or conclusion:
Grandpa [REDACTED] was correct. It is weird that crowd work is such a big thing on social media, because those spontaneous moments are by nature not representative of the show that a potential audience member would attend.
But this actually is what comedy (or at least a big portion of it) is trending towards
Comedy Critics, and the internet at large which is getting more and more interested in engaging in amateur comedy criticism, do not seem interested in labeling or pushing the understanding of this stratification
Matt Rife is very good at one ascendant genre of standup comedy and (currently) pretty mediocre at what is classically considered stand up comedy
He did not attempt to alienate his female audience. His audience has always loved his edginess, which has always been the flirty “I’m saying something I shouldn’t” version of edginess he opened his special with.
All of comedy would be better if people were talking about how his jokes were boring instead of talking about how they were offensive.
It is up to comedy critics, who are more and more becoming gatekeepers and tastemakers in this corner of the world, to get to the bottom of why the cultural conversation is so off base and reframe it for people to better understand. This would be a service to comedians, comedy viewers, and comedy talk-abouters (the latter of whom I think would also make the world a better place by seeking out comedians they like better than Matt Rife rather than complaining about him on TikTok, which only grows his TikTok profile, and probably makes it harder for him to try to get anywhere near good at writing jokes.2)
But what do I know? I only do newsletters, right?
Recommendations
Love at the Store. Special. I watched this Jerrod Carmichael HBO special directly after watching Natural Selection. I was surprised to see that Jerrod tells a joke with almost the exact same premise, but nobody complained because it was funny. There are so many great comedy specials out there. Don’t waste your time complaining about the bad ones.
Oral. Song. This Björk and ROSALÍA song sounds like a good version of one of the songs Sophie and Katia tried to make on Stath Lets Flats, and you don’t know what that means, I pity you. Favorite line: “That’s where the hair starts.”
Napoleon. Film. This was way funnier than I expected and I am 90% sure it was intentional. The battle scenes were crazy and intense as well. I did get a 16 ounce pour of Cabernet from McGuffin’s so take all of that with a grain of salt.
Raycast. Program (Launcher?). Rare that I am recommending computer programs here, but I just started using the free version of this which is basically a souped-up, hot-keyed version of Mac’s Spotlight (not to be confused with the Boston Globe’s Spawtlaight) and it has cut down on the distractions I get from looking for documents or navigating to websites like tenfold. I bet I could have gotten them to give it to me for free if I said I was putting it in my newsletter, but I do not have the foresight so this is truly a no-catch recommendation.
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.
Grandpa [REDACTED] has a job and life which he has clearly expressed he wishes to never overlap with any of my shenanigans, hence the redaction.
I did forget to mention that we basically all collectively created his fame and therefore this Netflix special by being so into TikTok.
VERY strong edish