Matt Rife & the Post-Woke Election Year Landscape

looks like we all just need a good laugh

The only thing more annoying than dealing with a wokester is dealing with their inverse: the sort of Ron DeSantis-led calvary, obnoxiously blowing the trumpet of the war on woke. But declaring a war on anything is the first indication of failure. A war on something intangible and floating about in the unseen cultural minutia is an impossible enemy. The war on drugs. The war on crime. The war on terrorism. None of these wars can attain victory because military might and policy do not puncture the internal discrepancies of human  nature that lead to addiction, desperation, and ideologies. 

Wokeism was always going to dissipate. It already has for the most part. As Tim Dillion said on his podcast, relating wokeism to hipsterism, “[wokeism] is at the end and we all know it….. it's like hipsters. I remember the end of the hipsters….the last unicycle that rode over the Pulaski bridge…”

Comedians always seemed to know this. You couldn’t be dishonest, regulate people’s internal lives, and still connect. Like, on a real level. It’s that sort of brutal honesty that comedians incessantly remind us is funny and is the connective tissue in our social sphere. Think Ricky Gervais’s opening monologue at the 2020 Golden Globes. People were laughing because they knew it was true even when they were the butt of his jokes. And in the age of “my truth” versus “the truth,” controversy abounds not in the world of comedy but as a response to it.  Dave Chapelle. Joe Rogan. Chris Rock. Eddie Murphy. Matt Rife.

I wasn’t familiar with Rife until recently. The 28-year-old classically handsome chiseled jaw mouthpiece became popular through social media, mostly for his crowd work where the humor is extracted from some personal trait of an audience member. Rife usually finds some oddity or bizarreness from the person’s confession, then takes that morsel and highlights its ridiculousness, looking to the rest of the audience who are laughing in agreement with his reactions. It’s a loose formula that has sort of defined his skill, and one that people attend his shows expecting to experience–which is an expectation he says annoys him. 

In his latest Netflix special, Natural Selection, notably, there is none of his familiar crowd work. However, his usual audience is present: women–which is mildly perplexing given the fact that he calls them bitches and makes jokes about them being abused. Here, Rife reveals what was always wokeness’ blind spot: Humor can and often does reject a pronounced morality, even if you are the subject of cruel jokes.

The fact that so many women attend his show says something about what women want. Reality is often more complicated than the dictates of wokeism would hold. If women are supposed to despise Matt Rife like gays were supposed to hate Azealia Banks, and yet they don’t, then it seems that one’s identity is not solely sufficient in determining how they’ll respond to such “crude” remarks. What is supposed to deter your interest, might actually make you a fan.

The gays are not spared from Rife’s line of fire. As a major contingent within the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, it has become standard for straight public figures to engage with gayness in some shape or from–be it through leaning into the gay icon card, toying around with gaybaiting postures, or, in the least, acknowledging that the “queers are here.” Rife distinguishes himself from other attractive straight dudes who facilely play up their looks and physique in order to appeal to the gay market. He is unlike Nick Jonas, whose ploys at gaybaiting–posing in his Calvins in Out Mag with happytrail and all lasciviously laid out on display–are bit too obvious (and rather desperate). 

Rather, Rife has earned his kinship with gays because he is honest with us. His lack of squeamishness toward making gay jokes tells us that we are worthy to be placed within his line of fire. The same goes for women, blacks, the handicapped, trans, and so on. If you leave us out of the act, that’s where you insult us most. The stringent arbiters of think-kind consciousness have become cultural accountants, annoying the hell out of everybody and mucking up the fun. Comedians  break that up. They bring everyone together to sit in the auditorium with everyone else. Rife is contending with the cultural war, not by cloyingly preaching how things ought to be, but by bluntly pointing out how things already are. 

“We appreciate you in the trans community!” shouted an F2M at Rife during a crowd work session at one of his shows. In another show, Rife playfully jostles with a black man about his coat and the paraphernalia in it. Rife’s fearless defiance of PC-pieties echoes the musings of the infamously iconoclastic philosopher and activist Slavoj Zizek, who claims that “giving space to an occasional exchange of ‘friendly obscenities’ allows for more closeness and gives way to honest exchanges…there is something so fake,” continues Zizek, “about political correctness” which “prevents a true overcoming of prejudice and racism…It’s just a form of self discipline which doesn’t really allow you to overcome racism. It’s just oppressed, controlled racism.” Rife proves Zizek’s point: A comedian is often better equipped to build bridges than can even the most earnest, privilege-checking ally. 

Inevitably there are the rote calls for comedians to always punch up, never down. The reality is, that the comedian is punching not only up or down but also out front, to the sides, kicking, screaming, letting it out like Whitney Houston sweating up a storm belting out “All the Man that I Need.” Once they’re in it, opinions of them are useless. If every comedian only punched up, even those who insisted on it would get exhausted from the repetitive jokes about only a handful of repetitive subjects. Everyone punches down. I mean, anyone remember Anderson Cooper’s Olive Garden comment?  

Deny it all you want, but no topic is too touchy or off limits. As Rife reminds us, if you make fun of your whiteness, you’ve automatically given them license to make fun of your fatness. Or if someone is made fun of because of where they’re from, they are granted the liberty to retaliate commenting on someone’s intelligence. Or politics. Or looks. Or sexuality. That’s the commerce of jokes as a dialogue. Safe-space-thinking is left to the joyless basements of university student unions. Quite literally, the sunken place. 

Comedy might be one of the last citadels of wild free speech in artistic form. It insists upon not tailoring itself to any outside demand for change. That is one of the reasons for the genre’s massive recent success. You’ll get whiplash trying to catch every Netflix and MAX comedy special, all the podcasts, and YouTube videos–even amongst the faint, dying cries for cancellation. It is not a form where you can neatly separate the artist from the art. Nothing makes this more obvious than crowd work. The artist is live, out front. And though this may lead an audience member to believe they can wrestle with or call out the comedian, it would be a foolish mistake to challenge Rife…because ultimately you’d be handing him a gift. 

Rife will probably move on to movies eventually, but if it was hard to make it in standup, there’s even less of a chance of making it from standup to movies (with the funniness intact). The movies is where many comedians go to die.  Hollywood may reject him due to his content, or they may embrace him due to his profitable potential. The delusion of Hollywood’s insular world may have them as the last palm gripping to the crumbs of wokeism. But it's hard to make a case for their humane position when they give a standing ovation to a man who just physically assaulted another man at an award show. According to Jim Carey, the Will Smith/Chris Rock debacle, “was a clear indication that we’re [Hollywood] not the cool club anymore.”

Fortunately for Rife (and all comedians), the world of comedy exists even outside of Hollywood. It’s an obscene and problematic world for some, but for many it’s the release from the corporatized social scene ravaged by the last ten years of rubrics on how to behave. 

In the post-woke landscape and on the cusp of a presidential election, it’ll be interesting to see where the cultural war ends up. In all honesty, the war is probably over. The disorientation is thick with leftist students on campus shouting at Jewish students and the conservatives coalescing to not fund war in Ukraine. 

The blueprints are falling apart. As constituents reposition themselves, drafting up new creeds, the fodder will be rich for comedians. And thank God for that. An election year should be ripe for Rife, and the reprieve will be greatly appreciated. Just don’t get in his way. You have the free choice to be in on the joke or the victim of it. 

Brennan is a writer and artist living in New York City.  @brennanvickery

Also check out Brennan’s article Shriek of the Devil from the zine here, his critique of the second Republican debate, profile of Mo’Nique, profile of George Santos the Crafty Queen, piece on Dr. Cornel West and Third Party Candidates, and appearance on Cracks in PoMo the pod.

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