This piece isn’t really about Matt Rife. If it were, it’d be about two months too late. Yes, his face is on the cover photo above. I thought maybe it’d still be somewhat of a (hate-)draw, though are people still talking about him? At least he’s balanced out by The Paris Review and Tony Tulathimutte’s excellent novel Private Citizens, both of which I’ll get into later.
More than Rife’s material, I was interested in what he said in one of his interviews, where he said that his new Netflix special was more “way more for guys.” So I watched it to get what his idea of male-oriented comedy was. From what I gathered, it seemed to consist of a domestic violence joke, some jokes about the silliness of astrology and crystals, then a lot of jokes about loving old people, watching porn for the first time, and believing in monsters in closets. I don’t know why he’d think a domestic violence joke was what guys are aching for, unless there’s a Honeymooners revival on TikTok that I don’t know about. Besides that attention-hogging joke, there wasn’t much to discuss. You might half-chuckle at some of his jokes in the moment, then forget about them by your next meal.
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