My 20-year-old son called me last week to ask if I’d heard all the hullabaloo about a joke Matt Rife made early in his Netflix special, Natural Selection. But before I could answer he asked another question.
“…wait… Do you know who Matt Rife is?”
I’m at an age were a lot of pop culture slips past me, so it was a fair precursor to his original question.
But I am in fact, familiar with Matt Rife. That is, I recognize his face and name, and that he is a comedian who seems to be good at crowd work. Also, the ladies like him. I’ve wasted enough time scrolling TikTok, Instagram and Facebook reels to at least come to this understanding of who he is.
I was aware of the recent waves of protest surrounding the joke he included in his special. The discussions I've come across concern the perceived insensitivity of the joke and the whether he’ll be cancelled as a result.
If you’re still uniformed, the attempt at humor was in relation to domestic violence. While I knew of the subject and the resulting outcry, I hadn’t heard the actual joke. Truth be told, I had never seen any of Rife’s stand-up outside the social media reels I mentioned above. Curious, I played his special in the background noise to fill part of the three-plus hours I would spend “fluffing” the branches of my family’s nine-foot artificial Christmas tree yesterday1.
I heard the joke. I didn’t laugh. I rolled my eyes, finding it to be in poor taste. But then something happened.
He eventually moved on and told a different joke.
To be honest, I didn’t laugh at many of his jokes. But that’s okay. Matt Rife probably isn’t for me. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say my writing wouldn’t be Rife’s first choice either.
That’s okay too.
I’m fortunate in that domestic violence has never been part of my life. Not even close. One time dad raised his voice in an argument with mom when I was small. When I started to cry they stopped arguing, immediately came together to tell me they were sorry and told me how much they loved each other. “I’m sorry, Jeff. I shouldn’t have yelled.” Dad said. I never heard dad raise his voice in an argument with my mother again. Frustration, sure. Yelling? No.
But still, some people for whom I care deeply have suffered domestic violence. The stories I’ve heard aren’t funny. Some of them are downright terrifying, and as I listened to my friends’ experiences, my gratitude for how my parents treated each other - even when arguing - grew. I just don’t think it’s funny, and I’d never tell a joke about it.
I wish Rife hadn’t. But that’s a far cry from leaving his Netflix special with any sort of feeling of outrage. Comedians understand how to make us laugh. It’s what they do. The best comedians know how to take difficult situations and find a way to make them humorous. Perhaps that was what Rife was trying to do. I don’t know. If that was his goal, that particular joke missed the mark.
When historians look back at our period of history, cancel culture will be a part of the discussion. It’ll probably come somewhere down the list from “Russia invades Ukraine” and “Israel and Hamas kill civilians in the name of ‘war,’” but it’ll be there. It’s always been there.
I mean, strictly speaking, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion was the ultimate attempt at cancellation.
Cancellations are a means by which a person or people group send a message that a particular action or statement is unacceptable. The way it plays out is different, but we’ve been doing it forever.
I have vivid memories of a woman in my church standing at the pulpit listing different American companies with ties to the church of Satan and admonishing us not to purchase their products. I left that service wondering if we could possibly purchase anything because it seemed like she listed every company in the world.
The difference today, however, is that we all have our own little pulpit to stand behind. Several of them, actually. They’re called Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Erm… I mean “X.” Choose your preferred one—maybe even include an option I haven't mentioned. We all have a space to broadcast our public expressions of self-righteous indignation regarding the most recent source of offense to our sensitivities. We take our ego by the hand, open our app of choice, and rip into the person or people who aren’t as virtuous as we are.
To paraphrase the current reaction to Rife-gate: Matt Rife made an insensitive joke!!! Never watch him again!!!
Or… maybe… before taking to social media to let your ego vomit…
Hear me out on this one…
Don’t.
Don’t… what? Well, two things.
First, don’t be offended. In many instances, feeling offended is a conscious decision even if it may not appear that way at first glance. Sometimes the thing which caused offense reveals more about the person causing it than the one who feels offended. This dynamic holds true until we draw attention to our sense of offense or someone being offensive. Offensiveness only gains influence when we respond in the manner it seeks from us.
This leads to my second “don’t.”
Don’t make a big deal out of it.
I’m 100% confident I wouldn’t have watched his Netflix special if not for the controversy. The controversy led me to watch it.
I was curious, so I watched. I watched because people implied I shouldn’t. Their outrage caused me to do what they didn’t want me to do. Seems to me, the worst thing you can do to keep someone from gaining notoriety is to draw more attention in their direction. Perhaps don’t take to social media to gripe and complain about how offended you’ve chosen to be. You’re likely to bring more attention to the situation than you might have otherwise.
If you believe someone or something deserves to be canceled for any reason, opt for personal cancellation without resorting to loud, grandiose statements of vitriol and contempt as you do.
I’d be less than honest, however, if I stopped here. There’s more to my frustration with cancel culture than just our knee-jerk reactive tendencies.
On the one hand, I wish Rife hadn’t made the joke. It wasn’t just at the expense of “domestic violence.” It was at the expense of all who have suffered such violence and I think this was at the heart of his guffaw. I hope someday he understands how it might have affected a large segment of his audience (who seem to be mostly women) on a personal level and adjust his routines accordingly.
In the end, perhaps he’ll find fulfillment and success in his career without suggesting domestic violence is justified (which is what his punchline did). We need more healthy comedy in our lives. Not less.
I believe Rife can be part of bringing that to us. Cancelling him would not only take away the hard to accept parts of his routine, but would take away the important too. That’s the part I want to support - bringing more good into the world.
But before I can do this, I need to recognize what’s really happening on an individual level when it comes to how we feel about the shortcomings of other people.
Because I’m not sure our calling attention to the wrongdoings of others is what it at first appears.
In recent months, I’ve spent a good deal of time in introspection about the life I’ve lived to this point, the changes I’ve undergone, and who I want to be moving forward. I think that’s normal for a 47-year old guy. As a result, I’ve experienced a major shift in how I understand myself that has made all the difference in my happiness and outlook for life.
For four decades or so, I was of a particular understanding of what it meant to be human.
In short, the message was this: humans suck from the moment they’re born. You’re human, so you suck.
Now, my evangelical Christian upbringing had the solution to this: Jesus. But before you could accept Jesus you had to accept that you suck. That you could never do anything to earn God’s love, and that only Jesus’s sacrifice of his own life on the cross would make us good again. I’m close to a tangent here, and I don’t want to do that. I think most of you understand this particular perspective.
But even after I accepted the evangelical answer to the problem of sin, I still struggled with accepting myself as good, even if the theology insisted I am, due to salvation through Jesus.
I dealt with this a couple of ways. First, I feigned confidence. Those who know me well, particularly in the church community, will tell you I’m not short when it comes to confidence. But here’s a little secret… it was mostly fake. It was a front.
Second, I also found comfort in focusing on the flaws and shortcomings of other people. I’d jump all over the opportunity to show glaring flaws in somebody else. Particularly if they were famous. The more famous they seemed, the more I felt free to show how much they failed to live up to standards I was living up to.
Or so I wanted you to believe.
Say, perhaps, I heard a comedian tell an off-color joke. I might use the opportunity to show just how much I disagreed with the joke and thus, was a good person, or at least I wasn’t like the comedian.
You know, hypothetically speaking, of course.
When we do this, we ignore where we can actually make some real progress - within ourselves.
There is, however, a challenge with this.
In some of the research I did (and am still doing) in writing my eBook about overcoming my compulsive relationship with pornography, I learned the foundation of every addict’s struggles is a fundamental belief that they are not good. (I mentioned this finding before when I discussed the death of Matthew Perry.) That at their core they are a bad person, a failure, and always will be. In the end, they, um… we… we take action to prove our belief to be true. Our action proves our belief.
But what if our belief that we’re inherently flawed from the beginning isn’t true? What if accepting our goodness is the first change we have to make in our life? What if that will make all the difference? If the common denominator for the addictions that plague us is a belief that we’re not good, then shouldn’t we work to remove the harmful belief and replace it with something better?
Part of my story was to accept that my desire to view sexual images was not due to a personal inherent flaw. Learning to believe I’m a good person - first and foremost - was what made all the difference for me. It meant I could let go of the shadow of negativity which was always pervasive in the back of my consciousness. I could make good choices because I’m a good person at my core.
Rather than blaming mistakes on my humanity, I began to believe it was the goodness of my humanity which helps me to make better choices moving forward.
Well, sure, Jeff, that sounds like a good plan! You do that!
Yippee-skippee!
Wait… I don’t think you’re hearing me. This isn’t some small tweak. It changes everything. And it’s not easy to do.
If I have to accept that I’m actually a good person at the core, it means I need to be willing to accept that to be true for others as well. The problem is, some people are hard to like.
I mean really hard to like. It’s sometimes easier to not like them than it is to believe they’re good and worthy of the benefit of the doubt.
I’d kind of like for people to give me the benefit of the doubt too. I mean, I told jokes I wish I hadn’t in my younger days. I once told a racist joke at the lunch table. My dad was appalled. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t yell. He just looked at me, confused, and then asked why I’d tell a joke like that. He reminded me that he didn’t raise me to tell jokes about a person’s appearance, and that to hear it escape my lips didn’t make sense. He reminded me of the good person he believed me to be. He did not double-down on my inherent flaws. He reminded me of the good and that good people do good things.
I think that is a better starting point.
I wonder what Matt Rife would say if someone who loves him pulled him aside and reminded him that he’s good, and jokes which make light of domestic violence are beneath the person he is.
I don’t know him. But I’m going to give him the same benefit of the doubt I’d like for myself.
The special is only an hour long. I also watched Pete Holmes’s special, I Am Not For Everyone. I don’t know Pete personally, but I do know we had a quite similar upbringing. We even went to evangelical Christian Colleges that were regional “rivals.” Pete went to Gordon College. I went to Eastern Nazarene College. I think these Pete would identify himself as an ex-vangelical if he was forced to classify himself, but I’m pretty sure he’s not into classifications that way. At any rate, I love his response to the recent practice of atheist comedians poking fun at people who believe in God. You can watch the snippet here. It’s particularly great because his joke rips on the atheists, but the language he uses to do it will cause evangelicals to cry.
Listen, my evangelical friends: choose not to be offended.