Matt Rife’s sexist jokes are the standard for young, male internet comedians

If you’re scrolling by way of comedy on TikTok proper now, you’d be forgiven for pondering you’d been transported again to the Nineteen Seventies. You will note males making jokes about menstrual cycles. Maybe some snarky belittling of girls’s hobbies. Perhaps one or two home violence gags. This, although, isn’t the stand-up comedy of one other period. That is merely a glimpse into the fabric of 2023’s younger male web comics – the place mocking, dismissing and belittling ladies is customary. And the chief of the pack is Matt Rife.

The 28-year-old standup comic from Ohio made a reputation for himself on social media as a scorching, inclusive comedian with cheekbones. His jokes, principally shared through brief clips throughout Instagram and TikTok, have historically been geared toward a feminine viewers, stuffed with self-deprecating cracks at his personal attractiveness, or making enjoyable of different individuals’s unhealthy boyfriends. Now, although, individuals can be listening to his title for the primary time in a completely totally different context.

In his new Netflix particular, Pure Choice, Rife begins with an anecdote about going to a restaurant in Baltimore the place “the hostess who seats you had a black eye”. He continues: “A full black eye. It wasn’t like, ‘What occurred?’ It was fairly apparent what occurred. However we couldn’t recover from, like, that is the face of the corporate? That is who you might have greeting individuals? And my boy, who I used to be with, was like, ‘Yeah, I really feel unhealthy for her, man, I really feel like they need to put her within the kitchen or one thing the place no one has to see her face.’ And I used to be like, ‘Yeah, however I really feel like if she may prepare dinner, she wouldn’t have that black eye’.”

Rife’s crowd may need laughed, however the web didn’t. “The ladies and gays have been Matt Rife’s greatest demographic and he used his Netflix particular to pander to poisonous masculinity,” one particular person commented on Twitter/X. “Not Matt Rife constructing his platform on catering to his feminine viewers after which opening his Netflix particular with a home violence joke,” one other added.

To make issues worse, Rife responded to the criticism with an Instagram story geared toward these “offended by a joke I instructed”: “Faucet to unravel your challenge,” learn a URL hyperlink, which directed his followers to an internet site promoting helmets for individuals with particular wants.

Rife’s feedback may appear surprising, however to anybody who’s au fait with a selected nook of the web – one which champions fast, flash-in-the-pan content material from male comedians – it’s merely par for the course. There have been different moments of misogyny in his set, too. Such because the phase the place he delivered on ladies within the religious energy of crystals. “Fellas, we gotta put our foot down,” he started. “This crystal s*** is getting uncontrolled. Girls, put the f***ing pebbles down, okay?”

He later laments that these ladies “received’t shut up about” their crystals, earlier than impersonating mentioned ladies in a tone of voice that may solely be described as psychotically excessive. When you think about that Rife, whose viewers is predominantly feminine, just lately instructed Selection that this particular was “far more for guys”, you need to marvel about his intentions. Is he aiming to popularise himself amongst males by way of brazen misogyny? To crack jokes that belittle ladies and make them look silly? To cut back them to sexual objects designed for male consumption? As a result of, because it occurs, there are quite a lot of different males on-line doing simply that – and gaining thousands and thousands of views within the course of.

Search “brunch ladies” on TikTok and also you’ll instantly discover numerous movies of males impersonating teams of girls at bottomless brunches. Their voices are excessive, they’re ingesting rosé, and sometimes satirising a selected accent; they’re often both very posh, or from Essex. Cringeworthy poses are made in direction of the digicam, they usually like to bitch about each other. As a result of all ladies wish to do is gossip, get drunk and take embarrassing selfies, apparently. Typically they put on wigs and dance on tables. Different occasions they flirt with waiters and get more and more drunk and delirious.

None of that, in fact, is on a par with making a gag about home violence. Nevertheless it’s all a part of the identical tradition, isn’t it? One which undermines and devalues ladies, decreasing them to memeable tropes with vapid pastimes and meaningless lives, one whiny, unbearable voice at a time.

We see it so much elsewhere, too. The favored British comic Josh Berry has a sequence the place he usually impersonates ridiculously posh ladies, donning scruffy wigs and furiously puffing away on vapes whereas pontificating in regards to the “beguiling” tradition in Brixton. Considered one of his most-viewed movies sees him impersonating a lady working in PR who has a raging cocaine behavior, who says: “I haven’t received a clue what I’m doing, however I’ve taken sufficient coke to assume that nobody else has observed.”

Berry does usually publish movies mocking males, however they don’t appear to hold fairly the identical tenor as those the place he mocks ladies. His male characters have a bit of extra selection to them: gamblers, LinkedIn “thought leaders”, middle-aged, lycra-clad street warriors. There’s extra of a combination; the humour has depth. All of his ladies are merely morons. That’s it. That’s the joke.

Many different on-line comedians do the identical factor. In a single in style TikTok clip, American comedian Invoice Burr is seen poking enjoyable at ladies who’re “at all times bitching” about their lives. “What occurred to you in the present day, sweetheart?” he asks. “Did they not chill your rosé?”

Then there are the litany of viral clips poking enjoyable at “drunk ladies” (notice: it’s at all times “ladies” and by no means “ladies”). One sees comic Chris D’Elia – who has denied a number of allegations of sexual harassment – discuss incoherently on the crowd and state that “nothing issues to a drunk lady in any respect”. The audio has since been reused a number of occasions by different male comedians to riff off the concept that… erm… drunk ladies are… idiots? I believe?

This particular breed of male comic sexism had an additional viral second earlier this 12 months, when musician Matty Healy of The 1975 and comic Adam Friedland made a lot of derogatory remarks about ladies on Friedland’s namesake podcast. At one level, Healy instructed Friedland that he would “f***” Friedland’s sister as a result of “she’s scorching”. They later joked about ladies’s durations and advised that the moon controls menstrual cycles. “It’s so humorous that girl get f***ed up by the moon,” Friedland mentioned, including: “In the meantime we went there – males!” Healy laughed together with the feedback and added: “F*** yeah, f***ing too proper!” Additionally they made a sequence of racist remarks in regards to the rapper Ice Spice – Healy has since apologised.

Individually, a few of these movies may be humorous. And I’m positive I’d chuckle at just a few of them if I heard the jokes stay, significantly in the event that they jogged my memory of my very own behaviour. Nevertheless it’s onerous to not odor the lingering scent of misogyny when you glimpse the sheer quantity of those movies. You can also’t assist however marvel how useful all of that is, significantly when you think about it throughout the wider context of how males discuss ladies on-line – assume males’s influencer Andrew Tate – and the litany of male comedians who’ve made jokes about sexual violence, amongst them Michael Che, Daniel Tosh, and Jim Jefferies.

Then there’s Russell Model, who, amongst quite a lot of different misogynist materials, famously joked on stage about ladies giving him oral intercourse, saying: “I like them blow jobs, proper, the place it goes of their neck a bit of bit… Them blowjobs the place mascara runs a bit of bit”. The comic has since been accused of a number of counts of sexual assault, which he has denied.

So, the place does that depart Rife? He could not have cracked jokes about rape, or making ladies’s eyes water by way of oral intercourse, however that doesn’t make him exempt from the broader downside at hand. Maybe the purpose of all that is to recognise how one joke about “crystal ladies” results in one other about “drunk ladies”, then one other about their ethnicity, then their physique, and so forth.

It’s all a part of the identical tradition of misogyny. And it’s inside this framework that we have to consider carefully about the way in which male comedians are speaking about ladies. As a result of you may solely poke enjoyable at a sure sort of behaviour so usually earlier than normalising the poking. Then, earlier than you already know it, you’ve develop into part of the issue you have been making an attempt to satirise.