Was Matt Rife canceled? The comedian’s controversies, explained

28-year-old standup comic Matt Rife seems to have waded into a mire of controversies, but has he been canceled, whatever that means?

Echoing the success of fellow push-up enthusiast Dane Cook back in the era when being in enough people’s Top 8 could still get you famous (ask your parents), Rife rose to prominence through the power of the internet, building a fanbase via his self-produced specials Only Fans, Matthew Steven Rife, and Walking Red Flag between 2021 and 2023, as well as on TikTok. Before that, he picked up steam thanks to small roles on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Fresh Off the Boat, and on the long-running sketch series Wild ‘n Out. 

But along with stardom, adulation, a Netflix deal, and a brief relationship with Kate Beckinsale, Rife’s fame got him some negative attention. Accusations began to make the rounds – one hit Cracked in 2023, revolving around a joke that Rife told with similar subject matter to a Ralphie May bit. The accusing party on Twitter called the joke “nearly a direct lift” before posting clips from both acts with nearly no shared words or cadence. Cracked called the bombshell a “doozy.” Cracked readers called it “why we don’t read Cracked anymore.”

Then there was the Men’s Health interview in which Rife, who sports the same body type as most G.I. Joes, addressed his own physical attractiveness. He stated that being, empirically speaking, a cutie with a patootie had, if anything, made things more difficult for him as he pursued a vocation in being stared at by big groups of people. “You have to win people over more often,” he explained to Today. Miraculously, his career survived this phenomenon, and his TikTok ubiquity grew.

And then there was Twitter/X, that great social minefield that we lay out in front of our future selves after three beers in our 20s. In Rife’s case, a series of poorly thought-out tweets (reported on by Fandom Wire) from 2016 bubbled back up in light of his recent fame. The posts featured less than sensitive thoughts on the subject of the LGBTQ+ community, a laissez-faire attitude about social mores, and, inevitably, the N-word.

Some light social media fracking will also uncover one swiftly-deleted post about everyone at the Oscars “waiting to see if the cast of ‘Parasite’ coughs,” an absolute knee-slapper that managed to take a racist stereotype/ QAnon-adjacent COVID origin conspiracy theory about China, then add an extra layer of bigotry by applying it to folks from South Korea. Most people have to wake up pretty early in the morning if they’re going to put aside the necessary time to be that dumb. Rife nailed it in one tweet, and remained uncanceled.

His Netflix special did little to dispel his self-generated rep for needless, “I don’t cater to women” brinksmanship, either; its opening joke struck some former fans as a cheap shot at the expense of victims of domestic violence, and his follow-up Instagram story “apology” linked out to a website selling helmets for special needs children.

And then, as all great men have done, Matt Rife had a fight with a 6-year-old. It began with another joke during Rife’s recent special, in which he poked fun at women who enjoy astrology, and goofed on how they could get a ring from Jupiter. As reported by TMZ, TikToker mom Bunny Hedaya posted a response in which her young son asked Rife to be nicer to women, and stated that Saturn is the planet with visible rings. Rife, displaying a surprising knowledge of the solar system and an inversely proportional knowledge of English, replied: “Jupiter also has ring. OH!… and Santa Clais [sic] isn’t real. Your mom buys you presents with the money she makes on OnlyFans. Good luck,” followed by a zany emoji. It’s like people say: Comedy is tragedy plus a first grader.

Despite all of that, Rife’s career seems only to have grown stronger, propelled forward by the words of detractors, like a baking soda submarine filled with other people’s opinions about him. He remains, pretty objectively, not canceled.