There are few people who I would actually hate it if they actively hated me. One of those people is Marc Maron. The comedian really knows how to make an insult stick, and he came for Matt Rife. Time to pack it in, Matt.
Rife, as Maron so aptly put it, is the new “It boy” of shitty comedy. A man who thinks he’s actually funny but really isn’t, Rife stands on stage and looks pretty and then gets mad that his fans think that he’s pretty. More recently, he has been making a mockery of his mostly female fanbase by making jokes about domestic violence in his Netflix special, Natural Selection, and even going as far as to literally say on podcasts he doesn’t want only women as his fans. Weird!
Maron doesn’t like that. Quite frankly, if Maron said any of this about me? I would just crawl in a hole and die. At an event at the New York Public Library to promote comedian Kliph Nesteroff’s new book, Maron took a question from The Daily Beast’s Sean L. McCarthy and he did not have kind words about Rife.
“Well, first of all, like, don’t jump the gun on Matt Rife,” Maron replied. “If you don’t know who he is, he’s the new It Boy of shitty comedy. And he’s taken a big chance in his career right now to shit on the mostly female audience that he accumulated through social media to sort of kiss up to these pseudo edge lords. And personally, I don’t think it’s going to go well for him. And ultimately, my producer Brendan McDonald, the genius, made a good point in saying that he thinks that Matt Rife is actually mobilizing a new generation of comics to push back against what that stands for in much the way that Dane Cook did at a different time to once again, you know, be creative and bring a new energy and voice to what that doesn’t represent. So, maybe within show business, there is hope.”
Pack it up, dude. Look, comedy isn’t easy, and sometimes you have to admit that you’ve been bested. If Maron knew I existed and then compared me to Dane Cook in 2023? I would simply hand in my comedy degree (which I do technically have from the Upright Citizens Brigade) and say I am done for.
Is Maron perfect? No, no one is, but he doesn’t also sh*t on his fanbase because he’s whining about the fact that girls like him more than white boys, which is what Rife is doing.
I am tired of pretty white boys skating by in comedy. They have done it for years and then cry when we ask where their jokes are, and Rife is a prime example of it. This special is bad and if Marc Maron came for me? That’d be the moment I would pack up whatever comedy career I thought I had, and I would just keep posting me flirting with people in the crowd and pass it off as “jokes” on social media.
(featured image: Netflix)
