Navigating the Edgy Humor of Matt Rife at the Funny Bone, Albany

Oh boy, is this a long one.

I have had a rough week, and I needed something to make me laugh. Thankfully, I had my tickets to see Matt Rife at Funny Bone. I bought these tickets ages ago. Rife, a pretty boy comedian, was just beginning to make a name for himself; often he was found making rounds on my TikTok feed and showcasing moments of hilarious crowd work. 

He is crude. He is charming and handsome, with a wide, goofy grin, big, blue piercing eyes, boyish good looks, and a jawline & cheekbones that could cut glass. When I bought myself tickets for his show, he had just climbed into a roller coaster, climbing steeply at a very high speed. At the time of ticket purchase, Rife hadn’t yet sold out the set of shows at Proctors faster than you could say, “Who the hell is Matt Rife?” I’m not even sure those shows existed. Once I heard that he had achieved just that, I considered myself lucky. I got to see this rising star in a much more intimate venue than one would experience in a ginormous theater like Proctors. 

Comedy is a very subjective art and can be very dangerous. And while I may be whatever sort of slur people use to refer to progressives these days, I’m not offended easily, and I also like to believe I can take a joke—provided said jokes are actually funny. I might laugh at things that are “edgy” or even offensive, and I’ll feel bad laughing at them (again, only if they are actually funny), but only to a point. This cocktail of crude and blue humor and provocative remarks is what I refer to as “frat boy comedy,” and that’s the umbrella under which Rife falls. 

I’m not well-versed in internet drama, but I do know that within the past few weeks or months, Rife has become a figure of major controversy. The young man, whose career went from essentially a nobody to someone with a Netflix comedy special in under a year, was met with righteous hostility after making “jokes” about domestic violence in that special. He also picked a fight with, debatably bullied, an 8-year-old child who corrected him about which planets in our solar system have rings and who told him to be nicer to women. Rife dug his heels in, said some more not-so-nice things, and left me scratching my head as to why whoever was running his socials was letting him say these ridiculous things. The things he said were, well, not a good look for him. For a comedian, he sure didn’t seem to know how to take a joke or jab at his routine. His roller coaster of fame now was more akin to a maniacal child building their own coaster in Roller Coaster Tycoon and launching the train right off of the rails.

I wasn’t about to give up my tickets, and as someone who started off as a fan of his, I went into this show, hopeful of a quality show. I made sure to keep disappointment as a possibility but hoped he could find a way to dig himself out of his polarizing PR nightmare with humility and quality humor. As my counterbalance, I had my friend with me who simply did not find Rife funny from the start. I believe we both went into the show with our expectations set as middle-of-the-road as possible, open to any outcome. 

While I’m not sure if it was his fault, being let in to just be seated more than an hour after the posted show time was not exactly the start I wanted. The line wove its way around that wing of Crossgates, buzzing with the din of anxious comedy-goers eager to see him. 

Opening the show for us was Alex Cureau, who was met with a perfectly “mid” applause. He jokes with himself about the stereotype he projected: a bald white man from Louisiana. The same conclusions you’re drawing based on that statement are the same ones he was implying. You know, looking like a racist and “dressed like a Hot Wheels car,” as Rife later jabbed.

Cureau made some marginally amusing cracks at Joe Biden being the greeter at Walmart and similarly mocked Mitch McConnell for a face that looked like a baseball glove. But he also took shots at Biden’s supposed incoherence, which could have been funny if done right, but he went on to state that Trump made so much more sense when he spoke. I’m not offended, but please. Sir, have you ever tried to map out the syntax of any of Trump’s speech patterns? In a single, very long run-on sentence, he’ll have like five different thoughts, none of which he finishes. 

Cureau’s set was either really long or it felt really long. I had a few chuckles, but overall, his set was mono-dimensional, flat, and there were no knee-slappers.

Rife made it to the stage dressed in a Bass Pro Shops hat and a red plaid shirt, becoming one with the brick wall backdrop, and was met with a big round of enthusiastic applause.

“I’m excited for these comedy club shows,” he said. “I’m trying out new material.”

And he dove right in, starting with, “I really want to bring the R-word (retarded) back.”

Not. A. Good. Start. The bar is now underneath the floor.

Almost immediately, a table got up and left. I don’t blame them. He chastised them, claiming that his joke would have made sense and not be offensive if people (the table) hadn’t talked through it. No, Matt. I heard you and not them. It wasn’t.

Once he dropped the “bit” about the R-word, his set got better. I found myself genuinely laughing when he was talking about his mother—how she overestimated his fame and fortune and when he said he wanted to buy her a home, she had sent him listings for multi-million dollar homes with too many rooms and a horse stable or a pool. He made sure to clarify that his mother doesn’t have horses and never has, and he’s never seen her so much as use a bathtub. He talked about buying her a car and the world’s “second-ugliest dog.” This was the apex of his set, and it was only the second bit. 

The quality of his set sank again with his jokes about elder abuse, prison rape, the death of sick children, and hitting your children (which was sadly met with applause and cheers). There were some quips amongst those topics that I found funny, but when he brought Alex out again, the whole show got kneecapped. 

Once again, the topic and use of the R-word and mocking people with disabilities erupted from the two comedians’ mouths like vacating spillways. These “jokes,” a word which I am only using clinically in regards to his set, were unnecessary, unfunny, and honestly despicable. 

There is a way to tastefully approach edgy and controversial topics, such as those mentioned above, and even the use of taboo words. But Matt, I stopped using the R-word more than 15 years ago because I recognized the problems with it. Once it was out of my vocabulary, I never thought about it again because it wasn’t a big deal to cut it out. The fact that Rife is so locked in on this one offensive word says a lot about him as a person.

I’ll give Rife one thing, and that’s that he is very good at crowd work. He volleys and is very quick on his feet for a smartass remark and come back, and now that I think about it, the crowd work was the stuff that got posted on social media. That said, Matt’s low blows about minorities and in particular about people with disabilities and the R-word were low blows, childish and overall immature. Those were the moments I was in utter and complete discomfort. It didn’t come off like satire or parody; instead, much of Matt’s set felt an awful lot like any and all excuse to be offensive and rude and disguise it as “comedy.” 

I know I’ll get called names and get flack for all of this. I’m just a snowflake or whatever people want to call me, but as a whole, I can now understand the distasteful content and feelings people have towards him. I was hardly offended, and I laughed at significantly more things than my companion did, but I was certainly uncomfortable for much of the nearly 2.5 hours I was there.  

I think Matt has a future regardless of whether or not he has an attitude adjustment. The careers of many shamed (cough cough Louis CK) comedians is a testament that he’ll survive just fine. I think Matt has so much potential to be a much better comedian, but in order to do that, he would have to work a little harder at finding the line that crosses into actually offensive, and take a couple of giant steps back. It’s easy to take cheap shots at marginalized communities. It doesn’t make an effort; it’s the bottom of the barrel and it’s stuff that doesn’t require any ounce of intelligence or human decency to consume. That doesn’t make you a good comedian. A good comedian can find the balance and nuance of touchy subjects and, with carefully-crafted satire and parody, successfully stick the landing of humor.

Rife didn’t do that.

Author’s Note: In my earlier account, I mentioned a table leaving the comedy club in response to the comedian’s controversial remarks. I have since been informed that the departure was allegedly prompted by belligerent behavior, and the individuals were escorted out by security. I want to acknowledge that my initial interpretation may have been a misunderstanding and appreciate the correction, as I pieced together clues at the time without the full picture of the incident.

However, it’s important to note that this correction doesn’t alter my perspective on the stand-up routine. Regardless of the specific circumstances surrounding the table’s departure, there is a way to navigate touchy subjects with tact and cleverness (including those about disabilities) and I have seen it done time and again, but I maintain my view that the use of the R-word and the subsequent defense by the comedian contributed to an inauspicious and unoriginal start to the performance from which the routine did not ultimately recover.