By Donny Ndoka –
Matt Rife – the comic whose apology link for an offensive domestic abuse joke redirected to a site offering safety helmets – was baptized in August, he reported on a podcast interview.
“I’ve never been a super religious person, but when my grandpa passed away, it hit me that I would never see this person again,” he says on a video curated on Isaiah Robin. “I skew Christian, so I started to go to church a little bit more. I hate church. I find it excruciatingly boring. But I want to believe in God, and it’s a huge part of the process.”
It is hoped that Rife – whose routines are largely spontaneous interactions with hecklers – will clean up his repertoire, which has often been filled with sexual content.
Matt Rife got into comedy because he was bullied at school in the one-traffic-light town of North Lewisburg, Ohio. As classmates picked on him, he wise-cracked self-effacing humor to deflect the sting of being teased.
He was the class clown until, at 15, he did his first open mic night at the Funny Bone club in Columbus. Because it was an over-21 club with a liquor license, he had to be accompanied by a parental guardian and leave immediately after his gig.
This became the standard procedure until he got older.
At age 15, he hired a manager from Atlanta he met over Twitter. When he took the exam to graduate early from high school, he moved to Atlanta and did 11 gigs a week, handing out free passes at malls and posting bills on telephone poles.
When Rife practiced his routines, his manager would throw tennis balls at him, honk horns and sound jingles, to prepare him to not lose his concentration with anything an unruly crowd might do.
He cut his teeth on the Uptown Comedy Corner in Atlanta, a notorious joint where people came to laugh and if you weren’t making them laugh, they booed you off the stage.
“You have five or 10 minutes, they just don’t have the patience for you,” Rife said on a Jordan Peterson podcast. “I got trained in one of the harshest environments possible.”
There, he also connected with many other comedians.
At 17, Rife moved to Los Angeles and couch-surfed for a year while he developed his career. His gigs were getting bigger, and these parlayed into work with Disney and MTV until he landed a spot at Wild n Out.
During Covid, Rife blew up on Twitter. He became an A-lister.
Comedy is the balancing act on the precipice of saying inappropriate things. Without being mean-spirited, the comic voices what everyone is thinking but unwilling to say, and by doing that, can sometimes provide an escape from traumatic experiences.
Rife said he performed the infamous domestic violence wise-crack 200 times in live venues before uploading it to video, where some self-righteous Twitter user decided to cash in on Rife’s fame by trying to cancel him. The woke mob dutifully showed up with pitchforks and torches.
His “apology” was a link to an online storefront for special needs helmets.
Rife remained unrepentant. “I don’t believe I ever did anything wrong,” he relates. “I feel like the people who were offended were weak-minded.”
Instead of getting canceled, Rife blew up. He gained a whole new round of fans.
When his grandfather died, it hit home. Grandpa was his first and biggest fan. His best friends helped him overcome the grief by joking around with him, which was somewhat healing.
Going to church was also healing. Rife wise-cracks about pastors getting new material from him for Sunday services.
While he seems to make fun of everything, behind the humor, there’s a human being who longs for eternity. He wants to see his grandfather again.
So Rife took a step of faith and got baptized, and he’s not ashamed of it.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here
Related content: Kevin Hart, Russell Brand, Steve Harvey, Jeff Allen.
About this writer: Donny Ndoka studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near Playa Vista Los Angeles.
