Stand-up comedian Matt Rife’s sarcastic response to critics calling him out for making a domestic violence joke has been branded “disrespectful” and “offensive”.
Rife, whose viral crowd work interaction videos have earned him a massive social media following, recently scored his first Netflix comedy special after self-releasing his material on YouTube.
However, his streaming debut became embroiled in controversy after the 28-year-old comedian opened the special, titled Natural Selection, with a joke about domestic abuse.
The Ohio-native begins his hour-long set, which was filmed in Washington DC, with an anecdote set at a restaurant in “ratchet” Baltimore where “the hostess who seats you had a black eye”.
“A full black eye. It wasn’t like, ‘What happened?’ It was pretty obvious what happened,” he continued. “But we couldn’t get over, like, this is the face of the company? This is who you have greeting people?
“And my boy, who I was…
