Comedians have a mixed track record with the genre of autobiography. For professional storytellers, this medium should be ideal, but the results vary. Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime” is an indisputably fantastic book. Others like Colin Jost, Tina Fey, Leslie Jones and Rainn Wilson have dipped their toes into the murky waters of memoir, always with little success.
Next in this lineup comes Matt Rife’s “You’re Mom’s Gonna Love Me.” Mr. Rife’s life is indeed interesting, but the memoir proves to be a lazy effort to capitalize on his current notoriety, composed of immature prose and a misogynistic arrogance unjustifiable even in autobiography.
Mr. Rife is a contentious figure. He gained fame through crowd work, asking women at every show for their personal red flags and posting the clips on TikTok for a majority female audience. He then opened his first special on Netflix, “Natural Selection,” with a joke about domestic violence, which faced backlash from fans and critics alike. Mr. Rife’s “apology” was composed of a link to an adult special-needs helmet, prescribing them for those his comedy had offended.
The memoir goes out of its way to implicitly justify these actions by painting Mr. Rife as an underdog, a difficult task when the underdog in question is a handsome six-foot-tall white man — but the attempt isn’t unjustified. Mr. Rife grew up in an obscure town in Ohio where he had few friends and a difficult home life, a standard rags-to-riches narrative. However, despite his dislike for cancel culture and its proponents, Mr. Rife falls into the classic trap of using every opportunity for vulnerability in the service of further self-aggrandizement.
Even without this propensity for boasting, the book would remain unpleasant. In the last chapter Mr. Rife claims to be voice memo-ing the memoir: “I’m walking around right now dictating this [stuff] into my phone.” I completely believe him — the writing is conversational to say the least. Countless sentences are written in all caps, desperately urging the reader to pay attention.
Mr. Rife’s desperation may be symptomatic of his increasingly contradictory image. His previous actions alienated the female fanbase he built online. His personal brand remains targeted toward women, yet he reaches for the degrading rhetoric used by his male predecessors in comedy. The contrast is alive in this memoir, whose title is seemingly addressed to women: “You’re Mom’s Gonna Love Me.” Yet it contains lines like, “I don’t care if you’re a twenty out of ten, if your second toe is longer than your big toe — you’re toe-tally out.”
Mr. Rife may be presenting himself as a scrawny kid turned Casanova, but his tone suggests something different. Picture the intoxicated uncles at most Christmas dinners recently, bumbling and burdensome. On the page, stripped of his attractive appearance, Mr. Rife comes across as similarly out of touch and unoriginal in his desire to use women as scapegoats for his own insecurity.
