As a result, Natural Selection is half uninspiring dick jokes, half screed against the injustice of online haters, and entirely underwhelming. Now 28 years old and recording his first special for a mainstream platform, Rife seems to have arrived here on a speed run through comedic disquietude toward his own fans. A comedian’s cynicism toward an audience is nothing new, but Rife is part of a vanguard of young comedians whose fame has come largely through building a social-media following, which is something this show wrestles with. But throughout, Rife holds an adversarial position against the crowd who fills Washington, D.C.’s 3,000-seat Constitution Hall, and whose approval Rife longs for but whose judgment and worldview he finds suspect. He’s in a defensive stance: Will the audience be on board with him? Will they revolt? Will they be “fun”? Sometimes that defensiveness manifests as timidity, and sometimes as aggression.

This is the posture Rife holds for the rest of the hour. (And misogyny and a white guy relying on Black vernacular.) But as the first burst of laughter is still rolling, Rife says he’s “just testing the waters, seeing if y’all are gonna be fun or not … I figure if we start the show with domestic violence, the rest of the show should be smooth sailing.”

That joke suggests the rest of the hour might have more of the same: danger and naughtiness and crossed lines. “Yeah,” Rife tells his friend, “but I feel like if she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.” The crowd laughs loudly, shocked but also excited. The opening joke of Matt Rife’s Netflix special, Natural Selection, is set at a restaurant in Baltimore, a city Rife describes as “ratchet.” The hostess has a black eye, Rife tells the crowd, which prompts one of Rife’s companions to wonder why she’s been assigned to greet people instead of being moved into the kitchen where patrons can’t see her face.

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