Kathy Griffin Takes Aim at Matt Rife After Joke Fury

After being canceled for a joke she made about Donald Trump in 2017, Kathy Griffin has now taken aim at fellow comedian Matt Rife.

When a photo of Griffin holding the fake decapitated head of the former president went viral all of those years ago, it damaged her career. "I was in the middle of a 50-city tour and all the shows got canceled within 72 hours," she previously told Newsweek. Trump himself was a prominent voice in the backlash against Griffin, writing on X, formerly Twitter, at the time: "Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself. My children, especially my 11-year-old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick."

The gory image, which was taken by celebrity photographer Tyler Shields, sparked a widespread outcry, leading to Griffin issuing a public apology. Now, she has posted to X about the discrepancies between the outrage female comics can face compared to their male colleagues.

She reposted a screenshot of a Variety article that detailed a conversation between comedians Rife, Sam Jay, Tom Segura and Marlon Wayans where they discussed the state of comedy. "You can't be afraid to offend," part of the article headline reads.

"Lol. Ok. It's a little different for male comics, but please tell me all about it, fellas 😂🙄," Griffin captioned the post.

During the roundtable chat released on November 27, Rife told his fellow comedians that "intention matters."

"I think the subject matter all comes to intention," he said. "What is your intention in saying some reckless s*** right now? Are you trying to upset somebody or are you trying to make light of a certain subject that way it doesn't take up such a negative space in someone's mind and they can laugh about something that may have brought them so much grief and discomfort."

The interview took place prior to the controversy surrounding his November 15 Netflix special, Natural Selection, in which he made a joke about domestic violence.

Newsweek reached out to representatives for Rife and Griffin for comment via email on Thursday.

In the joke, he implied that a woman who served him in a restaurant in Baltimore with a black eye had received it because her cooking was bad. Rife then doubled down on the joke when, in an Instagram story that followed, he offered a fake apology. He wrote: "If you've ever been offended by a joke I've told — here's a link to my official apology." That link read "tap to solve your issue" and led people to a website selling helmets for people with special needs.

While he faced widespread backlash on social media, one public relations expert said they thought that Rife will survive the storm.

"Of course he's going to dodge the bullet," Molly McPherson said in a TikTok video, adding that her analysis was based on her professional opinion as someone who works in PR crisis management.

"He is a part of bro culture bro, comedian culture, such as Joe Rogan who has a top podcast for a reason because people listen to it, they follow him and if there's a genre that makes money, there's going to be more people who do it," she said. "If he didn't double down he would have lost his comedy credentials."

This is in stark contrast to what Griffin experienced in 2017.

"I wasn't canceled, I was erased," she told The New York Times.

Prior to the scandal, Griffin was performing several stand-up shows and executive produced her own show Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, which aired from 2005 to 2010. Following the controversy, she was fired from her annual New Year's Eve co-host job for CNN with Anderson Cooper and 25 theaters canceled her upcoming shows.

"When that Trump thing happened, it was so crazy and there was a lot of madness around me, a lot of insanity. And a lot of people reaching out to give me their opinion, but nobody really helped," she told Newsweek.

"I would have loved it if Lorne Michaels would have given me a cameo on SNL. Or I would have loved it if Netflix would have stepped up and said, we'll do a special or like something that would have just calmed the buyers down."

All of these years later, Griffin now feels like she's been "un-canceled."

On February 2, she was back with her first stand-up comedy tour since the incident, My Life on the PTSD-List.