Punk reads through the latest gags written up by the creative team
Amid all of his usual strutting bravado and pompous rhetoric, there was one thing that Vince McMahon said on last week’s Raw that rang true: the fans need to be treated like children. Of course, Vince was referring to the paternalist ethos that all GMs have to abide by, making unpopular decisions from time to time that the crowd may not approve of. What Vince said, though, extends far beyond the on-screen role of GM and can be seen influencing every aspect of the product. For now I’ll leave aside the habitual insulting of our intelligence by the commentators (we’ve never seen the walls of Jericho countered into a roll-up. Really?) and concentrate instead on the WWE’s attempts at humour.
The WWE’s latest attempts at humour definitely conform to the idea that the fans need to be treated like children. This week fortunately wasn’t so bad due to the welcome absence of Hornswoggle, but the ‘humorous’ segment fell similarly flat on its face nevertheless. It revolved around this week’s totally redundant guest host Ashton Kutcher and the similarly redundant wrestler Zack Ryder. Now, as far as guest hosts go, the fact that I had actually heard of this one was a welcome start (as a Brit I’m not all that familiar with failing American actors/comedians desperately trying to resuscitate their careers. We have our own thanks). Ashton Kutcher, we learn from a pre-recorded segment, had put a ‘hit’ on Zack Ryder on account of his offensive Twittering. The tension mounts until Zack comes to the ring with his faithful companion Alicia Fox and demands to be told who it is Kutcher had hired to ‘hit’ Ryder. Kutcher, proving he wouldn’t last a day in the assassination business, eventually reveals who it was and, in a twist approximately everyone saw coming, it turned out to be his companion Alicia Fox! Oh, how we roared!
How do they come up with this stuff?
If what I just described doesn’t sound the least bit funny, that’s because it wasn’t. And this wasn’t just a one off, the WWE has consistently been about as funny as finding out you have cancer. Their favourite jokes revolve around the mischievous antics of Hornswoggle and Jillian Hall’s atrocious singing, proving that the WWE’s creative team must have gone to the Joseph Goebbels school of comedy: repeat a joke often enough and eventually people will find it funny. A lot of people are inclined to blame the terrible humour on the PG rating and hark back to the Attitude Era as a golden age of WWE comedy. This would be to suggest though that adults can only laugh at a joke if it involves violence, swearing or crude sexual innuendo. Indeed, the Attitude Era’s humour was more mature than the current output in the same way that Emperor Nero was more of a humanitarian than Vlad the Impaler. No, it’s simply a case of lazy writing, only instead of DX making dick jokes we get the little people’s court.
It doesn’t require a level of wit to make Voltaire blush in order to appeal to children and adults’ sense of humour. You can keep the juvenile slapstick yet throw in clever asides every now and then that an adult audience would appreciate and would go straight over the head of the children. It is an art Disney and Pixar have mastered and makes sense from a business point of view since after all it’s the adults who have to fork over their hard earned money to buy the latest garish John Cena T-shirt. That, however, would require a degree of subtlety and intelligence. Why bother with that when you can just have The Great Khali in a tuxedo? Oh Vince, if you really want to treat us like children perhaps you should spare us the uncomfortable truth.
