12 Hilarious WWE Backstage Skits You Probably Don't Remember
“Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me." - Dwayne Johnson.
Despite trying their hardest for decades, WWF/E has never had a reputation as a purveyor of classy comic stylings.
Part of the problem is Vincent Kennedy McMahon and Kevin Dunn’s joint belief that toilet humour is the haute cuisine of comedy. Another part is the WWE’s insistence that maintaining a broad appeal means appealing to the lowest common denominator.
And so you get the poop jokes, the gay jokes, the accusations of bad breath, the bad photoshop mockery on the Titantron. You get the badly written, acted and edited backstage skits, cropping up like weeds in WWE’s flower bed.
Even when genuinely gifted comic performers come to work for the company, the WWE’s schoolyard homogenising influence kicks in, like a fifth grader rewriting a sitcom for added fart gags. Enzo and Cass are the current beneficiaries of these studio notes from hell, as the New Day were before them, and as John Cena and The Rock were before them.
Fortunately, plenty of excellent quality humour has slipped through the McMahon/Dunn net in the past. Everyone remembers moments like Steve Austin singing Kumbaya to Mr. McMahon, or Mankind’s amiable attempts to be the son Vince never had - but what about the ones that slipped under the radar?
I’ve sifted the nuggets of gold from the river of crap that is RAW and Smackdown’s feeble attempts at sketch comedy over the past twenty years or so, to bring you a dozen precious moments of fun that may have passed you by. Enjoy.
12. Manners Cost Nothing
Long, long before John ‘Bradshaw’ Layfield was drunkenly shouting at Maggles and Ron ‘Faarooq’ Simmons was loudly passing judgement on shenanigans for a living, they were the Acolytes Protection Agency: two blue collar, beer swilling, cigar smoking, poker playing cultist enforcers, a gimmick which involved hitting other wrestlers harder than they needed to and blurring the line between ‘pec’ and ‘moob’.
The APA would set up with brews, chips n’ dips backstage at whatever venue they were at to kill time… and part of ‘setting up’ involved placing a large prop door in front of their little den of macho iniquity, which they would insist that people use despite there being no walls surrounding It.
On this old episode of Smackdown dating back to autumn 2000, Just Joe - aka Canadian independent star Joe E. Legend, former tag team partner with one Sexton Hardcastle in the team Sex & Violence - tries to stir the pot by stooging on Edge & Christian to the menacing badasses… but Bradshaw puts the ratfink in his place by insisting that he use the door, and that he knock first.