10 Best Times AEW Threw Shade At WWE
1. Schadenfreude Hour
When a WWE backstage interviewer asks a question, the answer is almost invariably obvious.
"You are pissing blood from your face following that brutal battle backstage attack just seconds ago. Are you in pain, or...?"
The question is answered, anyway, because that is the weird way in which the show is scripted. The wrestler is usually angry or determined, or in any state of mind that requires them to storm off camera in a hurry. The camera then rests on the interviewer, who appears to be experiencing an existential crisis. They look profoundly troubled, as if they've just heard rumblings of corruption in the mayor's office and not the words "Baron Corbin: you're going to pay for that tonight". In a superb reveal-cum-visual gag, that same unsettled expression - which Charly Caruso wears every week, elevating it to a surreal running gag - formed over the face of Hangman Page earlier this year.
Matt Jackson had questioned his drinking and its impact on his behaviour. He seemed shaken. He looked to the distance for meaning with no immediate answer in sight. And then he drank beer from a massive comedy-sized pitcher that had appeared magically from nowhere. Clearly, a stage hand put it in his grasp, but the absurdity made it.
This was tremendous. It was a gentle mockery of an objectively stupid WWE trope with a purpose beyond saying that the Fed sucks sh*t. It used our familiarity with it to inform the spluttering pop.
Just when it was thought AEW had fallen into a trap, they subverted the cliche gloriously.