10 Wrestlers Who Hated Parodies Of Their Work
8. Arn Anderson
Kevin Nash didn't pioneer the impersonation skit that has since remained a fixture of episodic North American wrestling TV - Steve Austin and incredibly André the Giant, to name but two, offered up priceless impersonations of Ric Flair and the Ultimate Warrior respectively - but his performance in the Four Horsemen parody was so good that he damn sure popularised it.
He went studs up two-footed on Arn Anderson in a blackly comedic send-up. It was cruel, but undeniably piss funny. He shambled to the ring with an oversized gut prosthetic, a neck brace, and a cooler full of beers.
Nash, one of the funniest men in wrestling history, delivered a line so good that it was almost Simpsons-worthy. In the classic run of that seminal show, the drudgery of life was such that even fantasy sequences were tempered by reality. Where Smithers once fantasised that he was merely "quite good" at turning Mr. Burns on, Nash as Arn described his career as "quite excellent". That was so specifically funny; the idea that even an impression of a man putting himself over had to be undermined.
Arn was not remotely pleased; it was "so personal in the attack, so overboard", and Arn marched to Nash's dressing room and confronted him. They shared the beers, thrashed it out, but the sheer effort Nash made with the prosthetics - more than he ever made in the ring, hilariously - had to gnaw at Arn.