10 WWE Gimmicks That Seriously Took The Piss
Am I a joke to you?
There's certain smugness about the voiceover that hits just seconds before AEW EVP Cody makes his entrance.
In it, he famously crows about wrestling having more than one Royal Family, nothing that the Rhodes name belongs in the same conversation as McMahon. If it was a defiant shot at WWE when he worked on the indies following his 2016 exit from the company, it's since become a loaded missile within All Elite Wrestling.
Cody's father was the working class hero, but heroes done good have kids that don't have those struggles - he was the 'Grandson Of A Plumber' in lineage, rather than legacy. 'The American Nightmare' was born into the business and decided at some point that he too would aim higher than title belts, just as his father had when he'd been given booking power within NWA/WCW in the 1980s and 1990s.
His attempts to forge his own wrestling empire rather than his own wrestling career comes from a place of entitlement, but AEW's freshman year successes suggest he'll have provided employment opportunities in ways even his own father couldn't. Dusty had the piss ripped out of him in polka dots but he got them and himself over to an insane degree that the punchline dissolved. He - like Cody - refused to be flattened under McMahon's frippery.
This lot weren't so lucky...
10. Natalya Farts
This took the piss after it passed the gas.
The worst thing about Farting Natalya is that there's not really a great deal to mention beyond that description, nor anything that fleshes out the persona beyond the label.
Natalya - at the time one of the best women's wrestlers on a roster not exactly overspilling with them - had comedically long, loud and smelly wind, and broke more of that than she did faces for approximately a month. In that time, one of her bouts of flatulence caused Hornswoggle to pass out and her own future husband Tyson Kidd to recoil in disgust.
Women were there to be exploited for their looks, embarrassed for something or other, or wrestle popcorn break matches, in that order of priority. The Hart Dungeon graduate had done quite enough of one and the company didn't always want to use her for the other, so letting rip was somehow seen as the way to go...for a all of a few weeks until it was canned.
Unlike one of her actual cartoon gusts, it was dropped cold.