12 Most INSANE Things Wrestlers Have EVER Said On AEW TV
This list is a big motherf*cker.
Back in 2019, AEW had it somewhat easy.
The promotion wasn’t just great in comparison to WWE, but the abject state of Vince McMahon’s booking did its launch no harm whatsoever. The original All Elite manifesto was basically subtext for “everything you don’t like about WWE, we’ll do the opposite”.
On TNT, the first Dynamite press release read, you will see less “soapy, scripted action”. This was barely disguised code for “we aren’t hiring lame soap opera writers; unscripted promos are back”.
Now, Vince McMahon was a despot control freak who seemed to actively enjoy manipulating everybody on his roster. He was also ashamed to be a wrestling promoter to such an extent that he tried to rebrand the very product as “sports entertainment”; hiring fancy writers with “legitimate” backgrounds was his attempt to legitimise WWE in the eyes of the snooty media. This mostly explains the nightmarish scripted promo drive of the 21st century, but there is another factor to consider: wrestlers aren’t always the brightest, and they can’t really be trusted.
They get dropped on their heads for a living. About two thirds of them think that the government uses aeroplanes to spray mind-controlling mist into the brains of the American public.
The average professional wrestler, one could argue, is a complete liability. Hell, the most media-trained guy in the history of the sport (John Cena) and the man considered the cleverest of the bunch (Bryan Danielson) play Peter Gabriel songs on a boombox to Vince in media interviews.
God bless AEW for bringing the freedom back, though. Whenever the promotion actually bothers to air promos on television, the results are either Hall of Fame-tier excellent or hilariously ill-advised…