12 Most INSANE Things Wrestlers Have EVER Said On AEW TV

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…

12. Rick Ross Does A No-No

Before a fateful meeting with Hangman Page propelled him to the main event, it wasn’t looking great for Swerve Strickland. Tony Khan leans on certain tropes too heavily and too often, one of which is “give aimless midcarder a stable to fool fans into thinking we have a plan for them”.

Swerve was saddled with, inexplicably, a total nobody with an entirely tattooed face (Trench) and an Instagram influencer who scored a few WWE and AEW gigs by winning an unofficial Brock Lesnar lookalike contest (Parker Boudreaux). Swerve recruited these dudes as back-up in his abandoned feud with Keith Lee, as was revealed in an infamous segment that unfolded on the 2022 Holiday Bash edition of Dynamite.

Trench and Parker were clunky and useless when they attacked Keith - Parker in particular just screamed a lot and body-popped after every rubbish punch he threw - and in an unintentionally hilarious moment, a camera operator captured Swerve’s reaction to his masterplan as he surveyed it on the ramp. He looked nervously at the camera with a “Yeah, I don’t know about this either guys” expression.

Outsized in every way rap star Rick Ross was brought in to mediate the face-to-face before it went awry. At least, that was the plan: it went awry before it even got started. Ross, who later said he saw Lee’s shoulders and trapezoids and had to “express his heart”, stopped himself mid-promo. He looked at Lee with a sense of curiosity and amazement.

He then said to Lee: “You a big motherf*cker”.

This was one of the best worst moments in AEW history, a classic of a dying genre.

11. Brandi Rhodes Runs Wild

The Brandi Rhodes AEW run was possibly the most bizarre in the young history of the promotion. It was certainly the most uneven.

The constant whiplash was intense.

Brandi started out as a sort of manipulative parody of Stephanie McMahon, with her oversight of and meddling in the women’s division. It was atrocious. Then, as the furious valet promising bloody vengeance, she played a superb role in the vastly underrated Cody Vs. Shawn Spears programme. After that, her am-dram supernatural leanings as the mastermind behind the Nightmare Collective contributed heavily towards AEW’s shockingly premature late-2019 decline. This strange pattern - of good, then awful, and nothing in-between - continued.

Nobody expected it, after some shocking in-ring experiments underscored why she was originally a ring announcer, but her September 10, 2020 Late Night Dynamite match opposite Anna Jay was one of the most emphatic over-deliveries in recent memory.

Weirdly obsessed with getting over as a heel, Rhodes was an effective member of the supporting cast as a babyface. She had the fire - and she breathed it in a takedown of Jade Cargill that sits somewhere between infamous and legendary.

Look, the November 11, 2020 promo must have been pretty great, since Brandi created an entry in the pro wrestling lexicon: “Who the hell told you tonight was open mic night, bitch?”

It was unhinged and chaotic, but Christ almighty, the rhythmic delivery was superb, her facial expressions were fierce, and after it was over, you really wouldn’t have wanted to piss her off.

10. MJF (General)

MJF is the most charismatic wrestler in the game, still, and despite some ropey experiments as a babyface, he remains one of the most compelling characters.

He’s very clever; as a sociopathic “out of pocket” heel, he knows precisely where the line is. He doesn’t step beyond it; he struts towards it, places his hands on his head, swivels his hips, and thrusts against it. It also helps that MJF is incredibly funny. If he does cross the line, at least it’s entertaining.

In the pandemic era, MJF performed in a storyline premised on a takeover of Chris Jericho's Inner Circle, as part of which the faction held a ‘Town Hall” meeting. Rotund podcaster Conrad Thompson asked a question: “Will Sammy Guevara rejoin the Inner Circle?”

“Oh my God Turkey Tits, you cannot be serious right now,” came MJF’s response.

Some accuse MJF of resorting to cheap edgelord heat - but he was one of the sharpest minds of 2020. He worked around the limitations better than most. Having already been clever enough to establish a dialogue with other characters beyond his in-ring rivals, he was able to maintain his heel persona with no fans in the building to boo him. As he beat up Marko Stunt, he shouted towards the commentary table: “Hey Schiavone, you fat prick: tell Jungle Boy this is what’s coming to him at Double Or Nothing!”

MJF also “addressed” Brian Pillman by lowering his head towards the canvas; told Bryan Danielson that his mentor William Regal was “drug-addicted” and “worthless”; and threatened to “strap Wardlow to a cross just like Jesus”.

When people asked for 2010s WWE promos not to be so lame, MJF is what they had in mind.

9. The Cody Rhodes Exit Interview

Nobody expected Cody Rhodes to jump ship from AEW. Why would anybody agree to work with Vince McMahon and leave the “Ellis Island” of professional wrestling - particularly the guy who nicknamed it that?

So, when Cody claimed to be working without a contract in January 2022, nobody took him seriously. He was doing inscrutable, maniacal stuff every week as part of the ‘Codyverse’ on a weekly basis; his last, infamous promo just felt like an extension of a mysterious odyssey that nobody understood.

In that last promo, Cody basically built a feud with CM Punk that wasn’t in the plans. At all. He praised Punk and his comeback, but made sure to mention that he had in fact done everything that Punk had only fantasised about doing. This felt like a veiled message to Tony Khan driven by a fractured ego. Was Cody jealous about Punk’s top billing? Was he using his leverage for a new deal on live television? Or had he already left?

Cody has since explained to Sam Roberts that the promo was “selfish”, and he cut it to remind everybody of his importance to the company. But it gets wilder than that.

Cody has deemed it his “AEW exit interview”. He exited AEW, of course, to join WWE - which he indirectly buried twice. Even though he was going there (!).

First, he rubbished NXT as “developmental”, mocking its “hip toss class”, and then he mocked WWE’s practise of renaming wrestlers when saying Brody King had “balls” for not changing his own. “We’re not in the business of renaming people like Gunner McGillabuddy or whatever the hell it is,” Cody said, referencing Gunther.

He used Brodie Lee as a bridge to get to the TNT title, a match for which he was meant to be promoting, but not before suggesting that the contract for that match against Sammy Guevara was “maybe not the contract” he wanted. Did he want to leave? Had he left?

Perhaps this was the day Cody Rhodes was never less certain.

8. Sammy Guevara Demands Respect

Sammy Guevara has gifted AEW fans with many incredible moments, and he deserves far more credit for his ability to lay out a creative plunder match.

The problem with Guevara is twofold: he’s an exciting babyface wrestler with a heel’s charisma, and his foretold destiny as a future headliner means his midcard fate scans as an embarrassment. The slow-burn Guevara push, ultimately, was a noble failure. Frankly, at times, Guevara did himself no favours.

His dreadful edgelord pre-fame comments about Mercedes Mone suggested, at best, a total lack of maturity, and he lived down to his reputation time and time again. A mouthy drama addict, Guevara seemed cursed to simply never “get it”.

He really didn’t get it when he vowed to win the ‘Tournament of Champions’ booked to determine a new World champ in the wake of Brawl Out. You can sort of see where he was going with his bizarre rant on the September 13, 2022 Rampage. Guevara spoke of demanding respect. He was a day one AEW guy who wasn’t just there because he got fired from WWE, but he doesn’t even have an action figure. He was riffing on the state of AEW, turning heel on the promotion for failing him or whatever, but then he went a bit mental.

“And here I am, putting on five star matches! That I don’t even get recognition for! Huh Meltzer? Where’s my stars? You want to give stars to all your favourites, but where’s my stars?”

What.

The matches aren’t meant to be good! You’re just meant to win ‘em! And how did we reach a point at which a flippy guy, who actually had already received a ***** rating, is complaining about Dave Meltzer?!

This was the sort of incomprehensible nightmare that drives the protagonists in Lovecraft stories insane.

7. Jake Roberts Gets Sexual

It started very well for Jake Roberts in AEW.

His first promo, which he cut on Cody Rhodes on the Dynamite following Revolution 2020, was excellent episodic TV. Channelling the old sinister magic, Roberts talked about a secret client who was ready to annihilate Cody. This sparked intrigue, conversation, speculation - the exact sort of thing AEW is missing in 2025. Roberts continued to impress when narrating vignettes.

Archer quickly settled into a fun if familiar Monster of the Week arc. His aura drained away within months. Jake, meanwhile, wasn’t great in the live setting - and that’s because he kept saying a lot of odd sh*t.

At All Out 2020, Archer won a Casino Battle Royal held to determine the #1 contender to the AEW World title. This was built on Dynamite with various face-to-face confrontations between the bigger name wrestlers in it, and in one such segment, Archer and Roberts came out to compete in a pissing contest with Team Taz. It was cool to see a rare heel versus heel interaction - at least until it got distractingly, unintentionally funny.

“Let me tell you somethin’,” Roberts said. “You’re just a couple of squirrels trying to get a nut. Well, you’re not gonna bust a nut any time we’re in the ring. D’you see what I’m sayin’?”

Not really mate, no.

God knows what Jake was getting at here. He once compared successful crowd psychology to sexual intercourse, saying that a wrestler shouldn’t pop too early. Perhaps by “busting a nut”, what he really meant was “You won’t win in the end”. Or maybe he just wanted to make Archer corpse.

6. Hangman Page Goes Off Script

The term “scripted promo” is something of a misnomer, in that all promos are to some extent scripted. The wrestlers who aren’t under the direction of a creative writer nonetheless set out a plan for what they are going to say. They need to clear it or collaborate with their rival to avoid crossing any lines and to ensure, in the event of a face-to-face, that the responses make sense.

(When a wrestler does walk out there with no clear plan, even the best talkers ever get exposed. See: The Rock’s bizarre cameo appearance on NXT in January 2025).

According to CM Punk, Hangman Page did not do this during their company-defining feud of spring 2022. Page was under the impression that Punk enemy Colt Cobana’s demotion from his duties as a producer - and Punk friend Ace Steel’s new job as a producer - was no coincidence.

Even before the infamous “worker’s rights” line, Page’s demeanour was noticeably weird. With no context of the very real backstage problems that had yet to be reported, Page seemed inexplicably angry towards Punk, who was actually respectful in his generic “may the better man win”-style promos. In a promo cut before the face-to-face, Page said of his fellow babyface: “I’m going to destroy CM Punk!”

Why?

In the parameters of the story, Page’s fury scanned as insane. In their Double Or Nothing go-home face-to-face, Page said - to Punk’s bemusement and unshakeable anger - that while Punk talks a good game about worker’s rights, he’s shown the exact opposite since he’s been in AEW. Page said he wanted to save AEW from Punk; Punk could only quietly seethe in response.

At least until August…

5. CM Punk Issues A Receipt

On the August 17 Dynamite, CM Punk cut a promo.

He said he had some things to address; some important stuff, and some not-so important stuff. The not-so important stuff was a receipt issued to Hangman Page.

While Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful had reported on Cabana’s demotion and the resulting unrest, the backstage turmoil had yet to fully leak. So, when Punk addressed Page, under his gimmick name - “Hangman Adam Page…” - it felt like a storyline pivot. Perhaps the main event of All Out was going to be a three-way match for the AEW World title. If this all felt disconnected from AEW storylines, that’s because it was. Punk was shooting, and it made even less sense because the receipt was delayed by a few months; Punk was on the AEW injury list throughout a summer in which his mood darkened.

Punk offered Page a rematch, knowing full well that Page wasn’t going to answer it. It was not part of the show. Punk then said of Page’s failure to respond: “That’s not cowboy sh*t, that’s coward sh*t!”

Punk then said that “the apology should be as loud and as public as the disrespect”.

In the immediate aftermath of the show, Dave Meltzer revealed the missing context on Observer Radio, after which AEW was never again the same.

By 2024, the company-wide drama and disarray - folding in real backstage fights, soft brand splits, and Punk’s eventual firing - was so intense that Tony Khan resorted to booking multiple storylines premised on AEW “restoring the feeling”.

4. Jim Ross: Boomer Gooner!

Was Jim Ross ever really a great fit for AEW?

There’s no house style - Ross enthusiastically called the traditional U.S. fare of Cody Rhodes and the intense brawling of Jon Moxley - but the promotion does present a lot of warp-speed tag team and trios action, and Ross spent virtually all of those matches in a passive aggressive mood. Whenever he wondered aloud how the wrestlers had it in them to kick out time and time again, it was a rather unsubtle euphemism for “they’re doing way too much”. Ross, unhelpfully, would also actively berate the referees.

Ross was as good once as he ever was, but he sadly wasn’t that good that often. It’s always nice to hear him add the old gravitas to the few main events he is capable of calling these days, but no: Ross was never a great fit for AEW. He was either past his prime, or AEW should have listened to his barely-disguised complaints. A combination of the two, perhaps.

Please don’t confuse this with “Vince McMahon was right to treat Ross in the manner he did”. McMahon’s bullying of Ross was despicable and totally unjustified. At the same time, in AEW, Ross could have done with a few stern words in his ear.

On the February 26, 2020 Dynamite, AEW held an official “weigh-in” for the upcoming World title match between Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley at Revolution. Boxing-style “ring girls” were introduced as part of the ceremony; international viewers on the Fite feed heard a presumably horny Ross mutter “Holy sh*t, look at that” when Ross spotted one such talent walking to the ring. This prehistoric gooning was a longstanding problem.

At All Out 2020, Ross asked “Did Anna Jay have a wardrobe malfunction, or is that just wishful thinking in my book?”

He objectified Jay like a total creep. Anna was just 22 years old at the time. While Ross apologised for his comment, he didn’t entirely learn his lesson: he said “I don’t know, I kinda like ‘em” when Tony Schiavone, actually doing his job, was trying to get the Bunny and Penelope Ford over as heels on Rampage back in 2022.

3. Toni Storm (General)

This list could be composed entirely of Toni Storm quotes.

Since turning into a sex-crazed film starlet, the ‘Whore You All Adore’, Storm, with her love of innuendo, gets off an incredibly filthy quote so often, she comes out with one every week. These things just gush out of her all the time, it’s remarkable. It should come as no surprise; she’s all the way into her character. She never slips out of it, even when she’s doing fan conventions and the like.

She once threatened to sock Deonna Purrazzo in that “box of hers”. When met with the challenge of Anna Jay, Storm promised to “clap those cheeks all the way back to Georgia”.

Storm is so great that she can put over her opponents and ridicule beloved commentators in the same, foul-mouthed quote. On Kris Statlander, Toni Storm put over her ability to execute deadly power moves: “You know, the last time I faced Kris Statlander, she dropped me on my head and I lost three inches - but then I saw Mr. Schiavone and got it right back”. (When she can actually focus and stop fixating on the “juicy muscles” of the women in the ring, she’s really great at commentary.)

While this technically wasn’t said on AEW TV - she was doing a date in STARDOM - Toni “revealed” that Stan Hansen once gave her a lariat, “but not with his arm”. What an incredible mental image she conjured here.

Basically, anything that comes out of Toni Storm’s mouth is eligible for inclusion. So much of it is beyond the pale - so much so that it’s bloody translucent.

2. Tony Schiavone Will Not Tolerate Mariah May

While the “avuncular legend gets back into wrestling through AEW’s awesomeness” bit has played itself out, Tony Schiavone is one of the best signings AEW has ever made. Soul, enthusiasm, wit, credibility, charm: it would be easier to list the that which Schiavone hasn’t added to AEW, and his velvet-smooth voice remains such a pleasure to listen to.

He’s excellent at remaining impartial, because he’s wise and clever enough to grasp that it means something when he gets candid about a particularly loathsome character. His early aversion to MJF was fantastic; Schiavone was nice or neutral or played devil’s advocate about everybody else, which portrayed MJF as an exceptionally monstrous young man.

Schiavone’s association with Britt Baker was TV gold. At first, Baker was relentlessly awful to Schiavone, who she enjoyed tormenting. Then, they entered into a strange friendship. This was amazing; before it turned into something quite genuine and lovely, Baker basically kept Tony around as her gopher. Schiavone eventually plucking up the courage to say “Sometimes she can be a real bitch” was a fantastic line even better for its timidity.

This careful, disciplined approach to speaking his mind was used to sensational effect when Mariah May turned heel on Toni Storm in one of the very best angles in modern wrestling history.

Brilliantly, Tony didn’t even bother waiting for May to explain her actions when she cut a promo the following week; he had seen enough, and as Mariah gloated to the crowd, Schiavone said “Speak bitch, come on now”.

1. Jeff Jarrett Wigs Out

It’s not clear what the endgame was to the MJF Vs. Jeff Jarrett saga of January 2025 to January 2025.

Was Jeff Jarrett actually going to win the AEW World title? Or at least fail valiantly in the pursuit before saying goodbye to the sport? Or was it just a way of building to a big match against MJF, who was bound to screw him, on PPV?

Who knows, because Jeff Jarrett lost his damn mind before we could find out.

Jarrett and MJF held a verbal face-to-face on the January 15 Dynamite. MJF did his usual schtick; clad in a blue blazer, he tried to get a rise out of Jarrett by reminding him of his substance abuse battles. It was fairly standard. You know the drill. MJF talks some trash, babyface responds by calling his mom and fiancee a trollop.

Actually, what?

The key line in Jeff Jarrett’s promo was “I was you before you were you”. This premise was flawed to begin with. Fans never saw Jarrett as line-stepping evil little monster; he was more notorious for being a Triple H-lite politician. This line didn’t generate any kind of reaction. Nobody believed it. Which made what followed really excruciating, but there was no going back.

Jarrett’s big idea here was to out-MJF MJF - a bizarre choice, since AEW had attempted to cast him as an ageing, soulful warhorse.

Jarrett said he felt sorry for MJF, because it must have been tough being raised by a call girl mother. Jarrett - and his delivery was horrendous - said MJF’s “old lady” was a “Canadian call girl” who, Jarrett claimed, had a gangbang with 10 other wrestlers in the parking lot.

This was unfathomably weird. Don Callis would have played a better babyface.