3. Racist Stereotypes Make You Laugh In Spite Of Yourself, And Laughter Is A Sign Of Good Entertainment
So much of WWE is about the wrestling itself being the least important piece of the company's overall corporate profile. Without stereotypes, WWE would ultimately be a wrestling-first product. While the idea of a wrestling show without characters portraying stereotypes has a certain appeal to a certain demographic, WWE stopped being just another wrestling company somewhere around the moment that Hulk Hogan's Rock n Wrestling became a Saturday morning kids' TV program on the CBS network in 1985. The second that a beef between Hulk Hogan and The Iron Sheik could be portrayed as wacky comic hijinks for six-year olds, it's arguable that the then WWF had completely moved into the world of groan-inducing humor in the midst of headlocks and armdrags. Between the 2006 portrayal of platinum grill-wearing tag team Cryme Tyme being all about that "money money, yeah yeah," to Abraham Washington and the Prime Time Players wanting to make "millions of dollars," tired and repetitive stereotyping does little more than pigeonhole a character and induce something between a mild chuckle, or a stare of complete bewilderment that occurs a second prior to bitterly laughing instead of crying. With a similar corollary now able to be made between Big E's recent turn to speaking like a Baptist minister in his promos and Slick's turn from being a pimp into being a "Reverend" in 1991, WWE's desire to include racial stereotyping as a major piece of what has been a now three-decade commitment to terrible humor as "entertainment" is deplorable. Abject racism equaling "big laughs" is unfortunate and a quite telling statement not just about WWE, but ultimately also about the nature of mainstream America's willingness to seriously accept the progressions made by ethnic and cultural minorities. Even more damning? The fact that residents of the 180+ countries worldwide with WWE access are unfortunately willing to accept this as entertaining, too.
Besides having been an independent professional wrestling manager for a decade, Marcus Dowling is a Washington, DC-based writer who has contributed to a plethora of online and print magazines and newspapers writing about music and popular culture over the past 15 years.
