Silly Little Guys Who Didn't Belong In WWE ?

Turning funny into money - the most unlikely and WEIRD Superstars in WWE history.

Ronnie Garvin
WWE

There's a big movement building around wrestling not being serious enough at present.

The tide has turned on MJF and Adam Cole's extended bromance, and the thinkpieces are coming armed with ticket statistics that might - might - reveal some home truths. After All In and Grand Slam ended with handshakes and hugs and the 'Salt Of The Earth' moved deeper into comedy with his injured tag partner (and his "injured" partner Roderick Strong), the knives and the jury were out on the AEW Champion's entire title run.

There's no easy or objective answer to any of this, but part of the debate completely discounts how fun some of wrestling's stranger characters and storylines have been in the past. It's an odd industry; so odd that even the market leader in all of its insanity doesn't feel like the perfect fit for some of the talent that travel through it.

Buried within the bowels of WWE's history sit a selection of silly and/or little guys who couldn't have matched their surroundings any less. About as far away from the polymath Maxwell Jacob Friedman as it was possible to get, these weren't better than you...and you knew it.

10. Johnny Saint

Ronnie Garvin
WWE.com

Perhaps it's cruel to single out the elder statesmen of the already-forgotten NXT UK brand rather than highlighting the silliest of the silly little guys on that roster, but Johnny Saint was perhaps most representative of how silly and little the whole project was.

Any wrestlers and/or gimmicks that didn't feel particularly TV-ready - and there were plenty of them - were like that because they weren't TV-ready.

The entire idea was hurried into existence when World Of Sport dared to get a few hours on ITV in the UK, and the brand itself only existed to make good on a doomed promise about further elevating a then-booming scene. It was all a facade, broadly serving the purpose of creaming a little bit off the top of a diluted market before the pandemic and SpeakingOut were the two biggest of several final nails.

WWE trying to make a WWE-adjacent show out of all these decidedly non-WWE properties was silly. Making Johnny Saint the "tonight in this very ring" authority figure (because god forbid a show not have one of those) was silliest of all.

Contributor
Contributor

Michael is a writer, editor, podcaster and presenter for WhatCulture Wrestling, and has been with the organisation nearly 8 years. He primarily produces written, audio and video content on WWE and AEW, but also provides knowledge and insights on all aspects of the wrestling industry thanks to a passion for it dating back over 35 years. As one third of "The Dadley Boyz" Michael has contributed to the huge rise in popularity of the WhatCulture Wrestling Podcast and its accompanying YouTube channel, earning it top spot in the UK's wrestling podcast charts with well over 62,000,000 total downloads. He has been featured as a wrestling analyst for the Tampa Bay Times, GRAPPL, GCP, Poisonrana and Sports Guys Talking Wrestling, and has covered milestone events in New York, Dallas, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, London and Cardiff. Michael's background in media stretches beyond wrestling coverage, with a degree in Journalism from the University Of Sunderland (2:1) and a series of published articles in sports, music and culture magazines The Crack, A Love Supreme and Pilot. When not offering his voice up for daily wrestling podcasts, he can be found losing it singing far too loud watching his favourite bands play live. Follow him on X/Twitter - @MichaelHamflett