The WORST Wrestling Moment Every Year (1989 - 2025)
31. 1995 | The Flatulent Clown
1995 WWF was terrible.
Immune even from the vast power of nostalgia, beyond some timeless bangers, it’s as awful to revisit as it was to endure at the time. It’s bleak, small fry, unfashionable. It’s a dying glorified regional promotion that by default is #1 stateside and in Europe because Vince McMahon killed everything else. Everytime you go back and see it, the lack of scale is astonishing. It looks absolutely pitiful. The two years either side of ‘95 were, variously, excellent in the ring and or creatively adventurous and exciting. 1995 deserved those TNA-sized high school gym crowds because it was neither.
Doink the Clown did not define 1995, but he was as good an emblematic mascot as anything else. Long removed from the sinister heel originally and brilliantly portrayed by Matt Borne, babyface Doink was ironic, in that the prankster was himself a joke. Doink was used more sparingly, as an enhancement talent, but the few times he was on the winning end of things about summed the WWF up.
The character, already lamentable, reached a nadir in 1995, when a certain sound effect accompanied his Whoopee Cushion finisher.
“The stupid clown isn’t getting over.”
“No, he isn’t. Perhaps we should experiment creatively, perhaps by promoting realistic characters more attuned to the cultural zeitgeist and booking more outrageous angles designed to make best use of the episodic TV format.”
“No. The clown should fart.”
“Masterful gambit, sir.”