WWE Gimmicks Explained - Doink The Clown

At the time the company would still run multiple house shows on the same night and on occasion, whilst Borne was hamming it up as the clown in one town, Steve Keirn would be doing the same in another. Then if media appearances were required, Steve Lombardi - yep, the Brooklyn Brawler - would don the face paint. Basically, if you went to a WWF event in the early 90s and saw Doink, you might not really have seen Doink.

This gave Vince McMahon, in his mind, carte blacnhe to do whatever he wanted with the character. So, when Borne was fired for re-occurring drug abuses, he just handed the gimmick Ray Licameli, gave him a new sidekick Dink, and turned him into a comic relief character. His entire schtick became pulling pranks on other wrestlers, and then getting beat a lot.

Unsurprisingly, this wore very thin, very quickly, and in the space of a few short years (and with the company hurtling unstoppably towards the Attitude Era), Doink was merely a worn-out product of a different age. At the 1997 Slammy Awards, Doink was on the receiving end of a Stone Cold Stunner, the crowd chanted "kill the clown", and he was gone not long after.

He bounced around the territories for a while, appeared in ECW, and even made a few short-lived returns to the WWF, but Doink's gloried days were long since over by this point. Over the next 25 or so years Eugene, Jeff Jarrett, The Bushwackers and Chris Jericho would all dress up as Doink for one reason or another, but the glory days of that early 90's Doink were just never captured again.

Interesting really that both of the company's clown-inspired characters have come along immediately following an IT movie, although how much similarity you'd draw between the work of Wyatt and Borne is another conversation entirely.