ahem
I would like your attention while I say one of the least controversial statements anyone has ever made.
R-Truth is a national treasure.
There. I said it. Opposite eviscerate me in the comments. Stuff more guts in my belly!
Comedy acts have been an extremely important part of professional wrestling since its inception. I was always taught the major American art forms came from the great American art of the traveling vaudeville show: Stand-up; Movies; Professional wrestling.
Sure, if you trace anything far enough back, it goes back to an ancient form of this-that-or-the-other-thing. But it was vaudeville sideshows that made those artforms what they are to this day. Once the traveling sideshows got ahold of meaty men slapping meat, they had to add pathos. Otherwise, just go watch Greco-Roman wrestling.
RAW is three hours. If that were three hours of “Bizarro Gerard Way growls at Hipster Randy Savage while people cheer,” that would…I would not watch that.
Throw in a “Tom & Nick Mysterio” here and there, and you’ve got yourself a quality product right there.
With Alpha Academy getting sidelined, Shinsuke getting turned into Anime villain Wile E. Coyote, and the rest of the comedy roster released a couple of months ago, let us all stand, and give a cheer for R-Truth!
Postscript!
In the first draft of the above, I went on a long diatribe about how great Too Cool/Rikishi were back in 2000. It detracted from the point. It was meant to support the “comedy acts are necessary” argument. But, instead, I just cut it out, pasted it down here, and rephrased.
Here we go:
The 2000 Royal Rumble, the PPV, was awesome. One problem: The Rumble, itself, was set up to be a snoozefest after Cactus Jack and Triple H tried to murder each other for an hour. So, what do they do?
Well, Too Cool was too cool in the year 2000. My wife wrote that. She’s very clever. It makes me jealous sometimes.
They had Too Cool dance.
Grand Master Sexay was number 2 in the main event. Rikishi came in at number five and cleared the ring of all the jabronis other than his friend. As we all know, the Royal Rumble is “every man or woman for themselves,” so things looked bad for Brian Christopher.
Then, the Too Cool music hit. Out comes Scotty Too Hotty with the magical yellow sunglasses.
That’s all Rikishi needed for the spell to overtake them. In what is, arguably, the second biggest match of the year after the ‘Mania main event (Maineventia, I like to call it), three cool dudes just danced for a while. Six months earlier, they barely qualified for time on Sunday Night Heat.
Featured image: The arm of Jake Young.
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