MJF's Misguided Pipebomb Attempt
I don’t want to write too much about AEW because I generally don’t like it and think there’s already too much hate-watching in the wrestling community. But there’s one guy in the company I try to keep up with each week: MJF is one of the best young stars in wrestling, and one of the few people in the company who I think understands how the business actually works. He was in the news this last weekend for potentially no-showing their Double or Nothing PPV event due to conflicts with AEW owner Tony Khan over his contract, and has been making blatant overtures about going to WWE in a couple years, which has toed the line between seemingly real gripes and in-character heel work towards AEW’s anti-WWE audience. One of the appeals with MJF is that he’s always on, and so the company tried to capitalize on the situation with a big promo on last night’s Dynamite that got everyone talking.
This is the classic “worked shoot” in wrestling terms, where MJF is laying out his thought to be real issues with Tony Khan and the company in a promo, leaving fans wondering what is real and what is fiction. This sort of blurring of the lines can have its place in wrestling, and it particularly will almost always get the hardcore fans clapping like seals when they understand all the references and feel like they’re watching something that isn’t supposed to be happening. But it also comes with a lot of risks: the history of wrestling is littered with lame promos where wrestlers call each other by their real names or call out the booker and they often collapse the narrative structure of the show on itself by breaking basic storytelling rules.
When I did creative writing in college, I was a big fan of doing meta stories that played with narrative structures and referenced other works, usually because I couldn’t come up with any original ideas. These worked shoots feel like they come from a similar place. There is an element of cowardice to them, where it’s like the talents don’t have faith in their ability to tell an interesting story within the rules they’ve created, so instead resort to edgy comments that make fans go “oooohhhhh” in the moment but on further reflection don’t actually make sense or progress a story. That’s what this promo felt like to me: MJF has done some great stuff in the past year when he was simply a very effective pro wrestling heel, but this was bad and I suspect will end up being one of the most overrated wrestling segments of the last several years.
The obvious reference point for this promo is CM Punk’s infamous “pipebomb” from 2011, when he “broke the fourth wall” while calling out John Cena. I was the stereotypical young male fan who was sick of Cena at the time, so I was right there with everyone else who got sucked in by that promo and the “wow, he went there” nature of it. But what really stood out about CM Punk’s promo is how in the end it came around to using basic pro wrestling psychology. Underneath all the shocking lines about Vince, the references to other companies, and the frank talks about WWE as a business, Punk laid out a case for why he felt he was the best wrestler who deserved to be at the top of the company. It made many fans want to see Punk beat Cena in a wrestling match to prove it, and that came to fruition at the next pay-per-view when they had a classic match with a Chicago crowd that desperately wanted Punk to win. As meta as that promo was, in its own way it was a typical wrestling story that positioned Punk as an anti-hero protagonist who fans rallied behind, leading to investment in his matches.
That’s the major contrast to this MJF promo, and why it ultimately doesn’t work for me. He is going off on the owner, Tony Khan, who is not even an on-screen character, referencing this contract dispute that has not been talked about much on their television show at all. MJF talks about how he “doesn’t drop guys on their necks,” bragging about how he’s a safe, well-trained worker, which makes no sense if this is actually a show where guys are fighting each other and trying to win matches. MJF’s shots at Tony for paying ex-WWE guys instead of him are fine, but I also suspect a lot of AEW fans are nodding along with that part (evidenced by the fan reaction), so it’s not really getting him any heel heat. Then the conclusion is MJF begging Tony to fire him because he doesn’t want to be in AEW anymore, and he calls Tony “a fucking mark” at which point his mic is cut. CM Punk, while bashing WWE in his promo, made it clear that it was because he felt he should be the guy on the top who was in the promotion’s marketing rather than Cena. MJF says he doesn’t even want to be in AEW, and his only beef is with a non-wrestler who is barely on TV, so what exactly are fans supposed to want to see happen with him in an AEW ring?
It’s possible this is the first chapter in a huge story that will totally make sense at the end, though that still wouldn’t excuse how blatantly the promo talks about wrestling in fake, insider terms. I’m not buying that anyways, though, and I suspect this is a typical AEW thing: they want to recreate a special moment from wrestling’s past, and rather than think through the psychology and context that made it resonate, they’ve done a surface-level imitation that gets fans oohing and aahing and going “what an amazing promo,” but ultimately it can’t lead to a payoff like Punk’s did because none of it makes sense or builds to anything in-ring (unless Tony Khan is going to wrestle, which I actually would pay to see). In fact, this promo if anything seems to have muddied the waters of AEW, where many fans now are liking MJF while seeing the company in a heel context similar to WWE’s played-out evil authority angles.
Nothing can be taken away from MJF’s delivery, and it’s easy to see why people think this promo was great because of how he says it and his conviction. That makes it more frustrating to me that he’s chosen to go this meta worked-shoot route instead of telling a normal wrestling story that maybe makes some allusions to these backstage issues without completely blowing up the foundation of the show. Ironically, while MJF rags on the untrained indie guys who do flips, this felt like the promo version of that kind of style-over-substance “this is awesome” wrestling — without the logic of building up a pro wrestling match guiding it, this promo was more like a collection of buzzwords and zingers that ultimately meant nothing.