This is a commentary on the Christmas Day edition (12/25/2025) of the Thursday Dynamite Review by Joe Lanza. I’m only commenting on the monologue, specifically the part about MJF’s return and the AEW fans. A summary of that section is below:
Lanza talks about MJF beginning his segment and getting his comeuppance. He recounts MJF winning a squash and then being confronted by Page and Swerve. He then says “Wouldn’t you know it?” and saying that obviously things turned out as they did, with Page running MJF down for being an asshole. Lanza says MJF is supposed to be an uncouth piece of garbage to set up the babyface, Page, to set him straight so people can rally around the babyface and hate the heel. Sarcastically says that “this must be wild for some of you but that is the point”. Lanza says he’s tired of the MJF debates, says there’s a distinction between being tired of the schtick and being offended. Lanza says he can’t understand that people are truly offended by MJF’s schtick. He calls MJF an edgelord heel. Lanza says he isn’t tired of MJF personally, and says edgelord MJF is way better than brochacho MJF. He asks if people treat MJF any different than other fictional characters. He says MJF is tame by fictional bad guy standards, calling him a cartoon character. Lanza wonders if people who are offended also get offended at movies or books when the bad guys act badly. Lanza says he doesn’t get the difference between those kinds of fictional characters and the cartoonish world of pro wrestling. He reiterates that everything MJF says and does eventually leads to comeuppance. Lanza says that Page expressed a lot of people’s criticisms of MJF within the kayfabe. Lanza says that people are being worked, MJF got them. Lanza says that the point is that MJF is trying to get people to rally around the face. Lanza says that people want heels that they can nod along with and “boo with a smile”. Lanza says he doesn’t want that, he wants heels that he can “boo with a scowl”. He says a lot of people want heels like Dom Mysterio who aren’t really hated. He says that this is a way that pro wrestling has changed, fans don’t like real heat. He points to MJF as a sign of that. He again separates being offended from being tired of MJF. Lanza says he couldn’t imagine the reactions if he was truly doing edgelord material. He says that people flipped out because MJF brought up titty. He says that AEW has cultivated this attitude in part. He doesn’t know if these fans are the majority of the fans or anything (who are offended). He says that in actuality MJF isn’t getting enough heat, people really like him too much. He blames this partly on the style of promotion that AEW is. He says FTR and Don Callis come close, largely a tongue-in-cheek promotion. He says that fans can’t handle how edgy MJF is. Lanza says that it’s a confusing attitude, doesn’t understand how those fans consume fictional media.
I’m going to give some caveats which will, to a lot of people, make this commentary untenable. That’s okay. I’m gonna post this publicly but I’m not writing it for you, I’m writing it for me. However, since I am going to make it public, I’ll give the caveats anyway.
I’m not really watching wrestling these days. I am not even following through podcasts as much as I used to. The comment I give on Lanza’s monologue isn’t going to be extremely informed by this particular case because I just wasn’t watching at the time. I haven’t gone back to see the episode either; I know what MJF is like and I’m not going to talk about the particulars here. I did take a quick google to see if there was much support for Lanza’s assertion that people were saying that they were offended. I didn’t find anything like that. I’m not saying people weren’t talking about being offended, but I didn’t find any evidence of it to work off of.
Why, then, am I making a commentary on Lanza’s commentary? It’s partly because I want to respond to the general idea that fans now are too soft for MJF’s type of material and partly because I’ve recently written a piece about circles of belief which I feel can be applied here.
Lanza’s got a lot more history going to shows, researching wrestling, and writing about wrestling than I do. I would not even try to match up our knowledge of material. I have read a good deal of wrestling history, however, and one thing that sticks out to me about it is that people didn’t buy into wrestling. We have this imagination that people in the past truly “hated the heels”, that there is such a thing as “real heat” where people “actually” didn’t like the wrestling bad guys. I will quote from Lou Thesz’s Hooker, and remember, he’s talking about wrestling in the 1920s and 1930s: “I was only a kid, but I had absolutely no illusions by then about the reality of pro wrestling.”; “I didn’t know the name for it, but it was obvious to me at an early age that they were performing their matches. Anyone who had amateur experience could see it.”; “I had come to look upon the matches as entertainment, not sport, and I enjoyed them for what they were. A lot of other regular fans had the same attitude, so it wasn’t like someone was swindling us out of our money.” These quotes can be found in Chapter 2 of the book. The idea that there were a lot of fans who thought everything was real just doesn’t hold up to looking through newspapers etc. from the time. There was always skepticism about pro wrestling, there were always questions about it.
Now, I will say that Thesz also said the following somewhat earlier: “By the time I was a teenager and wrestling professionally myself, I had learned one of the ironic truths about the business: The heroic good guy in the ring was often a jerk, while the villain was a great guy.” That shows that there is an aspect of the performance that does work, that not everyone is fully skeptical. But the point remains that the idea of “real heat” is overblown; even though there’s some aspect of performance, we all know people who act like angels in one context and devils in another. It just isn’t the case that people in the past didn’t know what was happening and got drawn in to hate fictional characters without their knowledge. Everyone was knowingly participating in the fiction being presented.
Am I saying that riots never happened, that people never got threatened, etc.? No, obviously not. But “lead in the gasoline” is a meme at this point. We know that all sorts of criminality used to be much higher than they are now. Fighting in general was probably more common. We shouldn’t jump to the idea that people were uniquely riled up by wrestlers that made them do things like stab out tires etc. Firstly, it’s not as if nobody’s doing that anymore, people still slash tires out there. Secondly, we could just assume that people got drunk or got too amped up and decided to go further than they should have. You don’t have to assume that they “really hated” the heel in a way that is greater than what heels today get.
My point in bringing that up is just to lower the expectations around “heel heat”. Obviously, if you can maximize it you should do so, but we can’t always be comparing heat responses of now with heat responses we kind of remember in the past. There’s never in my lifetime been a “truly hated” heel, not one who actually works shows. I don’t think it’s fair to say that wrestlers now need to hit some mythical level of heat for the amount of heat they draw to be legitimate. In the context of MJF, it means that we shouldn’t think that there’s another level of heat he could be hitting if only he was less restrained, which is kind of what Lanza implies when he says that MJF isn’t even as edgy as other fictional characters.
There is a conversation about power dynamics between promoters and audiences which could be had here, promoters feeling as though they could simply present whatever (e.g. Ron White), but I’m just going to drop it for now; it’s not what I was originally going to talk about but I think it does merit some kind of look at a later point. Power dynamics would be the easy way to argue this, but the argument I actually want to make is around craft.
I see Lanza as making two basic points: first, MJF’s comments shouldn’t be seen as offensive because he’s a fictional character; second, that fans today can’t handle true heat. It might seem like I’ve dealt with the second part but I haven’t, not fully. Let’s start with the fictional character bit, though.
The first thing I have to say is this: Lanza, you gotta consider that you’re more detached than other people.
When you say that you don’t get how people can be “like this” about MJF, what do you mean? What about Disney adults? What about Marvel nerds? Again, knowing the history of fiction also involves knowing that people actually do get incredibly attached to fictional characters, and they do react badly when a character acts the way that they don’t want. So if your argument rests on people having a hard line between the morality they expect from real people and that they expect from fiction, it’s a losing argument because a lot of people actually don’t expect different things. A lot of people do directly moralize, and more than you would think stop watching shows because people did something “immoral” and so on. So from the jump, the idea that people are reacting to MJF in a way that they wouldn’t react to another character is flawed. Am I saying that’s a healthy way to act? No, I think people should be a little more detached than your stereotypical Disney adult. But it’s how people actually are.
Further, pro wrestling characters are actually not like other fictional characters. The fourth wall does not exist in pro wrestling. As a concept, the “fourth wall” is not just a phrase for the separation between audience and players. It’s a true metaphysical barrier, in the sense that those inside the four walls (i.e. on the stage) are completely unaware of the audience. Of course, plays experiment with this barrier, they “break the fourth wall”, but such a break is only possible because the wall exists. Pro wrestling, on the other hand, doesn’t break the fourth wall; like I said, there just isn’t a fourth wall. That makes pro wrestling characters interact with the audience in a way which is not similar to traditional theater, movies, or even printed fiction like novels and comic books.
A pro wrestling character is actual in a way that fictional characters of other types are not. Being a pro wrestler exists somewhere between going up on stage as an actor and going out on a street corner dressed in a wacky costume. As an actor, what you are doing when you play a character is you are acting as a character. As a pro wrestler, what you are doing is being a character. In your head, as you go out on the street corner in your costume, you might say to yourself “I’m just joking around, I’m doing a prank”, but not everybody gets that. It’s up to the person who sees you to decide what you are doing. Some people might just decide that you’re out of your mind. Some people might see you as worth pity. Some people might laugh at you for those first reasons. Some might see that you are doing comedy and laugh with you. You don’t have control of that, and not just because you’re not in a theater; it’s also because you haven’t constructed that fourth wall which separates you from the audience.
I feel like kayfabe is often presented as protecting people from the fiction of pro wrestling; people didn’t know it was fake and kayfabe prevented them from figuring it out. But I think it’s actually the other way around: kayfabe constructed the fiction of pro wrestling. It was an attempt to create a fourth wall in a medium where it structurally couldn’t exist. Exactly why it can’t exist is something that should be examined by a thinker who is more familiar with theater, not simply traditional theater but non-traditional/non-Western theaters with different setups. But the basic fact that the fourth wall doesn’t exist in wrestling can be demonstrated by a simple observation: it is never possible for a wrestler to simply “play a different role” unless an extreme effort is undertaken to disguise their identity; changes of attire, name, attitude, etc. always get mashed into a single continuous identity for a wrestler, rather than being broken up by promotion, era, etc.
I think kayfabe helped to make pro wrestling more attractive to people by cutting down on dissonances they would feel in watching wrestling, but I don’t think it made heat hotter, so to speak. At the end of the day, as Thesz gives a hint of, it just isn’t the case that people were going into arenas and being fooled in large numbers. You can figure out that wrestling is fake just by watching wrestling. Try to do a straight-legged vertical suplex on somebody who doesn’t want you to. You’ll never accomplish it. Why would you stick your legs straight up, anyway? Why would you keep running into the ropes after someone pulls on your arm, and why would you bounce off 70+% of the time rather than holding on? Once you know that wrestling is fake, the idea that you continue to have some notion of hating the guys in the ring becomes ludicrous. Even if, like Thesz said, you were surprised to learn that a lot of “bad guys” were actually nice, you would still understand that a great deal of what they were doing in and around the ring was for show.
Lanza partly hits on why people get particularly offended about MJF: they like him. They don’t want to believe that MJF is a bad person and they don’t make the kind of clean distinction between “actual person” and “wrestling character” that Lanza would like them to. Like I’ve just explained, it isn’t as natural as we might expect for people to make that kind of distinction, and this is even more difficult in a situation like wrestling where there is no clear barrier between the fictive and the “true”. However I think Lanza misses the mark when he suggests that fans now want to boo with a smile.
I’ve talked about this a bit already as I tried to lay out how the idea that fans of earlier eras weren’t booing with a smile is overblown. They understood that they were watching a show and they were bought in to the show. We shouldn’t see fans acting out as them not understanding that it’s fiction but as them being extremely engaged with the fiction to the point of direct participation. I don’t think it is correct to imply that people need to be goaded more, to be given more things they dislike as a way to increase heat. Pouring gas on the fire can definitely work, but it can also backfire. My point isn’t to advocate for a particular method but to challenge the idea that a report of fans throwing batteries etc. means that people in the past were necessarily more riled-up than people nowadays. In fact, you could make an argument that the way people reportedly acted out in the past shows they were less tolerant of what they were being shown than fans now are; again, this discussion needs power dynamics to be brought in, so we’ll skip it for now.
What I do want to point out is one of the glaring contradictions I see with Lanza’s position. To be clear, this isn’t a new position; the reason I’ve got so much to say about this is because it’s been expressed before and by people other than Lanza. But they always bring up the same contradiction: as Lanza points out, people who are mad at MJF “got worked”, which is what Lanza wants to see… so why is Lanza mad about it? If the heat worked and people are “legit” mad about what MJF said, why is Lanza then mad that people are mad? Surely this is what Lanza wants out of heels: for them to get people worked up. Well, mission accomplished! But Lanza frames it as a bad thing that these particular people got worked.
I think this comes down to the circles of belief as I talked about in the other blog. We all know that for the usual kayfabe-style heel-face dynamics to work, we have to sort of imagine a person who is actually out there believing everything, someone who is actually getting worked. But it seems like Lanza is kind of offended that this true believer actually does exist to some extent. Again, I want to point out that I couldn’t find any actual pieces that were offended at MJF’s return segment, so I can’t verify this, but it seems plausible that Lanza is mad primarily at fellow commenters and “people who should know better” who express this take and not necessarily that it’s everyone. On the other hand, Lanza doesn’t really show any mercy to the AEW fanbase as a whole, saying that they can’t handle it even as he notes that a lot of people seem not to be mad in the buildings.
Some people are just caught up in the flows. Some people get worked by MJF’s crassness and his cheap provocations and that’s okay. Like Lanza said, that’s the point. But I think other people, including Lanza, need to take a step back when coming at this particular conversation. At the base, you can’t want people to get worked and then get mad at them for getting worked. That’s crazy. If a heel is gonna be hated, then surely someone has to hate them, right? You can’t want a heel to be hated and then get mad that people hate the heel. What did you want to happen, then?
Of course, it doesn’t have to be the case that this true believer actually exists. But what are we talking about, then? Fully ironic wrestling? No, these exact people who are in chatrooms or on forums or writing articles, that’s who you want to get worked, isn’t it? Because those are the people who are spreading the message. And the more those people who really got worked get in their feelings, the more they vent, the more hated the heel becomes, which is better, isn’t it? So it’s one of those things where, if this is a coded message to people in Lanza’s phone, then hopefully they take it; but as wider analysis, I don’t find this point of view to be very strong and I never have.
There is something to be said about a heel driving fans away and thereby driving down revenue, but as Lanza also points out, that’s the point of the babyface. You’re supposed to get everyone to rally around the babyface in order to take down the heel. That’s where your revenue will come from. So it shouldn’t matter how mad people get at MJF, as long as they are still fans of Page or Swerve, there shouldn’t be a major disturbance.
To sum it all up, I don’t think AEW fans are softer than earlier fans, nor do I think people complaining about MJF’s return is a problem. What would heat be if people didn’t get upset about it?