>>12761560I think he tried very well and some of the intentions behind his act are quite good, especially the idea of getting the most quaint of moves over, but it obviously suffers from being too silly for a long term main event run, and most of all it just enabled his worst impulses as a performer. He was already coming across like a parody of a heel, but now he completed the circle and posited himself as a parody of a wrestler, because he wraps his schtick under so many layers of references and irony that whatever story he's delivering loses all stakes and prevents it from being anything more than a ''haha ya sure are a fan of wrestling!''. A storyline with Joe or Jay that directly tackled his status as the face of playdoh wrestling archetypes would have been great, but all we ended up getting was more asinine BS. It's not that he's phony per se, but that he tries so hard to tick all the supposed right boxes that you can only perceive him as an insecure guy, which hurts him even more now as a babyface than as a heel. The crowds playing along with the joke as opposed to being truly invested doesn't help, since it fuels their conviction that what they're presenting here is genius-level stuff.
