Let's get RAW

-Last week, a couple friends called to ask if I wanted to go to a taping of WWE's Monday Night Raw. I wasn't sold on it at first, because I hadn't watched since my sophomore year in college, before the World Wildlife Fund stripped the WWF of its name. I don't understand that. Who would get the two confused. Someone thinks they have tickets to Wrestlemania. They show up at the venue. It's the other WWF. So what. They still get to watch pandas and monkeys race on unicycles. Who's losing there? No one.

I didn't want to go at first because I hadn't seen it in so long. I thought I wouldn't know any of the characters, and the storylines would be even more ridiculous. But then I stumbled upon Gene Shallot's review of this year's Survivor Series... “Best show of the year... for a moment I thought I was watching O'Neill's “The Iceman Cometh.” I was sold.

The taping was this past Monday, and my hesitance was warranted. It was nothing like it used to be. What was different? Oh, I'll tell you...

-Ric Flair is 62 years old and still wrestling. When I used to watch, he was only 54.

-Shawn Michaels is the most popular wrestler. The last time I watched, he was reduced to a speaking role, because the diagnosis was that if he wrestled again, he could die, due to having 4 vertebrae fused together. Danger... watch yo'self.

-Hacksaw Jim Duggan is wrestling in the WWE. When I watched in 2000, he'd been retired for about 6 years. What is going on? Did they get the Karl Pilkington anti-aging shot? That's a reference to the Ricky Gervais Podcast. Get it from iTunes.

-In probably the most disturbing trend... I remember a day when only the wrestlers carried championship belts. Now, literally one in every 10 people carried a championship belt. I don't now why. I'm not sure what they thought it accomplished, other than looking like they're a little too into it. That's like wearing pads to a football game or a cape to a magic show. When I was standing in line to spend $20 on chicken strips and a Coke, there were 11 people in front of me. Eight of them were wearing belts. I tried taking a picture with my phone, but their backs were facing me, so you couldn't get the full effect. My friend told me he saw a guy wearing three belts. Who's going to believe someone won three belts? That's ludicrous.

One of my friends owns one of the belts, but he only drapes it over his shoulder when playing Madden. So, that seems very normal after going to this show.

-In the eighties, the WWF paralleled the Cold War. But not in a realistic way. Not even in a Rocky IV way. It was more like the movie, Victory. The good guys were the Americans. Everyone else was an enemy. Whenever Nikita or Ivan Koloff, The Iron Sheik, or anyone else who pretended to be from another country came out, chants of “U-S-A... U-S-A...” would fill the arena. For some reason, that jingoism is still present. They introduced a guy as a Russian Sambo and mixed martial arts champion, and people instantly started booing and chanting U-S-A. Then, when I thought it couldn't get worse, they made his character sound like a complete idiot. People who wore championship belts in public were laughing at him.

Also, of course there's a gay French character. My only question there is, did they say, “Should we make the French guy gay?” or “Should we make the gay guy French?”

-They've copied the most annoying feature of NBA games... The Kiss Cam. It's even more pathetic at the WWE show though. At an NBA game, the crowd is all normal people that you'd run into at any restaurant that happens to be in public. They handle the Kiss Cam in a civil manner. “Oh, the camera is on me and my wife. I'll kiss her.” Then they move on to the next couple. At a wrestling show, only about 30% of the crowd consists of normal people. The crowd is also very dude-heavy. So, when they actually find a woman on the camera, she usually looks a little rough. Instead of just letting them kiss like they do at an NBA game, they have an announcer who shouts, “I want to see some tongue... Come on, get on it...” I swear I'm not exaggerating at all.

Sometimes at an NBA game, they'll put the camera on two guys who aren't together, as a joke. The guys laugh and the camera moves on. At RAW, they put the camera on two guys, and you could read their lips, as they yelled, “Fuck no. I'm not gay. I'm not gay,” all while giving the middle finger to the camera.

- Kevin Federline was there, challenging the champion to a match. He's smaller than me. The last three celebrities who got involved in wrestling who weren't wrestlers that I remember, were Mr. T, Mike Tyson, and Zeus (Tiny Liston). They all looked like wrestlers. Kevin Federline looks like the bastard child of Ricky Morton of the Rock 'n' Roll Express.

- There is a guy named Chris Masters, who might be the least charismatic speaker and worst actor in wrestling history. This would unseat early 90s character Isaac Yankem D.D.S. He was a deranged dentist, who would say things like, “Beating you at Wrestlemania will be easy. It won't be like... pulling teeth.” Then he would growl.