It’s no secret that WWE Superstars are expected to read their promos verbatim, as handed down by the promotion’s writers. However, that’s a call that comes directly from Vince McMahon. Former WWE writer, standup comedian, and podcast host Matt McCarthy was a guest on the “Wade Keller Pro Wrestling Podcast.”
During the show, McCarthy clarified what a WWE writer’s job is, and Vince McMahon’s stronghold over the creative process:
“Look, if the writers really wrote verbatim scripts and handed it to them [the talent] and really said, ‘This is what you need to say,’ then I would agree that yeah, that doesn’t help anybody and I’m not into that idea. That’s not what the situation is, the situation is, it’s Vince, you know?”
“Vince is the one who wants them to say it verbatim. It’s not the writers, the writers aren’t the problem. If there’s a situation where we can collaborate, I think that that works. If there’s something that talent wants to convey or get across then that’s perfect. It works better if everybody understands and I don’t think everybody understands, and this is from somebody who was there. It’s like I was talking about before you don’t know where Vince’s head is going to be on any given day.”
“Should there be no writers? There’s too much to do for there not to be writers. You can’t think of them in terms of like, ‘Oh, they’re writers. They write.’ It’s like, ‘No, they also produce the segments.’ Put it this way: the amount of people that come and go in the creative team, part of it is, some people get fired, a lot of people quit because you get a lot of TV writers who come to that job and more times than not they all say the same thing, they go, ‘Oh, this is not a writing job.’ Because it’s not. You’re not writing scripts, you’re not figuring out story lines, you’re not coming up over-arcing things, you’re wearing a lot of different hats and the most difficult hat to wear is being that liaison between Vince and the talent.”
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H/T WrestleZone for the transcriptions
