During the latest edition of his “Cornette’s Drive-Thru” podcast, Jim Cornette commented on Vince McMahon’s banned words and phrases. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On the handbook of banned phrases: “Now they actually have an entire handbook of phrases that you cannot use, and it’s been out on the internet, and you can look it up, but that’s how WWE Universe came about, didn’t want to call them fans, can’t say the fans.”
On not being able to say the referee’s name: “Now you can’t say the referee’s names, I’m told, you’re not allowed to identify the referees. They are there on your screen but they don’t exist in real life because they don’t have names.”
On how a WWE producer told him not to say the word “wrestling” on commentary: “Jennifer Good, the producer, said, ‘Stop, can’t say that.’ ‘What’d we say?’ ‘Can’t say wrestling.’ I didn’t even realize what I said, I said, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t say he better concentrate on winning this wrestling match?’ ‘No.’ Goddamnit. It’s all about trying to remove phrases and terms that he thinks are rasslin’, and he has done a pretty good job removing all the wrestling out of his wrestling program.”
On how WWE employees would use all the WWE-created phrases to each other: “You would actually hear them saying these phrases to each other, and that’s the big problem I had with, not a big problem, but just a problem I had with Bruce. Is that even when we were just speaking just ourselves, he wouldn’t admit that this shit was bullshit, and that we were calling stuff that was one thing by obviously another name. I guess they were afraid that Vince had the house bugged or whatever. But no, they did not recognize that nobody has ever said, ‘I can’t wait to get my sports entertainment tickets’ or, ‘Did you see the sports entertainment matches last night’ or, ‘I think I’ll go to sports entertainment.’”
On how Kevin Dunn told him not to compare the Brood to the Freebirds because ‘nobody remembers the Freebirds’: “When they had the Brood, Edge, Christian, and Gangel together, and I thought those guys looked great, the gimmick was good because they looked like the vampire guys that was hot at that time, and they were young and I’ve always been a fan of Edge and Christian and Gangrel was the veteran at that point and he actually went and got the fangs. So I’m putting them over on commentary, and said something to the effect of, ‘Not since the Fabulous Freebirds have three men like this made such an impact,’ or whatever the fuck, right? Kevin Dunn calls me over to the side later on, next to TV, he heard the show, and this was when Michael Hayes was working for the company but he was Doc Hendrix then, he said, ‘Don’t compare the Brood to the Freebirds,’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘It makes them sound old, nobody remembers the Freebirds.’”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
