Wrestling is inherently absurd, but Friday pushed it
Wrestling is fundamentally absurd. We buy into the premise that Irish whips work, that referees are legally blind, and that nobody can climb a ladder faster than a sloth stuck in molasses.
We suspend our disbelief. We sign the unspoken contract with the promoters: give us good action, and we’ll pretend a man in his underwear fighting a zombie is high art.
But every now and then, WWE produces a two-hour block of television that severely tests the limits of human sanity. Friday’s May 8th edition of SmackDown was exactly that.
It was a chaotic, tonal whiplash of an episode that left me staring at my screen in total disbelief. One minute you have legitimate real-world security issues, the next you are watching a baked good get put in the dirt, and right after that, a legitimate superstar returns to lay waste to the women's division.
It was a mess. A glorious, confusing, deeply flawed mess. Let's break down the madness, because I am still trying to process what aired on national television.
The Guy Who Couldn't Hold His Temper
Let's start with the real-world intrusion. Before the show even hit its halfway point, social media was completely buzzing with cell phone footage of an unruly fan getting violently escorted out of the arena.
You've probably seen the clip by now. It’s making the rounds on Twitter and Reddit, looking exactly like every other arena ejection video from the last twenty years. What possesses a grown adult to act a fool at a wrestling show?
You paid probably way too much money for those seats. You navigated the absolute nightmare that is arena parking. You bought an overpriced foam finger and a flat beer. And then you decide to act so wildly out of pocket that six guys in yellow jackets have to drag you up the concrete stairs while twenty thousand people point and laugh.
It’s a bizarre entitlement. The rise of camera phones means everyone thinks they are the main character. Instead of watching the world-class athletes risking their necks in the squared circle, the guy wanted to start a confrontation.
It took multiple security guards to finally wrestle him out of the section. The footage is embarrassing. It’s a bad look for the fan, and it’s an annoying distraction for the thousands of people who just wanted to watch some wrestling.
Security did exactly what they needed to do. They dumped the guy out onto the street. The show rolled on in the ring. But it definitely injected a weird, tense energy into the building for the next twenty minutes.
The commentators completely ignored it, obviously, sticking to the action in the ring. But you could feel the distraction bleeding through the television screen as the crowd turned its attention to the scuffle in section 114.
A Funeral For A Cookie. Seriously.
And then, just as the live crowd finally settled back into the wrestling, WWE decided to violently test our patience with one of the worst segments of the year.
I have defended some genuinely wild creative swings in my time as a wrestling fan. I defended the early days of the Firefly Fun House. I even found some twisted, ironic joy in the initial Maximum Male Models run.
But a Gingerbread Man Funeral? Are we doing this? In May of 2026? Let me get this straight.
The roster is absolutely stacked right now. You have incredible, generational talent struggling to get five minutes of television time on a Friday night. And someone in the creative department walked into the writer's room and decided to pitch a funeral for a cookie. Worse, someone with actual authority nodded their head and approved it.
Wrestling has a long, terrible history of disastrous funeral segments. We all remember Big Show surf-riding his dad's coffin. We all try to repress the memory of the Al Wilson funeral. But this? This felt like a new low of camp.
It played out exactly as stupidly as it sounds. They had the somber, royalty-free organ music playing over the PA system. They had wrestlers doing community theater levels of fake grief over a piece of baked dough.
And then, the payoff: the dead rising. It was campy, insulting nonsense. It wasn't funny in an ironic way. It wasn't intriguing. It was a massive, momentum-killing waste of television time.
And who does this help? Does this get anyone over? Does selling shock and awe over a baked good make me want to buy a t-shirt or order a pay-per-view? Absolutely not. It treats the audience like toddlers.
We just came off WrestleMania 41 in Las Vegas just three weeks ago, a show that felt huge, important, and historically significant. We saw Cody Rhodes defend the WWE Championship. To pivot from that high-stakes, main-event drama to a comedy sketch involving a pastry in a little wooden box is insulting.
It gives ammunition to every critic who calls wrestling stupid. It was heatless, it was weird, and the live crowd treated it with absolute, punishing dead silence. A complete and utter misfire from top to bottom.
Enter Jade Cargill: The Ultimate Palate Cleanser
Just when I was ready to turn off the television, cancel my cable subscription, and rethink my life choices, business finally picked up.
The lights shifted, the storm clouds gathered on the Titantron, and Jade Cargill walked out. Talk about a desperately needed palate cleanser.
Jade has been off television for a minute, and her absence has been incredibly noticeable. The women's division on SmackDown has felt a little light on sheer, undeniable star power lately.
There are great wrestlers, sure, but nobody who carries themselves with that final-boss aura. Her surprise return on Friday night fixed that problem immediately.
She didn't just walk out, wave to the crowd, and cut a twenty-minute promo about how happy she was to be back. No, she marched down the ramp and absolutely wrecked shop. The visual contrast was stunning and hilarious.
Ten minutes earlier, we were dealing with pastry-themed resurrections. Now, we had Jade Cargill throwing human beings around the ring like lawn darts.
She looked incredible. She hit a vicious, sickening pump kick that nearly took a woman’s head clean off her shoulders. She scooped up her target with terrifying ease, planted them firmly into the mat with the Jaded, and stood tall as the crowd finally woke up from their gingerbread-induced coma and lost their minds.
This is exactly how you book Jade. You don't put her in long, drawn-out promotional battles where she has to trade bad scripted insults.
You don't stick her in convoluted, multi-person storylines. You let her show up, look like a million literal bucks, and break people in half. She is a pure attraction, in the vein of a late-90s Goldberg, and SmackDown needs that energy desperately.
The women's locker room has to be on high alert now. You don't bring Jade back just to have her stand in the background. She is built for main events.
Whether she sets her sights on the top champions or decides to run through the midcard first, her presence fundamentally changes the geometry of the show. She brings a level of physical intensity that cannot be taught.
When she hits the ropes, the ring shakes. When she throws a strike, it looks like it genuinely hurts. That level of believable offense is exactly what was missing in the earlier parts of the broadcast.
Where Does SmackDown Go From Here?
Friday's show was a deeply schizophrenic episode of television. It was the absolute worst of WWE's campy, childish impulses colliding head-on with their best presentation of a dominant, box-office superstar, all while arena security dealt with a legitimate idiot in the cheap seats.
It wasn't a universally good show. The middle hour dragged, and the funeral segment was too offensively bad to give the episode a passing grade. But it certainly wasn't boring.
It’s the kind of episode we will probably talk about in a year, purely for how bizarre the sequencing was.
WWE has all the pieces on the board right now. They have the talent, they have the crowd heat, and they have the momentum. But they need to stop getting in their own way with comedy spots that aren't funny.
Next week, I beg of you, Triple H: leave the baked goods in catering. Give us more Jade Cargill hitting people very hard. It’s not a difficult formula to crack.
