WWE Has Become Vince McMahon's Personal Playground

Vince McMahon treats the WWE superstars like a bunch of toys. Each wrestler is just an action figure that he can pose and bend in any way he sees fit.

Hall-of-Famer Sgt. Slaughter? Haul him out of retirement to lose in an unannounced match in a minute!

Mae Young? Dust her off and re-enact a horrible angle from 14 years ago!

Hornswoggle? Slap that grown man in a diaper after emerging from an 89-year-old woman's...well...you know. 

The Shield? Show badly photoshopped pictures of them as babies!

Dolph Ziggler? Remind everyone that he was a cheerleader and a caddy!

Vickie Guerrero? She should fart! They haven’t had a woman fart on live TV in a while!

AJ Lee? Time to dump doo doo on her!

Seriously, what is going on with this company? More importantly, what is going on with Vince McMahon?

At 67 years old, he has been putting out a baffling, inconsistent, horrendously unfunny product.

Look at the crowd’s reaction after those sketches. They’re not doubling over in laughter. They’re not applauding. They’re sitting there in confusion and even disgust.

They didn’t pay to watch some lame backstage antics.

It’s not just the holiday season, either. It has become commonplace for the show to be filled with material that only seems to appeal to the boss.

How about those segments where Vince treated Vickie like an idiot and basically tricked her into booking matches?

That’s how a pay-per-view main event was announced! Cena vs. Ziggler with Money-in-the-Bank on the line was promoted with comedy.

Still, it made Vince look smarter than Vickie, which must have been the point of airing it.

Or how about when senior citizen Vince McMahon (complete with an action figure’s physique) booked himself to fight CM Punk and proved he could still hang with the WWE champ?  

The WWE has always had quirky, corny humor, but in the past they've been funny, at least occasionally. 

Lately, they are failing in every possible way at being innovative, and instead have become increasingly embarrassing to watch with family or friends.

The New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve episodes highlighted everything that was wrong with the company.

Some fans will say that it’s no big deal, because it was just the holiday episodes.

But we’re not talking about your regular 30-minute sitcom's holiday-themed episode. This was eight hours of TV that was devoted to WWE screwing around, breaking the fourth wall and treating their product like a joke.

We were in a world where Santa actually existed and title shots were handed out by ping-pong balls.

The WWE is in some sort of weird space and time warp where the show is stuck partly in the mid-1980s, and partly in Vince McMahon’s mind.

WWE is different from other TV shows. They don’t just rely on ratings. They need to convince people to buy tickets to their events and order their pay-per-views.

The overall tone of WWE and its promotional style isn’t working. The company is failing to get fans to invest in their product.  

In the 1980s, they were pretty goofy too, but they knew when it was time to get serious.

Hogan’s feuds with Andre the Giant, King Kong Bundy and The Ultimate Warrior didn’t involve him dropping feces on them. He didn’t constantly laugh in his opponent's face about “grabbing a pint,” and the top heels (or wait, is Alberto Del Rio a face?) never ran over Santa Claus.

Sure, the WWF had acts like The Bushwhackers, but they were over with the audience. Khali and Hornswoggle are not over. The only reason they have stuck around so long is that someone in power is amused by them.

It’s too bad that he, or she, is the only one.

If fans wanted to watch a pure comedy show, they would do that. But wrestling is essentially its own genre of entertainment. Fans, especially longer-tenured ones, still watch wrestling for the wrestling. The drama that airs should exist to complement and promote the in-ring action.

Somewhere along the way, Vince has forgotten that. Or he just doesn’t care anymore.

He just wants to play.