You know they say all channels are created equal, but you look at most wrestling channels, and you look at Promo Joe and you can see that statement is not true, because the quality of his output is 166 and two-thirds better than what most wrestling channels are able to put out.
One of the most fun things about watching Maffew’s classic series, Botchamania, was the ending segments, little jabs that pointed out connections that pro wrestling makes to pop-culture as well as meme-culture. As entertaining as those are though, they always felt like they were in short supply, meanwhile PromoJoe’s videos are like 10-minute-long compilations of the endings.
Each bit in his videos lasts somewhere in the ballpark of 5-30 seconds, and they usually consist of funny interactions between wrestlers in the crowd, podcast ramblings over relevant footage, commentary banter, found footage of talents before they got their start, or just straight-up botches, be it on the mic or in the ring, with plenty of memes spliced in, almost like leaves of lettuce separating the meats on a sandwich. Many of these little zingers could function perfectly on shorter form video platforms like Twitter and Tiktok. There are even a few clips that take shots at recent controversies in wrestling, such as Jeff Hardy and Jimmy Uso’s struggles, or Vince McMahon’s whole hush-money fueled affair. One of his more famous bits has been noticing when wrestlers, be it subconscious or intentional, copy other moves, spots, and sequences from famous matches from years gone by. This segment has gotten so notorious on Twitter that it worked ROH and IWGP tag team champions — FTR — into a shoot at their recent press scrum.
Overall, each video feels like a great performance from your favorite open mic comedian. There’s a distinct format and style, but the jokes land, the observations made are true, the audience giggles at all of the references, and the material remains topical.
Another thing that Promo Joe has in common with the greats of the wrestling world is a solid and consistent work-rate. Week after week, Joe uploads a video, and it hits just as well as the last one, without a single botch on the editing. Consider too how demanding that has to be. WWE has Raw on Monday, which is three hours, NXT 2.0 on Tuesday which is two hours, and Smackdown on Friday, which is also two hours. This also doesn’t account for Premium Live Events (sidenote: STOP insisting that they be called pay-per-views still. The whole point of a pay-per-view is that you pay every time you watch it. You do not have to pay every time you re-watch Day 1.) which usually last from about 3-5 hours. This amounts to 10-12 hours just of watching for the new material, not to mention how long it takes to download and render the footage, but that’s only when accounting for just WWE, and with the more diverse wrestling landscape, any channel worth anything cannot just solely account for WWE. Thus, when adding AEW’s shows, Dark (1hr), Dynamite(2hr), Rampage (1hr) along with their own Premium Live Events, (3-5hr), the busiest week can now look like 17-21 hours of straight-on wrasslin’ watchin’. It gets even crazier when also accounting for the German cockroach of wrestling promotions (affectionate), Impact.
As such, one of the best things that Joe does is condense a week’s worth of wrestling into videos that consistently remain under 10 minutes. Many American fans might only have their one promotion, or even just their one show that they’ll bother to tune into after a hard day at their job, but Joe is there, doing the watching and compiling the footage to let people know exactly what they might be missing out on. He almost has a duty to it. As his outro song states, “You gotta let ’em know, Joe.” What this results in is content that is informative for the casual fans, rewarding for the hardcore audience, and funny as hell for everybody.
Give them a subscribe before WWE/AEW/TV Asahi tries to get them taken for copyright infringement.
