After decades of discouraging its large and impressionable audience from trying any of the dangerous maneuvers of sports-entertaining at home, the company has “pivoted to the new reality of social distancing” by launching a new campaign called “Sure, try this at home.”

A series of public service announcements will begin airing on WWE programming next week, each featuring a vignette of wrestlers crashing injuriously from great heights. 

The 30-second PSAs feature a solemn-voiced narrator extolls the dangers of sports-entertaining, with audio snippets of shocked commentators hollering dramatically:

Bodies have been bruised. 

Jim Ross: How do you learn to fall of a 20-foot ladder onto the goddamn roses you just planted yesterday, all because your kid’s goddamn frisbee is on the roof? This man has a family, dammit, and they’re driving him insane!

Michael Cole: He may have been broken in half in his own garden. 

Rikishi: I dislocated my right shoulder setting up my home office.

Kurt Angle: I think I broke my tailbone sitting through seven consecutive Zoom meetings.

Narrator: Necks broken.

[REDACTED]: I ruptured a disc, which fragmented into my spinal column, by obsessively washing my hands. 

Narrator: Careers ended in an instant. Yes, this is entertainment, but the hazards seem kind of small-potatoes when you realize we’re rapidly approaching a zombie apocalypse. 

Jim Ross: How is he even able to stand after all that lying down? 

Michael Cole: Trainers, referees, EMTs, all at home — well, except for the EMTs, who are the only actual heroes who’ll mentioned on our WWE broadcast tonight. 

Narrator: No matter who you are, whatever you do… wash your hands and stay home. After that? Sure, fine, try this at home. Go wrestle in your backyard or on your parents’ bed. We know you’re doing it anyway. And hey, you only live once. Go wrestle your brother or your dad or somebody. But nobody from outside your household, young man! Try this at home with someone who lives at your home — and even then, try to be cognizant of symptoms and social distancing. Perhaps you could have a pose-down or a rap-off or something great like that. If you must wrestle one another, just don’t be stupid about it, okay? No piledrivers or chairs or glass or barbed wire, all right? Can you resist maiming yourself, and just have a good old-fashioned wrestle in the yard? And while you’re out there, clean out the shed you ungrateful freeloader. So, yeah, do what you want. You only live once, right? And who knows for how long? Carpe diem. Try this at home. Just don’t come crying to us when it hurts, okay? 

Below is the old version, which Vince McMahon described this week as “quite frankly passe, quite frankly.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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