To start, a weird confessional moment. Several years ago, Julie and I were at Target in Okemos, MI. I always make her duck into the toy department when we’re out shopping because I collect (and I’m a huge nerd). We saw this little cutesy anime looking figure of CM Punk. I picked it up and said “this is cool.” But I ended up not buying it because there were already a bunch of those little cute figures and I didn’t want to get started.
I now own over 150 Funko Pops, but the CM Punk that got away is out of production and out of my price range.
*sigh*
This post about CM Punk is going to be a bit different than the others in this series, as there’s a lesson from one of my rhetoric courses about Punk that I’m going to slightly revise here. I love CM Punk because he understands storytelling and he understands genres. He played constantly with what it meant to be a pro wrestler, from his Ring of Honor “Summer of Punk” before leaving for WWE, to his first Money in the Bank Cash-in moment, to the legendary “pipe bomb” promo and his walking away with the WWE championship (only to come back a month or so later and begin a tear of amazing content).
He was done wrong by the WWE’s desire to make Rock vs. Cena a big deal, but CM Punk is the longest running champion the company had since the Hogan era. And he was… fantastic. Such a joy to watch.
But Punk’s greatest attribute– unlike me at Target that day– is his understanding of Kairos and how to capture it perfectly within the context of what it is he does (the genre of sports entertainment promo).
I could give you a book definition of Kairos, but the one on Wikipedia is surprisingly well written (go figure), so here we go:
Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). The ancient Greeks had two words for time,chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.
Genres of course, are styles or types of things. For example, video stores are broken up into genres: comedy, action, drama, romance, horror, documentary, etc. Book stores are likewise broken up. But genres also apply—in fact the word is more often used—for the types of writing or speaking event one is observing.
For example, the genre of what I’m doing right now is “blog post.”
And what you’re about to watch is in the genre of a professional wrestling promo. This one is called the “pipe bomb,” because of how Punk would refer to it later. It’s a fascinating story turn, very much about playing with the idea that wrestling is fake.
Since I doubt most of you watch professional wrestling, let me give you some context beforehand. The guys in the ring here are John Cena, the WWE Champion, and a performer named R-Truth (he’s not really important to the scenario, as he is walking away for most of what you’ll watch). The two were having a “table” match, in which to win one performer must throw the other into/through a table, breaking it. It doesn’t hurt quite as bad as it sounds because the tables are made to break, but I’m told it’s still extremely painful.
The guy on the ramp is CM Punk. To the point of this video, he’d had a decent but not particularly impressive WWE career. Unlike someone like, say, Hulk Hogan, or even John Cena, who he comes to yell at, Punk hadn’t caught on beyond the wrestling world. No one beyond the fans of wrestling knew who he was. That was about to change.
Here’s the Kairos: his contract with the company is actually about to expire (not just as a storyline—that part is true). He’s been “booked” in a match with John Cena for the WWE title on the last day of his contract in his home town of Chicago. While no one really knows for sure, my little gremlins in the business tell me that the plan was for Punk to lose to Cena and take an extended vacation.
Vince McMahon, the owner of WWE, gave Punk permission to walk out with a microphone and say whatever he wanted to hype his match with Cena. In that moment, here is what Punk chose to do:
There are a number of subtle things here that come into play. First of all, Punk knows the genre of the wrestling promo well. He invokes a specific ethos by wearing a Stone Cold Steve Austin shirt. He then goes onto mix what in wrestling is called “kayfabe” (the storyline, the scripted idea of the show) and “shooting” (referring to reality). He refers to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as “Dwayne” when he was always called “The Rock” on television to that point, and he refers to Brock Lesnar, who at the time was out of WWE and competing in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Punk then goes on to follow the genre expectation of talking about how he is better than Cena while venting his actual frustrations. He even maintains his role as the “heel” (the bad guy) even though the fans, you might notice, start to cheer him. At one moment Punk gets so comfortable, he mentions a friend of his in another wrestling promotion and says. The piece ends with his microphone being cut, presumably for legitimate reasons (that he is going too far) though I think it’s also possible that was the one scripted part (that Punk was told to go too far right as it was time for the show to end).
How effective was this move? Watch the entrance at the event three weeks later, in Punk’s home town of Chicago, and see how the fans receive him.
Punk was rewarded with a championship win…
..
and a short break (with the title), before this comeback moment. Remember as you watch this that Cena is the “good guy” and Punk is the “villain,” at least in theory.
The reason this was successful, however, is because it could have been a typical “John Cena! I will beat you at the Slammerbowl!” sort of yelling, screaming moment, and instead, Punk uses his understanding of what is expected and the fact that he has a perfect Kairotic moment to do something that becomes highly rhetorically interesting.
That was the Tao of CM Punk. He left because he wasn’t happy with the direction of the company, and he tried his hand in UFC. That went poorly.
But I keep hoping that one day CM Punk will return, because he was hands down the most entertaining WWE superstar of the 2010s.