Triple H wants WWE to use swearing and blood sparingly for the best impact.
The WWE COO recently appeared on Logan Paul‘s podcast, Impaulsive, in the build up to WrestleMania 40. He was asked about the increase of swearing and blood in the WWE recently.
Logan asked him if this is a return to the likes of the Attitude Era. Triple H stated that he wanted that type of thing to be less frequent, but to make sense for the maximum impact in the story.
“You know…I would rather watch a movie that has incredible drama and an incredible build to a single gunshot that what a movie with hundreds of people firing machine guns, and nobody is getting shot. I’d rather build and get to the scene in the movie where the one shot happen and you’re like ‘Oh my God! Can you believe he just fucking shot him? Holy shit it’s unbelievable!’. There’s been times where we, as a company, say we’re PG and we’ve been G. Like, way G-Rated. I believe there’s a time for things to work.”
“There’s a time for everything, but its got to be done in moderation. It’s got to be done when its right. If everything you say is cussing, who cares? You just tune that out and it doesn’t matter. But right now, we’re so clean on it that Rock says something, given his position and ‘disruptor’ and the guy coming in from the outside, it’s believable that he has that leeway and doesn’t care. He can do those things and it’s shocking, because it’s not been that way.”
Triple H Thinks Profanity And Blood Should Be Used When It Means Something
Triple H continued, talking about the use of blood and swearing in the Attitude Era. He noted that it should be used when it means something, and the recent storyline with Cody Rhodes and The Rock showed how it can be used effectively.
“Cody gets busted open the other day. It’s shocking, especially in the right scenario; it was powerful. A lot that happens all the time, who cares? You know what I mean. So it’s not a shift of philosophy, it’s just when it’s needed, pull the trigger. But the discipline is only pulling the trigger when it really means something and when it’s shocking, not when it’s just, ‘oh we should do this when it counts.’ “
“Yeah, I should just use a bunch of profanity today’; it doesn’t matter, you don’t need it. All that stuff is a crutch. I lived through the Attitude Era, yeah, when you know, look when we put matches together, there’s what every third word is the f-bomb, right? Like it’s just how it is and that’s how people talk. But sort of just dialogue to really have it be meaningful, it’s got to be here and there. I lived through a time period where blood was an, you know, like an everyday thing and it just, it you know, it started to not mean anything.”
He Thinks Ric Flair Bled Too Much In Unimportant Moment
Triple H also name-dropped Ric Flair as somebody who bled too much in situations that didn’t warrant it. He claimed Flair would cut himself in “the middle of nowhere”, and it was so frequent that nobody would notice.
“We’d be at a little town in the middle of nowhere wrestling in front of 2,000 people and I’d look over and Flair’s bleeding like a stuck pig and I’d be, ‘what are you doing, dude? Like what? What? Yeah, what are you doing?’ And nobody cared, right? Like no one would even, I, I didn’t even notice it happened because there was no big reaction to it or anything. It was just, was all the time thing and it just can’t be that way to make it be impactful. And it’s, you have to do it in moments when it means something and do it big when you do it. Do it big and do it moments when it means something, you know?”
“And, you know that, that, the bus thing with Rock and Cody was a holy shit moment for a lot of those reasons. Even Rock blurring the lines of putting content out after. ‘Don’t tell me to cut, I’ll do this when I want to do it.’ And like, you know, he’s going off, holy shit, like right, like who is this guy? Yeah, you know, meanwhile if you really look at it from sort of a creative standpoint, it’s like Cody just get up and run away. You know what I mean, like it’s there, there’s, yeah, it’s storytelling, you know.”
