Insult Backfire / Professional Wrestling

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• Shane Douglas of ECW used to yell "WOO!" to mock Ric Flair. Everyone who copies Douglas now does it as appreciation for Flair.
• In his WWF debut, Chris Jericho insulted Raw and The Rock. The Rock soundly verbally tears him apart, where normally new guys are built up to be strong. However, not only was Jericho a goof and this worked for his character, fans were overjoyed that he was in the WWF and were just happy that such a talented and abused performer would get the push he deserved. Later Jericho would try insulting The Undertaker, which resulted in something of a Worked Shoot over being disrespected, and Jericho either kayfabe or for real later discussing how much he stepped over the line not respecting the Deadman.
• WCW was partially undone by what may be the ultimate insult backfire. It was their habit during the Monday Night Wars on Nitro, to reveal the results of WWF matches on air, to prevent people from changing the channel to watch WWF Raw. On the first Nitro of 1999, they revealed that Mick Foley would win the championship, with Tony Schiavone sarcastically claiming "That's gonna put butts in the seats"^note On orders from Eric Bischoff, who fed him that line through the headset. Schiavone and Foley were friends and Schiavone felt terrible about it and apologized to Foley (who's feelings were deeply hurt by the jab, especially coming from a friend) a short time later (or according to some, that same night). To this day he considers it his biggest Old Shame. It did; many viewers switched channels to see it. This compounded the damage done by the Fingerpoke of Doom, which occured the same night. WCW never recovered.
  • Not to mention the signs in arenas for years which said, "Mick Foley put my ass in this seat".
• On the WWF's side, there were the "Billionaire Ted's Wrasslin' Warroom" skits that took shots at Ted Turner, Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage and "Mean" Gene Okerlund, particularly their ages and their supposed greed. Not only did Ted Turner reportedly find the skits Actually Pretty Funny (as did everyone else other than Savage, who, according to Lanny Poffo, was deeply hurt by the skits), but USA Network order the WWF to stop airing these skits after they got too personal. And according to some sources, they actually caused a lot of fans to tune in to WCW to see if Hogan and Savage really were as washed up as the skits claimed (they weren't), thus giving WCW more publicity. Coupled with the debut of the New World Order not long after, the WWF didn't exactly start the war off on a high note.
• At The Rock's birthday celebration on 5/2/11, Vickie Guerrero attempted to ruin Rock's party by bringing in...Mae Young. This backfired spectacularly, as The Rock was positively delighted to see Mae. And even kissed her.
• Natalya Neidhart told LayCool that their IQ was lower than their combined non-existent waist size. The girls took this as a compliment on how skinny they were. This also qualifies as Comically Missing the Point.
• On WWE Tough Enough, contestant AJ was nicknamed "tumbleweed" by the trainers. He embraced the nickname and his fans now call themselves "Team Tumbleweed".
• A dozen years later and it seems Chris Jericho still hasn't learned his lesson. In his feud with CM Punk for the WWE Championship, Chris went and did the stupid thing by trying to leverage Punk's Dark and Troubled Past (his father was an alcoholic growing up), insulting his sister by calling her a drug addict, and then insinuating that Punk was born out of wedlock, all but stating that his mother is a whore and Punk is a Heroic Bastard, all to get in Punk's head. All that did was cause Punk's Berserk Button to get stuck on the ON button, and Chris suffered immensely for it, first tapping out to Punk at WrestleMania and then suffering a severe No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at Extreme Rules during a very brutal Chicago Street Fight.
• On Reality Of Wrestling shows, "The Wild Thing" Rockelle Vaughn was commonly known as "invokedRatchet". When she had a chance to wrestle on one of their "Ladies Night Out" she also had the chance to tell everyone that they had it wrong. She's Rachè! It turns out she has a third job as the Paris fashion model "Rachè Chanel", and was happy to know people were starting to "recognize" her.
• Early in the ECW revival that WWE put out, when they were making The Big Show the ECW World Champion, the Mutants did not take kindly to this, and would chant at him "You can't wrestle!" They shut up when he chanted back in the same cadence "I don't have to!"
• In their 2020 feud, Edge accused Randy Orton of half-assing his career. Orton responded that yeah, he phoned it in, and he still accomplished more than almost everyone else, that's how damn good he is.
• In 2024, The Rock joined the Bloodline and called all the fans who booed Cody Crybabies due to Cody challenging Roman Reigns at WrestleMania XL, ruining Rock and Reigns plans to main event there. Many of the fans embraced the name, declaring themselves Cody Crybabies and even Cody himself have called his fans that at one point.

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