Wrestling / Jim Cornette

"They used the Cornette Face on my TV Tropes page?"

James Mark Cornette^note Usually referred to as James E. Cornette on TV, as a bit of a rib on legendary promoter Jim Barnett, whose particular way of speaking and being spoken of often led him being referred to as "Jimsey" (Jims-E) (born September 17, 1961) is one of the all time greatest and most colorful wrestling managers,^note He won The Wrestling Observer Newsletter's "Manager of the Year" award for 12 out of the 14 years between 1983 and 1996 that they awarded it promoters and personalities of The '80s and '90s. A former ringside photographer who was offered a more active role in his profession in 1982 by Christine Jarrett and her son, Jerry; and supposedly funded by his mother's riches (who made her money selling wrestling merchandise), his instantly recognizable Southern accent and angry motormouth have entertained fans for over three decades.

With signature tennis racket in hand, JC has managed many great tag teams and wrestlers, most notably "Exotic" Adrian Street, The Midnight Express, Jeff Jarrett, Yokozuna and Vader. He has worked with or for nearly every major pro wrestling group in the United States, from the NWA to WCW to WWE to TNA to Ring of Honor to MLW, as well as running his own promotion Smoky Mountain Wrestling and spending several years in charge of WWE's developmental promotion Ohio Valley Wrestling.

Jim Cornette has become popular with many fans on the internet for his insightful and often acerbic profanity-filled commentaries on the Who's Slamming Who podcast, leading him to host two podcasts of his own, The Jim Cornette Experience and Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru. Known for having one of the largest wrestling memorabilia collections in the world, his long efforts to sell it off have incidentally helped younger fans learn some of the rich history of professional wrestling.

He's also known for his love of Wendy's triple cheeseburgers and seething hatred of Vince Russo, Kenny Omega, and Donald Trump.

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Cornette's pro wrestling career and his podcasts provide examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Deconstructed: after posting an excerpt from one of his podcasts talking about his podcast on Youtube discussing his love/hate opinion of Dexter Lumis (short story; Cornette likes Lumis but finds his current character to be a waste of his talent as well as not being able to understand why he's being pushed as a good guy) with a preview picture featuring a drawing of Lumis, the wrestler began using those drawings as his social media profile picture. Cornette was a bit disturbed but took it as a sign of respect from Lumis, who at least on social media, stays in character meaning he was trying to show that he was a fan of Cornette and messing with his head for fun.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • Jim isn't shy about his loathing of Joshi wrestler Maki Itoh. When Itoh was asked if she was Cornette's favorite wrestler, she said Jim acted like he hated her but suspected that he really liked her and was just shy. Jim was thoroughly amused.
  • Cornette enjoyed Danhausen as a character outside of the wrestling business. ^note  Cornette was first exposed to Danhausen through the website Cameo and not through promos and matches. Cornette doesn't like Danhausen's promos and matches for the same reasons he doesn't like comedy wrestling.
• Age-Inappropriate Dress: While managing in Mid-South Wrestling he was more than once forced to wear a diaper, usually as the result of a lost wager.
• Ambiguously Gay: Cornette managed "Exotic" Adrian Street in place of Miss Linda and fans wouldn't let him forget it years after the fact. He has also made very fawning comments about the Midnight Express while at the same time expressing contempt for many women while hiding behind M.E., but Cornette's reactions to them getting him alone suggest he wasn't so much disgusted by them as confused and embarrassed about finding them attractive.
• Angrish: His hatred of Vince Russo is so intense that he sometimes has trouble forming coherent sentences when he's extremely angry at Russo.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • In Kayfabe
    • The Rock 'n' Roll Express (Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson), The Road Warriors and then the expies of the former group, the Rockers, especially Shawn Michaels.
    • He once tried to render Baby Doll sterile.
    • Homicide in 2006, then Kevin Steen through 2011 to 2012.
  • In Real Life, hoo boy...
    • It really doesn't take much for Cornette to go on a patented Vince Russo Rant. The wind suddenly changes direction? BETTER SLEEP WITH ONE EYE OPEN RUSSO YOU COCK SUCKER MOTHER FUCKER ASS. Cornette has said that he's made it his "life's work" to haunt Russo and prevent him from poisoning any more companies. They've tried to bury the hatchet twice. The first time when Cornette left ROH and felt so done with pro wrestling he was willing to be nice to Russo so long as they did not talk to each other about pro wrestling. They didn't, but Russo did pitch the idea of them returning to pro wrestling for an angle, which Cornette rejected when told and was soon back to his usual Russo bashing ways. The second time Russo apologized to Cornette, which surprised Jim so much he thought they might finally move on. But then a fan sent Cornette Russo's phone number, email address and home address, leading Russo to file a restraining order, and Cornette was soon back to his Russo bashing ways. He's claimed that his life's ambition is to outlive Russo so he can piss on his grave and has left instructions that if he is too senile and/or infirm to do it himself, then he is to be rolled up to the graveside in a wheelchair.
    • Kevin Dunn finds Jim to be so tiresome.
      Jim Cornette: KNOW WHAT I'M TIRED OF? THOSE BUCKY BEAVER-LOOKIN' TEETH OF YOURS, MOTHER FUCKER. FUCK YOU.
    • Other backstage personnel he hates include John Laurinaitis, Tim Horner, Phil Mushnick,^note Who isn't actually in the wrestling business at all, he's a columnist for the New York Post and formerly wrote for TV Guide and is hated by everyone in the wrestling business because Mushnick has been on an anti-wrestling crusade since the 90s. He's also not very popular with the hip-hop community (or Black people in general, not really surprising when the Post leans pretty far to the right), or video game players, or any of the athletes he writes about. What specifically set off Cornette was the comments Mushnick made about Brian Pillman after Pillman's death, and Vince was more than happy to let Cornette tear Mushnick apart on camera. Twice. Cornette says this was the only time he ever wrote down a promo and then had it fed through the teleprompter, as Vince made him run it by the WWF legal team to make sure Mushnick didn't sue Terry Landell, Ed Ferrera, Eric Bischoff^note Cornette blew his nose and smeared a huge nasty booger on Bischoff's windshield one time. (though they have since buried the hatchet, as they bonded over their mutual hatred for Vince Russo), and Kenny Bolin. All of these are in Real Life.^note Though he's stated the animosity between him and Laurinaitis was/is purely over business and he doesn't hate Johnny Ace as a person. Bolin is a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis compared to the others, as he and Cornette have since reconciled.
    • Bubba the Love Sponge, although again, he seems to be on better terms with Bubba after Bubba played an excerpt from Jim's "Who's Slammin' Who" podcast on his radio show and not only did he decline to argue against Jim's acerbic points about him, it ended up giving Jim's podcast an extra 30,000 hits, causing Jim to comment that he probably needed to send Bubba a Christmas card.
    • Notably not fond of The Kliq because of the MSG Incident and them exposing the business and destroying kayfabe. He has a deep level of vitriol for Shawn Michaels. Cornette was on the creative team at a time when Michaels was the top draw in the company and was extremely difficult to work with, though his opinion of Michaels slightly softened after watching Michaels's A&E Biography and seeing that Michaels was truly sorry for his previous behavior. Cornette's view of Triple H has also improved, even going on record praising Triple H for his handling of WWE NXT. He doesn't even refer to him derisively as "the son-in-law" anymore. He also said he never really had a problem with Sean Waltman (Cornette even apologized for the "They only keep you around so they can laugh at you when you get drunk and throw up on yourself" promo)^note Waltman being the one Clique member not involved in the "Curtain Call" probably helps, however he still hates Kevin Nash (and the feeling is mutual^note Though Nash has said he does respect Cornette and generally likes him, but if Cornette is going to continue to bury him over the "Curtain Call" incident then Nash will respond in kind), you can almost hear him dying a little bit inside when he realizes he's about publicly say he agrees with something Nash said.
    • Mark Madden. For lying about him and being an overall heartless coward who allegedly threatened to sue a promoter and take money intended for ailing referee Brian Hildebrand's medical bills when he learned Cornette would fight him on the spot if he saw him due to their bad history.
      Jim Cornette: I BOUGHT YOU FUCKING WENDY'S, YOU FAT COW!
    • Kenny Omega. Their relationship started well enough before Omega, Cornette claims, lied to Ring of Honor about a foot injury in order to have some of the sillier matches (one of Cornette's tried and true Berserk Buttons) in the history of New Japan Pro-Wrestling (to say nothing of his independent circuit work in World Wonder Ring STARDOM and Dramatic Dream Team). Since then, Cornette became sharply critical of Omega's in-ring style, which he views as hammy and over-the-top. AEW making Kenny one of its Executive VPs put the promotion on Cornette's shitlist, to the point where Cornette on a podcast pondered if Omega may be even more his complete opposite than even Vince Russo.
    • The Gangstas, especially New Jack. They ran afoul with each other over a shady business deal and talked smack about each other for years. They finally made up years later when the Gangstas showed up during the filming of a Shoot interview while jokingly serenading Cornette with "Why Can't We Be Friends" (Corny loved it and immediately hugged them both to put the beef to rest). When Jack passed in 2021 Cornette eulogized him on his podcast and expressed gratitude that they were able to make up before he died.
    • Joey Ryan, whom he calls a "frustrated preliminary wrestler", a "no-talent piece of shit" and "the dick guy", whose antics are entirely based around what, Cornette considers, are shameless shock value, violations of the boundaries of good taste, don't require athleticism or charisma to perform, and drag the legitimacy of the business through the mud. This started when Ryan asked Ring of Honor for more money, and unlike even Colt Cabana or The Young Bucks, Cornette did not even try to help Ryan, suggesting they find a fifty dollar local jobber instead. It escalated when Ryan started doing Sexxxy Eddy-type comedy in Dramatic Dream Team and reached its peak when Ryan started a promotion bordering on softcore pornography propped up by a hardcore porn company. Joey Ryan has taken it personally, often trying to pick fights with Cornette on social media. Or he used to, until Cornette was more or less proven right about Ryan when Ryan was hit with over a dozen sexual misconduct allegations and he hasn't been seen in wrestling since.
    • Ryback for having an undeservedly high ego, working stiff, especially regarding his habit of hurting other wrestlers, having unrealistic goals and attitudes (namely for believing that all wrestlers should be paid the same amount), being a poor man's Goldberg, and his increasingly unhinged social media presence. Although it was initially seen as one-sided, when he made comments in return about Cornette, it was obviously seen as a mutual disliking.
    • Ironically, on the exact opposite end of the tonal spectrum, Garbage Wrestlers in general, for almost all of the same reasons. He has some respect for Atsushi Onita, Tarzan Gotoh, Masato Tanaka and FMW for the most part, feeling they were talented guys who needed a change and simply went "too far". With that as the root, the further along the garbage wrestling stem one gets from FMW the less amount of respect Cornette is likely to have for it. He hates IWA Mid-South and promoter Ian Rotten in particular for souring the entire state of Kentucky on pro wrestling by having blood baths in schools. Then for Rotten (who did seem to learn some lessons) allowing his son to sour the entire state of Indiana.
    • Jim Herd, who Cornette holds directly responsible for driving himself and Stan Lane out of WCW. He's also stated that Herd's creative decisions and interference damaged WCW so badly that they were left to recover until the Monday Night Wars and especially the New World Order finally got the company hot again.
    • Paul Heyman, although relations have eased considerably and they have always held each other in high regard as managers and bookers. Cornette has also said that the hostility between the two was way overblown, pointing to his appearance on an ECW show in 1997 as proof. He's also said that the supposed hostility between the two while they were in WCW together was actually a complete work on their part, they were just so dedicated to their angle that they even wanted the other wrestlers to think they hated each other (and it worked.) The hostility only began when Heyman convinced The Gangstas to no-show their last match in SMW, though as noted above Cornette is not a fan of the "hardcore" wrestling ECW presented and to this day blames Heyman for the popularity of garbage wrestling in North America.
    • Brock Lesnar, for having no passion or respect for wrestling, bullying the ring crew, only working when he has to, only being in the business for the money, and for groping Cornette's girlfriend during a spot, after which Jim told Lesnar he'd just shoot him if he did something like that again. It didn't help that at the time Syn had recently had her lady bits pierced; when Brock press slammed her he was supposed to go gentle on the crotch region. Him grabbing her hard instead was a serious breach of locker room trust, bringing Brock's willingness to protect his fellow workers into question. That being said, Cornette has generally praised Lesnar's work on camera.
    • His wife, Sable, gets even less love from him, citing her egotistical attitude, having no skills in the ring, getting by purely on both her looks and her screwing the right people, setting off the trend of "pretty women who can't wrestle" that lasted for over a decade, and having no respect for the business altogether. He also expressed disgust at her pushing out/shafting legitimately entertaining colleagues or friends of his that had potential to go further and cared about wrestling, namely Sunny and Marc Mero. The comparisons drawn by him of her to Ultimate Warrior hasn't gone unnoticed by the public either, even among Corny's detractors.
    • He really seems to hate Orange Cassidy, due to Cassidy's propensity to wrestle comedy matches with his hands in his pockets. He even goes as far as refraining from referring to him by name, calling him "My little dog Pockets" instead.
    • Joey Janela, who he loathes as a talentless and unprofessional Garbage Wrestler. Similar to Orange Cassidy, Cornette rarely refers to him by name, instead referring to him by disparaging names, such as "Jelly Nutella" (after claiming that his "un-athletic" body looks like "the jelly on the edges of a biscuit"). During an AEW match Janela once shouted "Fuck you, Jim Cornette!" into the camera. Cornette's response?
      Cornette: Tony Khan, if you're listening - and we all know you are - tell your guys they can feel free to mention my name on your nationally televised wrestling program any time they like. I encourage it!
    • He dislikes the republican party in general but he hates Donald Trump in particular. He actively stumped for Joe Biden on his podcast in the 2020 election, making impassioned speeches about his very real fear that the country could not endure four more years of President Trump. After Biden was declared the winner, all of his rants before and after the election were edited into a supercut that clocks in at just over an hour.
    • After a bad experience with his cable internet provider Spectrum, he has not held back his distaste for them.
    • Kast Media and their CEO Colin Thomson, for stealing ad revenue from Cornette's podcast (and many others) and then going bankrupt. Cornette explains the whole mess here^note Now a full playlist!, litigation is ongoing. His co-host/producer Brian Last has stated that he's starting a podcast called "Does Colin Thomson Owe You Money?" so all the other people ripped off by Kast Media can tell their stories.
    • Ex-WWE wrestler Top Dolla joined the list in November 2023 when he posted in a social media thread thread started by singer Billie Eilish about body shaming that he was shamed by a "60 year old documented racist that called me a whale and a manatee", also saying that he'd "take care of" the 60 year old in question if he ever saw them in person. He never mentioned Cornette by name but everyone knew who he was talking about (see Embarrassing Nickname below for why Cornette was doing this)^note He also more or less refused to dignify the racism accusation with a response, saying "I don't hate all whales and manatees, just the ones that are lousy workers!", Cornette responded in his usual fashion with a 20 minute burial of Dolla on his podcast, capping it off with this closing remark:
      Cornette So point is, Flopper, if you keep your piehole shut and go about your business we're done, because I don't... really care. But if you continue to run your ever-lovin' yap about people that are more famous and more equipped to answer back than you, then this can go on and on. Otherwise, we're done here, you're dismissed, and if I need you I will send for you. Thank you very much.
    • Tony Khan has now joined these hallowed ranks after the 2023 Worlds End PPV. Jim said in the Jim Cornette Experience episode 323-324 about Tony's booking- "and I thought Russo was bad!" and that Tony was "Vince Russo on methamphetamines". Yes, there is now someone worse than Russo.
• Ascended Meme:
  • The Cornette Face, including a Word of God endorsement.
  • "Thank you, fuck you, bye!" Now available in t-shirt form.
• Berserk Button: Jim is notorious for having a viciously short temper all around, but some things just get him going more reliably than others.
  • Say you're at a booking meeting that he's attending. You suggest bringing in Hulk Hogan, Eric Bischoff and Scott Hall (and possibly Kevin Nash), give them all a main event push and sweep the undercard under the rug and/or giving them all stupid gimmicks. Or just say something nice about Vince Russo. Please stand back and enjoy the fireworks. Actually, on second thought, don't do that. The building would probably collapse.
  • To explain how embarrassing he found it, Cornette said he'd rather live next to a child molester than someone who worked in the wrestling business if the only things he knew about the business came from The Wrestler.
  • He nearly ran over Terry Landell and some of his friends with a car after they attacked Cornette's girlfriend. Later Jim threatened to shoot Brock Lesnar for being a Jerkass to Cornette's girlfriend in OVW. Reportedly, this actually made "The Beast" legitimately worried for his life, sending him complaining to the other owner, Danny Davis. The two men then explained to Lesnar that trying to muscle his way through a locker room will likely get him shot, especially if he brings someone's significant other into the picture, thus giving Lesnar incentive to start toning his attitude down a bit.
  • He absolutely despises comedy spots. In Cornette's eyes, things like Joey Ryan's 'penis power,' Kenny Omega wrestling a blow-up doll, or Chuck Taylor's 'grenade' utterly disrespect the business and are heinous, unforgivable crimes. On the other hand, he admitted to finding NWA Wildside alum Lazarus hilarious, even though he rather not see Lazarus's antics in actual matches. Cornette's not against comedy in and of itself, especially not if it is at the expense of dedicated mid carders or non wrestlers, but hates the idea of wrestling matches themselves becoming jokes, and hates it even more if opener and main event wrestlers intended to be the top draws are made to look foolish for a cheap laugh. He later expanded further on what separates good comedy wrestling from bad comedy wrestling. The major bullet point was that good comedy in wrestling is treated as a joke in the story, rather than in the metanarrative. Wrestlers, in Jim's point of view, should be embarrassed to be treated as a joke and respond appropriately by getting revenge against whoever humiliates them, rather than treating themselves as a joke and getting the crowd to laugh along.
  • What Cornette has taken to calling "video game wrestling". As a general rule, Cornette believes that wrestlers should be attempting to simulate a fight in a logical way within the confines of the rules of a professional wrestling match, from their attitudes when facing their opponents to the type of moves they perform feeding into the story of the match (with some leeway given for moves that are impossible to perform without cooperation). Matches where the focus is on the type of moves being done, or clearly showing the two competitors working together, as opposed to the simulation of a fight drive Jim crazy. He also has a very low opinion of video game players in general (not helped by many of the wrestlers he hates, such as Kenny Omega, being confessed video game fans).
    • Since this "video game wrestling" is mostly based on the Mexican lucha libre style it's probably no surprise that Cornette isn't a big fan of that either. He's said that he respects the athleticism it takes to do it and has nothing against the actual lucha libre companies in Mexico (where this style of wrestling is deeply ingrained in the culture and he understands the conditions like harder rings that led to it being what it is), but he doesn't consider it pro wrestling (often referring to it as "aggressive parkour", "gymnastic play fighting", or other derisive nicknames), feels it doesn't mesh with American style wrestling at all, and believes Mexican wrestling needs to just stay in Mexico. He has made exceptions for people like Rey Mysterio Jr., however.
  • On that note, wrestlers who call wrestling "fake", inside or outside of the ring or dismiss it and the people involved are a MASSIVE one for Jim. He disavowed Ronda Rousey when the latter called what she was doing "fake fights", calling her ungrateful among other things, and has frequently said Ryback does so because has no legitimate talent or desire to improve his wrestling ability.
  • Jim absolutely hates hardcore matches, as he feels they cheapen the impact of using weapon bumps, which he feels shouldn't be done except a few times each year, and only feuds that need one. He especially is critical of women doing hardcore matches, as he feels it completely devalues weapon bumps on men if much smaller and lighter wrestlers suffer no ill effects from doing them.
  • Another big reason why Jim hates hardcore matches is because they often involve stunts and props that can cause horrendous career-ending injuries. Cornette is a big believer in safety being paramount in matches because it's absurd to risk life and limb for what amounts to a single night's work, especially with the dwindling audiences at most events.
  • One particular weapon that's earned Jim's disdain are thumbtack spots, which he considers to be incredibly dangerous and not particularly visually impressive.
  • Jim also has little tolerance for complicated table/ladder spots that take lots of time to set up and require obvious cooperation. He usually refers to these spots as "playing with furniture".
  • Considering that he spent most of his career managing tag teams he has a pretty fierce loathing for bad tag team wrestling, be it either guys doing the video game and hardcore wrestling or the guys that just don't understand how a tag match is supposed to be structured. Phrases like "He makes his own comeback and hits the flat-footed iceberg tag" (usually with added curse words) are pretty common on his podcast^note Usually when reviewing AEW matches, WWE keeps their wrestlers on a much tighter leash, though they have their terrible tag matches too, just not as many. Cornette didn't exactly write the book on tag team wrestling but he definitely contributed more than a few chapters, so this being a particular pet peeve of his is understandable.
  • Much as Jim hates Kenny Omega for personifying many of the changes he hates in the wrestling business over the last few years, he also hates Nick Gage for personifying the insane Garbage Wrestling style he loathes.
• Bias Steamroller: If Cornette hates you, he won't even pretend to be in any way objective or fair about you, no matter what you do, up to and including sincerely wishing you either to be blacklisted, bodily harm, or that you die. Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, and Orange Cassidy are just a few (out of many) examples of men he will never say anything nice about, ever, regardless of how over they are with fans.
  • This goes both ways, as Cornette will give a free pass to anyone he respects from his days as a manager (like Ric Flair or Bret Hart), the children of wrestlers he respects (Charlotte Flair, Tessa Blanchard), people he helped train in OVW (Randy Orton, Dolph Ziggler), or guys he just really likes (CM Punk, MJF), so long as they're not doing anything really terrible. For example, Cornette has always been known as one of Jeff Jarrett's biggest supporters (despite Jarrett's relationship with Vince Russo), which is understandable when Cornette wouldn't be in the wrestling business if not for Jeff's father and grandmother. But a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" match in AEW with Jarrett and Jeff Hardy offended Cornette with its idiocy to the point that he read Jarrett the riot act and said that Christine Jarrett would have disowned Jeff had she been alive to see it.
• Big Eater:
  • JC is a big fan of Wendy's and hamburgers in general, even from Dairy Queen, which is known more for ice cream. He was once asked if he has ever gone to the infamous "Heart Attack Grill" and he enthusiastically described his eating experience there. So much so that he's had to go on a diet in later years, probably to avoid becoming a Fat Bastard since his knee keeps him from running his meals off like he could while younger. And so he can outlive Vince Russo, since his life goal now is to piss on the man's grave.
  • Despite his love of fast food he still has some standards though, as evidenced by this rant against Krystal, a southern burger chain:
  Cornette: "Krystal? No, no... Krystal is the shame of the south, it's a White Castle imitator, they put mustard on the fuckin' things and they're already rotten enough as it is. Everything that's ever been on the Krystal menu sucks donkey dicks, and they should all be closed down immediately. It's poisonous. That was only place when I lived in Morristown, Tennessee, the only place to get food after 10 o'clock at night, that was the only place to get food, was the Krystal, and I would go hungry. I would go hungry all night rather than eat Krystal."
  • He's also associated with being a big soda drinker. Diet Sprite/Sprite Zero became associated with him in the wrestling community enough that on Wrestling With Wregret Brian Zane appeared drinking it whenever he played Cornette. When working in WCW, Cornette once stress-drank so much Pepsi (his favorite beverage at the time) that he ended up in the ER thinking that he was having a heart attack... It was actually a bad case of acid reflux brought on by over-consumption of caffeine and stress.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Among many reasons why he hates her, he saw Sable as this. Describing her as an "Undercover Cunt" in contrast to Tammy Lynn Sytch, who he described as an "Upfront Cunt".^note Sytch has said in interviews that she agrees with this assessment, of both herself and especially Sable
• Bring My Brown Pants: During The Undertaker's casket match with Vader, Jim Ross said it was a good thing Cornette was wearing dark britches. During the Boogeyman's OVW debut, Jim Cornette shat himself.
• Bullying a Dragon: Though it was understandable why he was upset, Jim Cornette calling out CZW invader Necro Butcher to a fight on the grounds neither of them were wrestlers wasn't too smart. Adam Pearce, who had issues with Cornette, still decided to bail him out.
• Caustic Critic: Cornette's main claim to fame after being a wrestling manager is being a really caustic wrestling critic, like Diversol levels of caustic.
• Character Catchphrase
  • "Thank you, fuck you, bye.", "Fuck this company!", "I hope you fuckin' diiiie!", "Wouldn't you know who won the pony?", "You couldn't believe him if his tongue was notarized." among many others.
  • Cornette has actually trademarked "Thank you, fuck you, bye!" and sells collectables with the phrase printed on them on his website. He's also trademarked the "Cornette Face" (shown at the top of this page) and uses a black and white version of it as his logo.
  • Has a tendency to either start or end a sentence with "God damn!".
  • “And I just gotta ask whyyyyyy?” whenever he’s commenting on something in a wrestling angle that he finds illogical.
  • Ironically, "Fuck this company" was what many of the FANS shouted at Ring of Honor Killer Instinct, October 6, 2012, in response to the botched Worked Shoot-style ending of the main event between ROH World Heavyweight Champion Kevin Steen and Jay Lethal. This was the last show Cornette booked for ROH, with Lethal attacking him used as a way to write him out of his role. (Booked on screen. He had just been consulting Delirious and kept on doing so with changes to address fan complaints, starting with getting himself off screen, which lead to critical acclaim at the next show)
  • "Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy booking", for stipulation matches that happen for no real reason so guys (and girls) can do idiotic spots popularized by ECW, a promotion that was never profitable and has been out of business for over 20 years. This one is so popular that it's on a T-shirt.
    • "Hat on a hat" when multiple stipulations are stacked in the same match.
  • "Greener than a pepper tree"^note Peppers don't grow on trees for wrestlers deemed too inexperienced for their spot on the card.
  • "(Looks like he's) cruising on Lake Have-a-Soma" for wrestlers (mainly The Clique and Shawn Michaels in particular) high on prescription drugs^note Somas, also known as Carisoprodol, are a muscle relaxer that was added to the List of Controlled Substances (Schedule IV) by the DEA in 2012. Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, and Sean Waltman have spoken in interviews about how the three of them and Michaels would eat Somas by the handful while they were all in the WWF together, something Cornette witnessed first hand, or wrestlers so expressionless and uninteresting that they might as well be.
  • "He/she doesn't have any bad habits" for wrestlers known for always behaving professionally and not having drug issues or troublesome personal lives that bring negative press. Often comes up when a wrestler that does have bad habits is getting pushed in favor of someone Cornette feels is more deserving.
  • "He couldn't whip cream with an outboard motor" for guys that can't actually fight. Like the "Lake Have-a-Soma" example above this one is almost a reflex to any mention of Shawn Michaels.
  • "Flatter than a plate full of piss" or "Flatter than four o'clock" for a bad promo, segment, or match that doesn't get over with the live crowd, or a segment that buries someone instead of making them look stronger. Particularly terrible examples might also get "Deader than Kelsey's nuts."
  • "They're smoking the hopium" for someone who believes something that has little if any chance of becoming reality (like someone starting a promotion that classifies their wrestlers as employees), which Cornette will usually call a "Who shot John?" story.
  • "He couldn't draw fifteen cents in Chinese money!"^note At current exchange rates 15 U.S. cents is worth 1.08 Chinese yuan for people that, well, can't draw money. He'll occasionally switch it up with "He couldn't draw money if you gave him a green crayon!"
  • When talking about Vince Russo he often says, "He's never been in the men's locker room, and if he was he'd be whistling 'Stranger in Paradise'."
  • "Phony as a football bat"
  • "You know I hate to say 'I told you so', Brian..."
  • "For the people who like that kind of thing, that's the kind of thing those people like", for something which he considers stupid or would be seen as ridiculous by the mainstream but has a dedicated minority of fans. He'll often follow this with "There's even some people that like having their balls nailed to a stepstool!", basically saying that just because you can find a tiny niche market for just about anything that certainly doesn't mean that it'll be accepted by a wide audience.
  • "If I'm lying, I'm flying and my feet have not left the ground".
  • “You know, it’s like Mama Cornette used to say…” or "like Aunt Lola used to say…" followed by an incredibly folksy metaphor creating a absurdist visual to whatever he’s talking about.
  • According to him his catchphrase to people in the WWE developmental program was "I want a degree of difficulty of 5 and an execution rating of 10, not the other way around", or in the words of Dusty Rhodes, "Don't do shit you don't know how to do" (Jim will always say this in Dusty's voice and it has basically become one of his catchphrases at this point.) In other words, stick to safe reliable spots instead of something that he would call "video game wrestling", since they'll get about the same reaction from the crowd anyway with a much lower risk of injury and long-term damage to everyone involved.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Once said that he loved sick sex things, just not in wrestling.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • JC's commentaries on Who's Slamming Who.
  • His recount of the Dairy Queen visit (which also featured a young Chris Jericho as an instigator). "WE WERE AT THIS GOD DAMNED DAIRY QUEEN IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT KANSAS..."
  • Roughly half of anything Jim says about Vince Russo will be this trope.
  • It's easy to say that Cornette would probably answer "what did you eat for breakfast" with a dozen swear words. "Who in the saint fuck does this little mark bitch think he is to ask what I fuckin' ate..." On a side note: Cornette's favorite comedian? George Carlin. No surprise there.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Is in constant disbelief of how Marina Shafir is a horrible wrestler despite being married to Roderick Strong, a trainer and one of the best wrestlers in the business.
• Combat Commentator
  • He served as a commentator on Raw alongside Jim Ross when Smoky Mountain failed to get a TV deal. Prior to that they were occasionally paired on commentary while both were in WCW.
  • He was the color commentator for the short lived LPWA. Then sat behind the commentary table of OVW television with Dean Hill and also did one of the old Mid-South territories would be successors NWA Mid South. Sinclair wanted Jim Cornette to do commentary for Ring of Honor too but he refused.
• Cower Power: Jim would run from the angry wrestlers he wronged to Midnight Express stable mate Bobby Eaton and hug him for protection.
• Creepy Crossdresser: After being banned from Mid-South Wrestling, Jim Cornette snuck into a show by shaving his legs, wearing a dress, putting on a wig and high heels. He then hit Ricky Morton with a purse that had a brick in it while the Rock N' Roll Express was wrestling the Midnight Express.
• Cue the Flying Pigs: Wrestling news observers declared hell to have officially frozen over when WWE announced in 2017 that Cornette had agreed to come back to WWE long enough to induct The Rock 'n' Roll Express into the Hall of Fame, despite his infamous vitriolic rants directed at the company and many of its top people.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • One of Cornette's catchphrases in shoot interviews and on his podcasts is to compare someone or something to "the nicest guy in prison."
  • Additionally, Cornette himself was on the receiving end of this when Ole Anderson remarked that he "used to think [Cornette] was a dumbfuck, but so many dumbfucks have come along since that you've moved up the ladder without doing anything."
  • More recently, Cornette has praised Kenny Omega's physique and flexibility, suggesting that he might be better as a ballet dancer than a wrestler.
  • The constant barrage of what Cornette calls "indie outlaw talent" that he's subjected to while watching AEW has caused him to positively reevaluate a lot of people working for WWE, where everyone is fully trained and forced to stay in shape, and working in a much more structured environment. The Miz was once one of his favorite targets, but Cornette has recently praised him because if nothing else Miz can easily work a match without injuring anyone or completely exposing the business, and he's never been known to exhibit what Cornette calls "bad habits".
  • While discussing how Vince's business was with Shawn Michaels on top in 1996 (short answer: not well) Cornette actually gives one of these to Kevin Nash of all people.
  Cornette: So I never put this together at the time because you're in the middle of it, right? But now with all the hindsight of everything that's gone on the last 25 years... Maybe we shouldn't have fucking blistered Kevin Nash so much for being the lowest drawing WWF champion of all time! Because Shawn didn't do a world of good either.
• Deep South: Cornette is from Louisville, Kentucky, and he's very proud of it, his rivalry with Kevin Dunn having more or less started entirely because of Dunn's publicly-noted dislike of Southerners. Having said that, while Jim is proud of where he comes from and is as traditionalist as they come where wrestling is concerned, he almost totally runs against the usual assumptions associated with this trope; he's a self-described socialist and hardline atheist, he's ardently anti-gun and pro-universal healthcare, and he loathes Donald Trump to a degree of vitriol he reserves for very few people.^note As Jim explains it, he actually wasn't very politically aware prior to leaving OVW because up until that point his entire life had been consumed with pro-wrestling. When he took a step back away from the business, he claims he started to notice his money disappearing with the economy crashing, and then started to pay attention to the news because of that, and came to the conclusion that the Republicans were the ones fucking up the country. He still has plenty of promos to cut on the Democrats (mainly since they lost to Donald Trump, who rivals Vince Russo and Kenny Omega for the amount of vitriol that Jim spews against him).
• Defiled Forever: In his quest to embarrass Shawn Michaels, Cornette claimed Shawn had done this to Diana Hart-Smith, for them simply being sort of flirty. Her husband, the British Bulldog was trying to have her distract Shawn.
• Designated Girl Fight: Invoked on TNA when he prevented Eric Young and Jerry Lynn from destroying Traci Brooks with a folding chair (crowd boos) stating he was not going to allow a group of men to beat up a woman even if she deserved it, sicking Gail Kim on her instead (crowd cheers). Averted in OVW, where he had little problem with Alexis Laree (face) or Synn (heel) fighting men. He in fact booked Linda Miles almost exclusively against men, even if it was only in dark matches and untaped spot shows, as he believed it was the only way to get a good match out of her(she tended to injure opponents and the ones large enough to reliably protect themselves happened to be men).
• Duct Tape for Everything: He could sometimes be caught taping cookie sheets and dog chains to his tennis racket, though he eventually gave this up in favor of loading the case with bricks instead.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • As a heel manager in Georgia Championship Wrestling, Jim was given free reign to basically say anything to get heat, up to and including full-on racist rants. However, one night, while cutting a promo on a wrestler who The Midnight Express had hit with a fireball, Jim shouted "his face went up like the Challenger!" As soon as the words left his lips, the studio went dark with an audible hum, and Dusty Rhodes called him into the control room like a schoolboy to the principal’s office. Dusty simply told him "Kid, don't talk about the Challenger. Go do it again."
  • A short time later while cutting a promo on The Road Warriors Cornette made reference to Brian Bosworth, a former NFL player who's name is still used as shorthand for PED use in pro sports decades later. While the office didn't have a problem with this one Hawk wasn't too thrilled about it, and asked that Cornette not imply that he was using illegal substances during promos, as it might make it more difficult to get through airport security checks. Cornette apologized, and would later say that this was the only time a wrestler had a problem with something he said about them on air.
  • In 2019, Cornette was fired from NWA for an on-air comment that Trevor Murdoch was so tough "he could strap a bucket of fried chicken to his back and ride a motor scooter across Ethiopia". Reaction was... negative, to say the least.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Bestows them onto wrestlers he doesn't like during his podcast.
  • Kenny Omega: "Kenny Olivier" (after Laurence Olivier due to him viewing himself as a performer and artist), Twinkletoes McFingerbang, "Harpo Finger Fuck" or just "Harpo" (based on Omega's resemblance to Harpo Marx of the Marx Brothers, in between the curly blond hair and Omega's in-ring style reminding Cornette of Harpo's pantomime, as Cornette views the former as hammy and over-the-top).
  • The Young Bucks: "Balding Buck" (Nick), and "Road Warrior Buck" (Matt). Jim retired "Road Warrior Buck" after Road Warrior Animal's death in 2020, and started calling him "Buck Hogan" before settling on "Pie-Faced Buck". Collectively he refers to the team as "The Cucamonga Kids", "The Buckaroos", or "the Hardly Boys", the latter in reference to his belief that the Bucks are less talented Hardy Boyz imitators.
  • Orange Cassidy: "My little dog Pockets" (or just "Pockets"), because of Cassidy's gimmick of wrestling with his hands in his pockets. Cornette will also often refer to him as "the company mascot", mainly because he's supposedly Tony Khan's favorite wrestler.
  • He calls Cassidy's "Best Friends" stablemate Chuck Taylor "Muffin-Top Taylor" because of Taylor's unimpressive physique for a wrestler. Also "Fuck Taylor", obviously.
  • Kris Statlander: Kris Flatlander, Kris Flatliner. Cornette has mostly dropped this one in recognition of Statlander dropping her rotten spacegirl gimmick and improving her in-ring work.
  • The Best Friends: The Puddin' Gang.
  • Vince Russo: "Shit Stain", "The Archbishop of Talent-Bury".
  • Marko Stunt: "Marko Stunted Growth", then "Dwarf Dong Sucker" after an indy show where an opponent forced the diminutive Stunt to fellate a dildo.
  • Luchasaurus: "Dino Douche" (pronounced "Dee-no", not "Die-no"), picked up from an MJF promo
  • Joey Janella: "Jelly Nutella", comparing his physique with jelly or Nutella filling falling off a cookie.
  • The Miz: "Frog face", though he wasn't the first to see Miz and say it. ^note  Cornette generally doesn't use this anymore. His opinion of The Miz has improved substantially following various promos and a feud with Gunther.
  • Baron Corbin: "The Possum King" during his run as "King Corbin." Now it's "Baron Von Corbin."
  • Excalibur: "Excrement", also "Sockface" because Cornette feels that the lead play-by-play man doing commentary with a mask on looks extremely unprofessional.
  • Dave Meltzer: "Uncle Dave", since he views Dave like the crazy uncle who hangs around the kids trying to be cool and this is why he puts over AEW in the Observer constantly.
  • Bruce Pritchard: "The Artful Dodger".
  • Johnny Gargano: "Johnny Same-Face", due to Cornette viewing Gargano as having limited facial expressions. Naturally, he refers to his wife Candice LeRae as "Mrs. Same-Face."
  • Tony Khan: "Jacksonville Dixie", since he views Khan as a money mark similar to former TNA owner Dixie Carter.
  • Chris Jericho: "Chris Jeri-COVID" after Jericho held superspreader concerts at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Also "Judas Lung" for the same thing; inspired by Chris Jericho's AEW theme song "Judas" and the fact that COVID-19 attacks the lungs.
  • Don Callis: "Don Phallus", coined by a fan after podcast co-host Brian Last said that Don looked like a penis in a suit. Cornette liked it and started using it.
  • The Dark Order: "The Dork Order", "The Dark Odor".
  • Brandon Cutler: Brandon Cutlet^note "A non-descript piece of white meat. Bland."
  • Miro: "Bluto".
  • Penelope Ford: "Penelope Pitstop". The first time Cornette used this he ended up trending on Twitter after people not familiar with the cartoon character (understandable when Wacky Races is over 50 years old) accused him of slut shaming. Cornette naturally responded by brutally slut shaming her on his podcast.
  • Nick Gage: "Bank-Addicted Drug Robber" or "Bank-Addled Drug Robber" (or simply "BADR"). Gage being an exponent of the "Deathmatch wrestling" style (i.e. Garbage Wrestling, one of Cornette's Berserk Buttons), Cornette hates Gage with a passion, whom he views as an "outlaw mudshow garbage match" guy. He coined both monickers after Gage's arrest for bank robbery while he was deep in the throes of his struggles with addiction, also leading to the name "Methhead McGee."
  • Jon Moxley: "The CEO of Moxley Plumbing", any other reference to "Moxley Plumbing", or just "Plumber". Due to the fact that Moxley dresses in street clothes and makes his entrance from the parking lot, coupled with Cornette's perception that Moxley is physically unimpressive, Cornette surmises that Moxley must actually be a plumber.
  • Blackpool Combat Club:^note Moxley, Bryan Danielson, Claudio Castagnoli, and Wheeler Yuta. None of those people are from England, though the stable's founder and former manager William Regal is not only from England, but started his wrestling career in Blackpool. "The BBC"
  • The House of Black: "The House of Blech", "The Black Fellows"
  • Adam Page: "Hangnail" Adam Page (rather than "Hangman"), "The Butterfly Jean-Wearing Dipshit"^note He'll also often refer to Page as "the hatchet-headed idiot/fuck/jackoff/etc...", though that's more of a declarative statement than a nickname. This actually comes from CM Punk, who used the insult towards Page during the infamous press conference that sparked off a backstage brawl, Cornette directed the lion's share of the blame for that incident at Page and he's been burying him on his podcast ever since.
  • Ethan Page: "The Other Page"
  • The Lucha Brothers: "Felix" (Fenix) and "Penthouse" (Pentagon Jr./Penta El Zero Miedo). A listener of his podcast sent Cornette an email saying that "Penthouse" sounded more like a compliment than an insult, Cornette acknowledged this but said he really couldn't be bothered to come up with anything better.
  • Michael Nakazawa: "Michael Naka-naka-naka-knock-it-the-fuck-off."
  • Wheeler Yuta: "Wheeler Useless"
  • Satnam Singh: "Zippy the Giant Pinhead"
  • Konosuke Takeshita: "Take-a-shit", or just "Take" for short. Subverted in that Cornette actually likes Takeshita and has generally praised his work, but he can't reliably pronounce "Takeshita" (it's "tuh-KESH-tuh"), combine that with the low-hanging fruit of a guy named "take shit a" and this one is purely for comedic value rather than an insult.
  • Will Ospreay: "Will Ostrich"
  • Jay White & Juice Robinson: "Gin & Juice", White on his own is "Lightswitch" instead of "Switchblade".
  • Ruby Soho: "Ruby So-so"
  • Mercedes Moné:^note The former Sasha Banks "Mercedes Moan"
  • The Butcher and The Blade: "The Fishmonger and The Meat Gentleman." When Allie (aka The Bunny^note aka Blade's real life wife) is with them they become "The Butcher, The Baker, and The Candlestick Maker."
  • Rick Knox: "The Corpse Referee", partly because he sees every possible violation of the wrestling rule book happen right in front of him but never reacts to any of it^note Knox is the personal referee of the Young Bucks, and is usually the ref for all the other goofy comedy matches in AEW, so Cornette hates him on principle and therefore must be a some sort of zombie or undead, and partly because Knox is very old.
  • Aubrey Edwards: Aubrey Ed, followed by jokes about her looking like a horse.
  • Renee Paquette: "Renee Moxley-Good"; in reference to Renee being married to Jon Moxley (real name Jonathan Good). He usually gets quite theatrical in his pronunciation, affecting the best RP accent he can achieve with his Kentucky twang.
  • Alex Marvez: "Officer Barbrady"
  • All Elite Wrestling: "All Friends Wrestling" (due to the rampant cronyism in AEW),^note  Ironically, Cody Rhodes coined this one when describing what he didn't want AEW to be perceived as. "All Petite Wrestling" (due to the male roster being about 90% cruiserweights, or as Cornette refers to them, "middle schoolers")
  • Game Changer Wrestling: "Garbage Championship Wrestling"
  • Pro Wrestling Guerrilla: "Pro Wrestling Chimpanzee"^note While PWG spells it like "guerrilla warfare" they've leaned into the homonym and use a gorilla face in their logo
  • Madcap Moss: "Moshpit Jones"
  • Bad Bunny: "Bugs Bunny"
  • Sonya Deville: "Cruella." It doesn't help that she for a time had white streaks in her hair.
  • Top Dolla: "Flop Dollar", or just "Flopper", thanks to this. He also takes special care to pronounce it "Dollar" rather than "Dolla", saying "Just because they can't spell doesn't mean I have to talk like an idiot."
  • Kazuchika Okada: Started out as "Japanese Cody" after he signed with AEW due to his similarities to the American Nightmare (blonde hair, superstar treatment, lots of hype). Then changed it to "O-Cody" which is easier to say than "Japanese Cody".
  • Ryback: "Fat back."
  • "Jungle Boy" Jack Perry: Jungle Jack-Off.
  • He deliberately mispronounces some names such as Sheamus's ring name according to its more traditional spelling, (Seamus) as "SEE-mus," ^note  He temporarily started calling Sheamus by his proper name after gaining several levels of respect for Sheamus following his match with Gunther. He reverted to his previous pronunciation in early 2023, however. Asuka's as "Oscar", and Seth "Freaking" Rollins' as "Seth 'Franklin' Rollins"^note This actually comes from a misprinted WWE advertisement someone sent Cornette, though the podcast is so dedicated to this nickname that they even use it in the titles of the YouTube clips.
    • He also over-emphasizes names of certain wrestlers such as Riho ("REE-HOOOOOOO!") and the aforementioned Miro ("MEE-ROOOOOOO!").
  • He calls Evil Uno "Pizzeria Uno" taken from the Uno Pizzeria restaurant chain.
  • Omos, the giant of a man who started his career as AJ Styles' muscle and tag partner, is called "Almost" because he was pushed to a prominent role while being green or in other words, "Almost a wrestler."
  • He refers to the Arabic commentators used for the Saudi Arabia shows as "Slapko Fudd" and "Fubar Makafakalou". Some wiseass actually edited the page for the Greatest Royal Rumble on The Other Wiki to list Fudd and Makafakalou as the Arabic announce team, which somehow went unnoticed by their editors for a couple years.
  • Even title belts can get one of these, Cornette referred to the AEW All-Atlantic title as the "A & P championship", after AEW renamed it to the Continental Championship (because All-Atlantic didn't make sense to begin with) he's started calling it the "continental breakfast title".
  • This Reddit post has a few more that aren't listed here.
• Et Tu, Brute?: He's fell out with former associates Chris Jericho and Matt Hardy, while claiming AEW ruined Cody Rhodes^note Who then returned to WWE and became a top guy and MJF. After years of Cornette praising MJF for keeping kayfabe, MJF participating in a musical sketch with Jericho was enough to make Cornette briefly swear off complimenting any current wrestlers out of fear they would "betray him" the way MJF did.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: The unseen "Mama Cornette" from his early career.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Jim Cornette will call people every name under the sun, but draws the line at the word "retard", as he believes it's insulting to those with real mental disorders.
  • When a fan jumped the rail at an AEW show to attack Chris Jericho (getting punched by Jericho and thrown out by security for his trouble) and later claimed online he did it for Cornette, Jim promptly buried and blocked him for doing so.^note And Jericho actually backed Cornette on this despite the bad blood between the two, telling the fan "You idiot, Cornette would have shoved his racket up your ass and broke all the windows on your car" In his words, the ring is a sacred place, and while he will mock wrestlers like the Young Bucks all day and night, jumping the rail to interfere with the show is unacceptable behavior. He went so far as to agree with a Kenny Omega tweet saying that the fan was out of line!
• Exact Words:
  • Used this to avoid his just desserts. During the WWF/NWA crossover in the late 90s, The Headbangers (working face) faced Cornette's Rock & Roll Express, with the stipulation that if the Headbangers won, whichever Headbanger won the fall would get 5 minutes with Cornette. The Headbangers won by DQ when Barry Windham interfered and knocked Thrasher out with a chair. So the Headbangers won - and Cornette got 5 minutes with an unconscious Thrasher and pinned him after a couple of shitty elbow drops.
  • At the event where he spat in Ed Ferrara's face for mocking Jim Ross's Bell's palsy, he had promised the promoter that he wouldn't punch Ferrara. When Cornette came across him at the event, Cornette decided that he hadn't promised that he wouldn't tell Ferrara off or spit in his face, which Cornette proceeded to do.
• Excrement Statement: Jim has stated multiple times that he wants to live long enough to piss on Russo's grave. He's even gone on diets to accomplish this.
• Expy: To Playboy Gary Hart, a young non athlete who tried to buy his way into the wrestling business with his mother's money. Only Jim Cornett was more a nerd than a playboy.
  • Paul E. Dangerously has often been described as an expy to Cornette, with a New York flavor and a big cell phone instead of a tennis racket.
• Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit
  • His on screen persona fits this to a T, but in Real Life this is harshly averted. Cornette has a strong sense of values and morality and is not afraid to stick up for the young talent.
  • He insists his Arch-Nemesis Kenny Bolin is this among other things.
• Fireballs: Back in the NWA. In particular, he singed the hair off the face of Ronnie Garvin, which lead to Garvin stomping on Jim's ass in a steel cage match.
• Fix Fic
  • His "Rebooking the Invasion" interview with Kayfabe Commentaries, the booking's actually pretty interesting but stretches credibility at times, for instance, it involves WCW acting as a shell company in opposition to WWE, something he admits Vince McMahon would never do.^note Interestingly, he does make some semi-joking concessions to reality: Lex Luger would never get a job in WWE; Triple H always being booked to win; Dusty Rhodes losing a WrestleMania match to Hulk Hogan by DQ due to manager interference (Cornette himself), because Dusty would never job clean in such a match.
  • The same interview also acts as a fix to the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, as he states/decrees that in the parallel universe he is describing, it never happened and would never happen.
• Forced Meme: Botchamania forced the "Cornette Face" meme and Cornette's phrase "Fuck this company!"
• Forgotten First Meeting: Met Scott Dawson of The Revival when Dawson was an indy wrestler and Cornette was looking for new talent for Ring of Honor and tried to sign him. Dawson reminded him of this when they met at a Takeover event, with Cornette having completely forgotten it despite being a fan of Dawson's.
• Fragile Speedster: He describes himself as never having been an athlete, yet also claims to have been too fast for anybody to catch besides Dutch Mantel, thus avoiding beat downs (and giving him a low tolerance for people who can't run the ropes). Unfortunately, they did not always have to catch him, such as when Cornette tried to assault Shawn Michaels head on after he had already beaten Owen Hart and Shinobi. Cornette, predictably, went down even faster.
• George Jetson Job Security: This was the gimmick Jerry Jarrett gave him, that all his clients would fire him but he would always get another one soon. It is almost true in real life, too, as he's been fired by WWE, TNA and Ring of Honor but still had people asking for services.
• Good Is Not Nice: Though Cornette is most famous for his heel runs, he's pretty condescending even as a face.
• Good Luck Charm: He carries a lucky horseshoe in his tennis racket case, which he obtained when a fan threw it at him in the ring. He deems it lucky because it missed.
• Goofy Print Underwear: When he was pantsed while managing Big Van Vader and Mini Vader. Cornette has in fact had his pants pulled down, ripped or otherwise loosened several times over the decades be by other workers, angry fans or his own misteps. Without fail he would always have some tasteless pattern on his underwear. Some of them were handmade by Mr. Cornette himself!
• Grumpy Old Man: Jim has qualified more and more for this as time has gone on, espeically now that he's past 60. Age has done nothing to put his profane, acidic nature to bed (even though he has softened some on comedy wrestlers like Danhausen).
• Hammy Herald:
  • For the Midnight Express. An example from WCW WrestleWar 90:
    Jim Cornette: Please welcome the Kings of the Ring, the Gangster of Love^note Stan Lane and the Sultan of Swing,^note Bobby Eaton Beautiful Bobby and Sweet Stan, the Midnight Express!
  • He also did some ring announcing in OVW. Sometimes prior to interviewing someone going up to WWE, sometimes to announce someone coming down.
• Heroic BSoD: Eulogizing Bobby Eaton on his podcast had Jim broken up and considering walking away from it.
• Hot-Blooded: He has a tendency to become really worked up over what's done to his beloved sport: changing it from a competition to a spectacle, having wrestlers compete in full contact contests like the Brawl for All or making wrestling too violent and extreme will elicit at least a 10-20 Cluster F-Bomb. Bring up someone like Vince Russo, Kenny Omega, or Kevin Dunn and he will lose it completely.
• Heel–Face Turn: Made his first ever Face turn during the Midnight Express' "Battle of the Brutes" feud with the Original Midnight Express.
• Hidden Depths:
  • A southern traditionalist fervently against the glitz and glamour of Sports Entertainment...that just happens to be an Internet-savvy atheist liberal firebrand.
  • Despite his hatred of video games players and wrestlers who frequently talk about "geeky" subjects, Cornette is an avid comic book fan. He's discussed his collection on his podcast several times. In 2019 he was even involved in the creation of a comic telling various backstage stories throughout his and other careers called Behind the Curtain – Real Pro Wrestling Stories, with IDW Publishing publishing and distributing it.
• I Did What I Had to Do
  • Cornette was a fan and friend of Buddy Landell whom he feels Terry ruined the good name of) and wasn't happy about firing him from Smoky Mountain Wrestling, but Cornette felt Buddy had exposed the business^note By singing "Ol' Man River" into the mic during an I Quit match and wasn't going to give him a pass.
  • He actually suggested a double cross himself before the Montreal Screwjob, except Jim wanted to put Ken Shamrock, a legitimate fighter, over because he would shoot, for real, if Bret would not do the job. Bret shot the match down, it had to be he beat Shawn in Montreal. Because of how troublesome it was Cornette was in support of what happened but treats it as Shoot the Dog to keep the title and hates that Vince, Shawn, Triple H did it.
    • In June 2019, Cornette detailed on his podcast that he actually came up with the finish. He says he suggested it hypothetically because Vince McMahon rarely took his suggestions. He also spoke up out of anger and frustration that Vince wouldn't sign off on the simplest solution: a Hart Foundation run-in/DQ finish.^note Because Vince didn't trust Eric Bischoff to not use the fact that he had the then-WWF Champion under contract in some harmful way. Cornette didn't know Vince was actually going to use the finish until he saw it live that night.
  • Cornette had no interest in booking when he went to TNA, but at times felt the booking was so bad that it would be unconscionable not to lean in and give his opinion (from the beginning he said it was time for Jarrett to let someone younger be World Heavyweight Champion). Again with GFW, he had little interest in the workings of the company but did let a few of his opinions known, most notably being against suing Matt Hardy for the Broken! gimmick.
• I Know Madden Kombat: The tennis racket, usually kept inside a gaudy, fur-trimmed case. Once the Midnight Express loaded a horseshoe into the case to make Jim's racquet swings more powerful. In Real Life, Cornette claims to have used the racket to fight off several rabid fans who tried to assault him back in the territory days.. Ironically, his promos video for his debuts in territories often showed him to be incompetent at the sport.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: Will sarcastically utter 'I'm just a small town bird lawyer' when flummoxed by something ridiculous happening, often in the wrestling industry.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes
  • Bright red on pink, bright red on blue, and pastels in every color combination imaginable. Plus his tennis racket was for some time fitted with a boa.
  • A WWE Magazine mini article from an issue in the early 90's brought up Cornette's outfits and claims to have seen him pick up a full suit at a K-Mart for $19.95. This is an article that very well could have happened in real life.^note Albeit as Cornette shopping for clothes for his character rather then for himself.
• Innocently Insensitive: This was his initial characterisation when he started out in the CWA, as an Upper-Class Twit who was so sheltered and arrogant that he didn’t realise he was being insulting, and condescended to the Faces even while he was trying to schmooze them. He quickly went from accidentally insulting people to deliberately doing it when all the good guys rejected him.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • It's not a script when you're writing pro wrestling, it's a format. Sports use formats, and in Jim's mind, professional wrestling is first and foremost, a sport. Cornette on one podcast recalled he would threaten to fine wrestlers who said "script" instead of format, after getting audibly uncomfortable with his co-host using the term "script".
  • WWE employs "comedy writers" to write their shows (showing the lack of respect they have for pro wrestling) and Jim refuses to refer to them as anything else.
  • If Cornette really, really dislikes a wrestler, he will refer to them with an Embarrassing Nickname (see entry above).
  • Any wrestler who doesn't take their profession seriously enough by Cornette's standards is referred to as a "cosplay wrestler", since Cornette believes they’re not true professional wrestlers, but merely pretending to be. This excludes some wrestlers who literally cosplay like Fergal Devitt and Low Ki, despite Cornette disliking Ki on a sometimes critical sometimes personal level since he, if nothing else, takes pro wrestling very seriously. Cornette's standards have also loosened over the years, as while he's still not the biggest fan of Colt Cabana's work, Cornette no longer considers Cabana a cosplay wrestler, just a wrestler a little goofier than he'd prefer.
  • "Middle schoolers" for wrestlers Cornette deems too small to be threatening in the ring. One of Cornette's many, many issues with modern wrestling is the over abundance of such, which he claims drags down the realism of the products being presented. Cornette's not as bad as Vincent Kennedy McMahon or Eric Bischoff in this regard, but Cornette is still above averages height, so his standard for small is a little stricter than the average viewer.
  • WWE is well known for their abuse of this trope and an official document from the company listing Vince's banned words has been circulating around the internet for years. In this clip from his podcast Cornette breaks it down, though keep in mind that the list is about 15 years old and the clip itself is from 2019.
• Irony: For all of his hatred of Donald Trump, he has been accused of being no different] from him by people such as Dave Meltzer and even fellow Democrats such as Brian Zane and Kenny Bolin. The latter even at one point telling him so to his face.
• I Shall Taunt You: Continually taunted and insulted Shawn Michaels in an effort to get him to accept continual rematches with Big Van Vader after numerous questionable finishes that lead to Shawn winning.
• I Take Offense to That Last One:
  • When Eric Bischoff called and said he's eaten too many Big Macs and was 241 lbs. in a 12 oz. sack, Jim said he eats Wendy's Triples and he's a slim 231.
  • When Jon Moxley referenced Cornette as an old-ass podcaster who complains about how the business used to be because Cornette is bitter, Cornette admitted that he is an old-ass, but he is not bitter. He's exasperated with today's wrestling.
• Jerkass Has a Point: This was Cornette's reaction to WWE telling their wrestlers they could no longer take third-party deals with other media platforms (YouTube, Twitch, etc...) to make extra cash. After delivering a pretty scathing rant about WWE's practice of making all their wrestlers "independent contractors" to deny them benefits like health insurance,^note He's also criticized WWE on several occasions for their (relatively) low pay, noting that while the talent in the "Big 4" American sports leagues collect somewhere in the neighborhood of half of all revenue in the form of their salaries, in WWE it's around 15% at best. Of course, none of the Big 4 sports leagues is a publicly traded company like WWE, something else that Cornette thinks has a huge part in all of WWE's various issues. Also unlike the players of the Big 4 (and basically every major professional sports league in the world), professional wrestling doesn't have a union of any kind. A few wrestlers have SAG-AFTRA cards, but those don't cover wrestling shows something Cornette believes they only get away with because Vince McMahon is a big GOP donor (though the "independent contractor" thing is standard practice in wrestling, WWE’s “independent contractors“ aren’t allowed to wrestle anywhere else while under contract with WWE, meaning they are employees in every sense that benefits the company, without the company having to assume many of the responsibilities it would be legally required to if they were actual employees) and the U.S. government thinks wrestling is a joke to begin with, he then agreed with WWE about the third party deals, albeit for a different reason. WWE shut it down because it considers its wrestlers to be Intellectual Property, while Cornette is against it because it always breaks kayfabe and often contradicts what's being seen on TV.
• Jerkass to One: While he can be just as critical of NXT as he is of AEW at times, his hatred is usually reserved for Johnny Gargano, whom he declares has no business being on television (let alone as a top star) due to his size and limited facial expressions with his only redeeming factor being his wrestling skills (believing he should be a coach for the WWE Performance Center or motion capture person for video games). To the point where when he heard that Gargano's contract was up for renewal, he insisted that WWE should cut their losses with him, seeing absolutely no value in him, and that the only way he would ever support him is if he were to job to Marko Stunt in AEW, if only to show where his place in wrestling should be.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Pretty much every time you hear Cornette in an interview, he's a loud-mouthed, vitriol-spewing F-bomb machine that will eat up every second of time he can to bash everyone he hates in wrestling. However, this is because he loves the business and can't stand that the younger generation is being stifled by older stars that hog the spotlight.
  • Cornette is a longtime supporter of the WHAS Crusade for Children, a charity in Louisville that supports services for disabled children. Both he and his fans (the Cult of Cornette) have made multiple donations, and Cornette has often promoted the charity on both his podcasts.
• Karma Houdini: Views Hangman Adam Page as this, as he blamed him for the whole fiasco between CM Punk and The Elite as it was caused by his "Worker's Rights" promo to begin with, yet he came out scott free while the others were suspended and stripped of their titles.^note To be fair Page wasn't suspended for the All Out fight because he wasn't there when it happened, though Cornette's point is that he should have been outright fired the moment he dropped the AEW world title to Punk, if not immediately after he went into business for himself on the promo.
• Kayfabe: Came up in the days when it was sacrosanct and still believes it should be protected as much as possible. Contrary to popular belief, he's not opposed to things like high flying and hardcore wrestling on principle, but he does think every match should look as much like a real fight or athletic contest as possible, and hates when things are taken to such an extreme that it looks obviously choreographed. He's described his ideal match as one where fans think that the wrestlers really hate each other and the worked match may have degenerated into a shoot fight.
  "Say what you want about wrestling, those guys are mad!"
  • When he started working as a manager in the CWA, he had been doing odd jobs in the arenas for a few years, been a ringside photographer and penned a few magazine articles. In his first promo, he acknowledged this and claimed he had been been dabbling in various roles as a hobby before deciding to use his mother’s money to become a manager. Although 95% of fans likely wouldn’t be aware of him, Jerry Jarrett didn’t want the minority who might recognize his face or name to think “Wait, why is the kid from the merch tables suddenly a manager?” and suspect wrestling was fake, and so weaved his real life history into his gimmick.
• Kick the Dog: "I've got to go kick some puppies, kick the cat's milk over and treat people lousy, the way I usually do."
• The Last DJ: He is without a doubt one of the most talented managers and promoters of all time, a man whose love for Professional Wrestling rivals Ric Flair's, John Cena's and Ryback's combined and has the knowledge to match. However, several things, including a caustic personality, a willingness to knock who he works for and his vision of wrestling not fitting in with "Sports Entertainment" or the Attitude Era has kept him mostly behind the scenes, and he has walked out of or been fired from every promotion he worked for.
• Malaproper: Cornette tends to deliberately mispronounce the names of wrestlers he isn't a fan of, e.g. Nia Jax, who he often refers to as "NEE-ah" instead of "NYE-ah" Jax.
  • Ever since CM Punk's 2021 return Cornette segues into reviews of his content by singing hilariously wrong words to Punk's theme song, "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour. He always starts with the "Like Mussolini" line, but it quickly falls apart thereafter.
• Malicious Misnaming: Basically his trademark now that he's a full time podcaster, see Embarrassing Nickname above. He used it quite a bit as a manager too.
• Momma's Boy: Early on in his managerial career he was implied to be one of these - he was sometimes mockingly referred to as "Mrs. Cornette's baby boy". This aspect of his character was quietly dropped after his first several years in the business. Jim Cornette had started taking pictures and ring announcing while he was a teenager, so his mother had to drive him to shows. By the time Cornette became a manager though, he was 20 and had his own driver's license, so only the oldest and most astute fans would have known the "momma Cornette" people were talking about. In-storyline, it was she who gave the money that got Cornette his kayfabe bodyguard, Big Bubba Rogers. (The man who dropped him in the aforementioned reference to the scaffold match which screwed up both Cornette's knees.)
• Mind Rape: The exact phrase he uses to describe what he believes WWE did to Doug Basham.
• Motive Rant: Some people think that Jim hates Kenny Omega because Omega backed out of a show Cornette was involved in by pretending to be injured so he could go work in Japan. Jim has consistently denied this, and explained in multiple videos exactly why he hates Omega so much. In short, Jim sees Omega has being one of the biggest influences on all the ways that the wrestling business has changed for the worse (in Jim's opinion) in recent decades. He thinks Kenny and similar wrestlers like The Young Bucks have turned professional wrestling into a giant joke with what he considers their comedy antics.
• Motor Mouth: His trademark promo style consists of him talking constantly and very quickly. He developed it while working for World Class Championship Wrestling in Dallas due to his interview time being compressed.
• Multiple Demographic Appeal: As he put it...
  Jim Cornette: I remember going to arenas in the 80s, where the audience was 60% female and they were all trying to kill us for beating up Ricky Morton. Those people spent the same amount of money as the guys did but now the audience is 80% men and whatever women those men can drag to the matches with em because it's their night out. So we have completely shut off... where else do you find a business featuring a bunch of good looking guys wearing very little clothes and no women want to see the show? Riddle me that, Lucy!
• My Greatest Failure: Jim admitted to coming up with the Montreal Screwjob in June 2019. (He did it as a hypothetical, not thinking McMahon would use it.) He later realized that the Screwjob was the event that killed off kayfabe. Cornette blames the decline of the wrestling business on the death of kayfabe and he's been trying to get the wrestling business to rebuild it ever since.
• Nerd Glasses: A wrestling nerd and, to a lesser extent, a computer nerd. The oversized style he wears double as The Artifact, as they have not been fashionable since the 80s, but are so associated with him he couldn't have it differently.
• Non-Action Guy: Cornette actually has "worked" the occasional match, usually as part of a six-man tag with The Midnight Express or as a result of a wrestler winning five minutes with Jim as part of a stipulation. His contributions would generally be to cower in the corner and bump around like a ping pong ball, the only offense he ever got was a sneak attack with his racquet. Justified since his gimmick as a manager was that he was an untrained, unathletic pansy who couldn’t fight, and he would have cursed out anyone who suggested he have anything resembling a competitive match with any wrestler.
• Nostalgia Filter: Is open about hating most current wrestling, and holding his time with Bill Watts's Mid-South Wrestling as a golden age never to be reached again.
• Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: Stock in trade as a heel manager, he had that tennis racquet for a reason.
• Not Hyperbole: When Kenny Omega, in an interview claimed Cornette exaggerated his hatred for Omega to play a character, Cornette rather bluntly replied on his podcast that he was not playing a character, was not being hyperbolic, and meant every word of what he said about wanting someone to cripple Omega.
• Oh, Crap!: "I see a sissy!"
• Pet the Dog: Whenever a wrestler passes away, Jim usually gives them a long, heartfelt tribute replete with humorous anecdotes dedicated to their memory.
  • Cornette's dislike of Ultimate Warrior is no secret, and while Cornette will speak ill of the dead in this case, he still promised to refrain from doing so while recapping Warrior's career when the news first broke.
  • After the passing of Jon Huber (aka Brodie Lee, aka Luke Harper), Cornette said he would not review the AEW "Celebration of Mr. Brodie Lee's Life" broadcast. He further stipulated that whatever they wanted to do on that show was fine and he would not comment on it at all, and also refuses to comment on anything the promotion does with Lee's young son, Brodie (who the promotion features as a recurring performer, first under the name Negative One and now as Mr. Brodie Lee Jr.). Finally, he retroactively retracted all criticism he'd ever had for Lee's in-ring work, feeling that whatever killed him so suddenly was almost certainly having negative effects on his body prior to his passing and therefore his judgment was unfair.
• Photographic Memory: He seems to be a rare real-life example of somebody having something closer to it, as noted by his many, many shoot interviews. Ask him about a topic, say the Brawl for All, and he'll happily describe it in great detail for 15 minutes on what it was about, who he could remember was involved and how good they were or could have been and everything he saw wrong with it. Especially everything he saw wrong with it.
  Madusa: How the hell do you remember this shit?!
  • Per Jim, this is attributable to the fact that he is a compulsive note-taker who saves everything. He has detailed hand-written records of every match he has ever participated in, booked, agented, or otherwise been involved with the creative direction of. He also has detailed attendance figures, gate receipts, and payoff information going back to his first match. He even has week-to-week notes on how much he made selling photographs as a teenager. He also takes pretty detailed notes while watching shows he's reviewing for the podcast, many of the examples listed under Embarrassing Nickname above are from Cornette having to come up with shorthand for some people's names. When he hates a show you'll usually hear him tearing up his notes in anger after the main event, for a couple shows he really hated he nearly set them on fire.
  • It also helps that unlike most people in the wrestling business he never got into drugs and barely even drinks, so he was sober enough to remember everything.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • His Fuck You's of the week on Who's Slamming Who.
  • After the aforementioned Mind Rape of Doug Basham, where WWE Creative sloughed off the trademark biker look of then-developmental champion Basham by shaving him bald because they couldn't imagine him bald, Cornette went off on John Laurinaitis saying that, with two weeks' notice, he could book Basham in a hair match, shave it, and sell tickets and make money. "Thank you, fuck you, bye!"
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Off camera Cornette is a huge Ernie Ladd fan who sings the praises of Shelton Benjamin to Earth, Wind & Fire. On camera he wants you black people to stay out of his business, which made it strange when the sergeant of his militia turned out to be a black woman. And religious people were a favorite target of Cornette's if he happened to be working a town in the so called "Bible belt" of the South West United States (off camera he's tolerant of religious guys like AJ Styles unless practitioners start proselytizing or forcing their practices on nonmembers). He's not much a fan of the blue collar workers either. And he has little patience for you Boricuas, though Cornette was fairly nice to Carlito Colón (who is black and Boricua) during one of his babyface authority figure runs runs in Ohio Valley.
• Power Stable
  • Militia (also known as Cornette's Army in Smoky Mountain), where Buddy Landel, Punisher (Bull Buchanan), Terry Gordy, Al Snow, Unabomb and sometimes Sgt. Rock handled the wrestling.
  • Cornette's Criminals, also in Smoky Mountain, which included two members of another power stable in The Moondogs.
  • Camp Cornette, which featured Yokozuna, Owen Hart, The British Bulldog and later Vader and then the NWA 'Invasion' with Jeff Jarrett, Barry Windham, and the New Midnight Express (Bob Holly and Bart Gunn), and, for a time, even his arch-rivals The Rock and Roll Express!
• Power Trio: With the Midnight Express, The Heavenly Bodies, Owen Hart, Yokozuna, The Briscoes and others.
• Real Men Wear Pink: And just about every other pastel color imaginable.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Tends to give these out like treats on Halloween to pretty much anybody who's crossed his path.
  • The most famous interview about Vince Russo produced the above picture.
    Jim Cornette: See, he was running a video store before Vince McMahon let him write for the magazine... He can't spell. He can't write or speak English! He "grew up in Brooklyn n' da Bronx or whateva" — I'm looking at the guy's pad: he can't spell, okay? It's not like he's a goddamn Rhodes scholar...So he's writing for the magazine. He insinuates himself. He's got good ideas. He has good ideas at a time when they need good ideas. And, you know, I'm not saying he's never had any good ideas. But you know what the problem is? The problem is that all the good ideas he's ever had is from watching those goddamn, cheap-ass B-movies that they used to rent at his goddamn loser video store. He doesn't know anything about wrestling. That's why when you hear "ding ding ding!", it's immediately followed 60 seconds later by "ding ding ding!" Keep the matches as short as possible. When that bell rings, Vince Russo is lost. Vince Russo is a babe in the woods. Vince Russo is a deer caught in the headlights, as long as there's a wrestling match going on. As long as he can make it a phony B-movie script or an outhouse in the ring, or women having miscarriages, or something that appeals to his New York bullshit attitude. So get the wrestling matches out of it, 'cause nobody wants to see that shit anyway. That's been proven over at WCW, where they don't even have wrestling matches anymore — I watched Thunder the other night, because I happened to be stuck in a hotel room; I saw Lance Storm falling around like a drunk man. When you make that guy uncoordinated, you can do it to anybody... He's got a bunch of fucking dancing bears parading around in the ring, a bunch of women with silicone, and a bunch of club-footed, slap-happy fucking guys that couldn't work their way out of a wet paper bag. And he don't know the fucking difference. And he's out there beating up Ric Flair with a baseball bat! Because he finally got to be a star. Now he doesn't have to subsist on the internet marks fuckin' clapping for him. He can have the fucking roar of their dwindling crowds, going, "ooh, that's uhh–yeah, that Russo guy. He's a star now! He beats the wrestlers!" He made this statement: "Well, we'll just teach actors to wrestle, because if I can learn to work in the ring, anyone can!" There's a goddamn news bulletin I didn't hear about when I heard about World War II and all the other great happenings of the past fifty years!: When did Vince Russo learn to fucking work? Jesus Fucking Christ. I wanna puke.
  • A rare editorial segment allowed to him on Raw during the Monday Night Wars saw him quite soundly tear apart a cage match pitting Hulk Hogan against "Rowdy" Roddy Piper at WCW Halloween Havoc 1997:
    Jim Cornette: I'm Jim Cornette, I just wonder if any of you are sick and tired as I am of people who claim to be the "ICON" of wrestling? Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper claim to be the icon, Shawn Michaels is the "icon that can still go", Bret Hart would claim to be the icon if he wasn't too busy crying about being screwed, and I guess Randy Savage is still "thinkin', thinkin'!" Well, Shawn Michaels is still the single most talented wrestler today inside the ring, but outside, he's an adolescent, obnoxious jerk who takes his tights and goes home if he doesn't get his way. Bret Hart is one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, but if he'd been screwed as many times as he claims, he would've struck oil by now. And Randy Savage is a legend, but let's face it, how many records did Frank Sinatra sell last year?
    
    But the pinnacle of this "icon" garbage came at last night's cage match between Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper, to determine–in their minds only–who the real icon is. WCW had the gall to say "this is the greatest cage match in history", when it was only the greatest in three weeks since Hell in a Cell. But here you've got a 46-year-old bald movie star wannabe who looks like Uncle Creepy with a good build taking on a guy with an artificial hip that hadn't wrestled a full schedule in 10 years! It's a tribute to the massive egotism, in my mind, of both men and indictment of WCW's promotional policies that this match even took place, much less being the main event, when the card was probably the best that WCW's capable of havin'! By the 10-minute mark, they were suckin' wind so bad the first three rows passed out of oxygen deprivation! – would've been funny if it wasn't so sad.
    
    Well, I'm sick and damn tired of hearing guys claim to be The Icon, especially when it usually comes from guys who just didn't know when to quit. Roddy Piper was my idol when I was a teenager, but that was 20 years ago. Hulk Hogan during his best years was 50% media creation, and those are long gone. This match was a slap in the face to every wrestler that takes pride in his profession! And in my mind, no one man is bigger than this sport, but if there is an Icon, it would be a man who has great ability inside the ring and professionalism and maturity outside of it! Let's leave all the petty, backstabbing, I-make-more-money-than-you BS with the hat-check girl, and concentrate on talent and attitude! The Undertaker, Ric Flair, and Steve Austin have never claimed to be icons, which means they're big candidates to be just that!
    
    And on a personal note to Hulk Hogan: you are a household word, but so is garbage; and it stinks when it gets old, too. I'm Jim Cornette, and that's my opinion.
  • He delivered a pretty stiff one of these to Impact Wrestling after seeing a particularly embarrassing match from a Impact-produced indie show during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The entire rant lasts about 6 minutes, but the closing alone is a pretty nasty example.
    Jim Cornette: "So if you would have asked that yesterday I would have said 'Well, ya know, they're trying, and they've got some good guys there, some friends of mine and employees there or...' but now, no. After I saw that, fuck you. Just get out of the fucking way at this point. Just let guys go somewhere where they can be fucking stars instead of goddamned subjecting the few remaining legitimate talents you have to this fuckin' horseshit and being associated with that until they get the stench of goddamned play wrasslers and grisly death on them too. I don't know why the fucking guys would even goddamn... contemplate going to... Why would you want to be involved with Impact Wrestling if that's the kind of shit they're putting out or validating? As a talent - why would you want to be there? Why would you want to be... especially not contractually obligated, when somebody legitimate might want to give you a fucking job, but just why would you want to validate something like that with your fucking presence if you're a real talent? If they can't do any better than that, quit."
  • Tammy Lynn Sytch has been on the receiving end of two of these after her arrest for DUI manslaughter in 2022. The first was Cornette more coming off like a very disappointed father, as he's one of the few people that Sytch has always got along with (and vice-versa). The second one after Sytch was convicted and tried to blame wrestling for her personal problems to get lighter sentence^note Using the usual claim of CTE, while in many cases this may be warranted for wrestlers (and other pro athletes) Stych wasn't a wrestler, just a manager. She did work a grand total of about thirty matches during her career, but these were comedy "manager" matches that required little athleticism on her part. Cornette even points out that in the all the time they worked together he didn't see her take a single bump (it didn't work, she got 17 years), sees Cornette take a much harsher tone, even saying that she should have got an even longer prison term. Naturally, the second one was followed by a Stephen P. New ad.
• The Rival: Paul Heyman, in a more Worthy Opponent manner than some of his other rivalries, they respect each other as bookers, but aren't fond of each other as people.
  Jim Cornette: He'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.
• Sanity Slippage: This is Jim's attempt to explain the horrific allegations about Vince McMahon that came out in 2024. In his video commenting on the revelations, Jim says that he never saw Vince write the sorts of texts or do the kinds of things the revelations described during his time in the WWE. Vince was always a ruthless bastard who didn't think the rules applied to him, but he never went this far. At about an hour into the video, Jim lays out his theory that years of late-age headshots, drugs and simple age all caused Vince's brain to pretty much melt, which caused Serial Escalation in his belief that he didn't have to follow any rules and could do whatever he wanted.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: He absolutely refuses to do any shoot interviews or projects with Russo regardless of how high the offer is. He asks people who make these offers to call Russo and tell him how much money Jim costed him. As of 2020, it was in the neighborhood of $40,000. According to Cornette, Rob Feinstein offered them more money than he's offered anyone to do a shoot together with a unformed police officer standing between them. Jim's response?
  Jim Cornette: I'll do it for free if you won't have the cop there. It'll be short but interesting.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: His reaction upon seeing the Montreal Screwjob. Being in the dark regarding what the plan was to end the match, Cornette hung around the back to see how it'd go down before quickly leaving the arena to avoid the mess that he'd knew would happen. That said, he said in a shoot interview that he would have done the same thing and that Bret should have just bitten the bullet. That being said, he has pointed out that most of the blame falls on Vince McMahon himself as he did not think to take the belt off of Bret before he decided to go back on the contract he had just signed Bret to. Cornette also has mentioned that, as wrestling has become sillier and sillier, with fake hand grenade spots and people being suplexed by a man's genitals, that he has grown to really appreciate, and miss, the seriousness in which Bret Hart took himself, and the sport of Wrestling. Finally, he has mentioned that he completely understands why Bret refused after all the crap Shawn Michaels had pulled, including openly refusing to ever put Bret over after Bret had just put him over in the Iron man match, and that if anyone in the whole world deserved to be treated with such disrespect...it was Shawn.
• Self-Deprecating Humor: Jim originally spoke the above line about Household Names in reference to himself when he was called such on the news, saying that the name people used in their houses for him couldn't be spoken on television.
• Serious Business: Wrestling. Jim lives and dies by the sport and is a staunch traditionalist. He despises people who disrespect and look down wrestling and cause damage to its credibility and integrity, such as Vince Russo (who, among other sins, insisted that he wasn't a wrestling booker, he was a "TV writer").
• Seven-Year Rule: Besides naming the trope, he had the following to say when asked by Slam! Sports about Samoa Joe and Kurt Angle putting on an "MMA style match" (which is also what people said about Joe vs Low Ki in Ring of Honor):
  Jim Cornette: UFC and MMA is really professional wrestling from 100 years ago. Unfortunately they have been able to present our business better than anyone in our business can present our business! Everything that they are doing came from wrestling. But it's the circle; wrestling will pick back up from UFC and MMA, the things that it used to do 100 years ago, and will present them as new to our wrestling fans. NBC used to have a slogan: "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you," and that was their way to sell re-runs. Well we can do the same thing that wrestling did 50 or 100 years ago, and then we can act like we just thought of it.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Pastel suits! He would manage wearing more gaudy outfits and colors than seen in Miami Vice.
• She Who Must Not Be Seen: Mama Cornette. Jim explains that the main reason why she was never seen is that a lot of people in his home territory actually knew what she looked like because she drove him to matches when he was a teenager.
• Sissy Villain: Invoked this trope during his early career, wherein he talked about his (unseen) "mama Cornette" and how she apparently paid for his tennis lessons (which explained why he carried around a tennis racket)
• Smug Snake: As an interviewed fan said upon watching Cornette try to wrestle when he came to Charlotte, North Carolina, "Jim Cornette is the lowest life form there is." Cornette was insistent the people loved him while this was going on. When the crowd started chanting "Faggot!" he then admitted "some" people didn't like him and he couldn't please everybody.
• Somebody Doesn't Love Raymond: Kenny Omega is widely respected and praised by many wrestling legends. Jim is an exception in that he has a seething hatred of Omega, who he considers a symbol of everything that's gone wrong with the wrestling business.
• Spoiled Brat: His original gimmick was a rich kid who bought his way into the wrestling business with his mother's money.
• Start of Darkness: To explain to the Memphis Wrestling fans why the ring photographer was suddenly a Jerkass manager, Cornette initially offered his services to several of the company's top stars. They turned him down and made fun of him in the process, leading Cornette to want revenge.
• Stealing the Credit: Among the many other things Cornette hates Vince Russo for, he doesn't seem impressed with Russo implying that he was responsible for the success of the WWE's Attitude Era. As Cornette put it, it's not like having Vince McMahon as a filter, the WWE shows' high quality production values, and stars like Mick Foley, Dwayne Johnson and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, had anything to do with that success.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome
  • Cornette has a ton of stories about his violent altercations with fans in the late Seventies and early Eighties, including getting arrested multiple times and even spending a few nights in jail. As a result of this fairly extensive record he is (legitimately) no longer allowed in Canada.
  • In 2020, AEW contracted wrestler Joey Janela, who has taken shots at Jim online and on the air before, and who Jim vocally and publicly hates, announced that he and his Tag Team partner Sonny Kiss would soon appear in AEW as The New Midnight Express. Many of Cornette's detractors were thrilled by this epic Troll and couldn't wait to see Jim absolutely lose it. However, since Cornette co-owns the rights to the name "Midnight Express" (a least in a wrestling context), he simply had his lawyer call AEW's legal department and inform them that one of their contracted performers was planning to commit trademark infringement. As of yet, Janela and Kiss have not appeared as the Midnight Express.
• Take That, Critics!: When New York Post writer Phil Mushnick used Brian Pillman's death as an excuse to launch a crusade to shut down professional wrestling, Cornette fought back in one of his angrier segments where one of the many many things he said is that wrestling fans do not appreciate being insulted by a publication they pay money to read. This was point 141 of about 200 he got off his chest, and there was a follow up video where fans voiced their opinion of the New York Post being used to attack wrestling fans.
• Talk Show with Fists: "The Louisville Slugger"
• This Is Gonna Suck: How he described the infamous 25 ft. scaffold match. "Boys...the University of Alabama Crimson Tide couldn't 'catch me like they catch the girls at the football games'..."
• Toothy Issue: Blamed a mouth injury he received in Ring of Honor on guest talents from CZW but this was later changed to Low Ki because Ring of Honor needed a way to write him off their shows.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Man loves his Wendy's.
  • And will order a Sprite with that combo. His trademark drink.
• Underwear of Power: When Jim Cornette actually wrestled alongside the Midnight Express (or rather, tried to), he wore them. Unlike most wrestlers, Cornette wore these over top of his pants! This has basis in the way real athletes dressed in the 1920s, but Jim was doing this in the 80s!
• Ungrateful Bastard: He considers Dave Bautista this. Batista was pushed as the top guy during his run in Ohio Valley Wrestling, winning the OVW Heavyweight Championship and going over such wrestlers as Kane and The Undertaker, and only doing the job a few times, once to Kane and on his way out to John Cena. Later in his career, Batista would run down his time in OVW, saying it was his Old Shame and disrespecting Cornette and Danny Davis. Cornette was furious.
• Un-person:
  • While he certainly has his unfavorites (see above), he has since created "rules" in regards to certain wrestlers/performers of which he will refuse to watch anything involving them, notably the "Tooth and Nail rule,"^*Dr. Britt Baker, Reba, and Big Swole, all three of whom were involved in the "Tooth and Nail match", basically a hardcore match held in Baker's real-life dental office. Cornette has apparently rescinded this one as he's watched plenty of Britt Baker matches since. the "Drake Maverick rule,"^*Maverick got involved in several skits around the WWE 24/7 Championship, most of them involving Maverick getting into increasingly embarrassing situations along with his (real-life) wife, while also trying to "consumate" their marriage. and the "Blissful Orton rule."^*Alexa Bliss, Randy Orton, and Bray Wyatt, the three who were involved in a storyline that led to an intergender match between Bliss and Orton match at Fastlane 2021, which consisted of Bliss demonstrating supernatural powers to Orton for a few minutes before Wyatt (returning after being absent for a while) attacked Orton to give Bliss the win. At least he's willing to watch matches that involve people such as Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks.
    • "The Fiend" Bray Wyatt deserves his own mention. As anyone aware of Cornette's dislikes in wrestling could predict, it wasn't a surprise that every appearance by "The Fiend" has Cornette like him less each time he watched his matches/segments due to Cornette perceiving them as increasingly ridiculous. It's reached the point where he has stated that he didn't want to watch two wrestlers he was previously high on again due to their involvement with him (Randy Orton and to a lesser degree John Cena). The Orton/Alexa Bliss match at Fastlane was the last straw, resulting in the aforementioned "Blissful Orton rule", as he declared it to be worse than even the "Tooth And Nail" match.
  • While Cornette has discussed episodes of Dark Side of the Ring on his podcast (as he is a regular contributor on the series), he refused to watch "The Ultra-Violence of Nick Gage", as he doesn't acknowledge Gage as a wrestler due to being an infamous Garbage Wrestler who is the embodiment of deathmatch wrestling.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: He says in one interview that he was the first one in a booking meeting to suggest (jokingly) a double cross on Bret Hart in Montreal. However in his version, Bret would have faced Ken Shamrock instead. In June 2019 Cornette detailed on his podcast that he actually came up with the finish. He says he suggested it hypothetically because Vince McMahon rarely took his suggestions. Cornette didn't know Vince was actually going to use the finish until he saw it live that night. This crosses over into My God, What Have I Done? territory when Cornette realized that the Montreal Screwjob killed kayfabe, and he came up with the whole thing.
• Villain Team-Up: In Mid-South Wrestling, Wendi Richter would sometimes come to the frail manager's aid and slip him weapons to use on the baby faces, especially fabrics soaked in ether.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With a fellow/rival manager Synn, the wicked witch of Kentuckiana, who caused trouble in OVW with her disciples, whom he eventually married in real life. To a lesser extent, Sherri Martel, the first wrestler he ever managed but later wound up as the valet of his enemy, Shawn Michaels. To an even lesser extent but still worth mentioning, Vince McMahon. Jim does not like Vince's business practices, politics or philosophy on wrestling, but will admit Vince kept the WWF smoothly running, got the industry better than the Turner/Sinclair/Panda suits and that his main gripes were with Vince's stooges than with Vince directly.
• Voodoo Shark: Or as Cornette puts it, "lazy booking". He usually uses this term to refer to no-disqualification matches, which he considers to be zero-thought ways to create a screwy finish that always leave the fans asking more questions than they had answered. He's especially critical of the recent trend that three- and four-man matches are no disqualification by default, as it makes him and the fans wonder why the wrestlers in the match don't immediately bring out weapons or get outside interference involved.
• We Used to Be Friends:
  • Cornette and Chris Jericho. Both men met in the mid-1990s when Cornette was running Smoky Mountain Wrestling and developed a long friendship that lasted even as Jericho signed with AEW. Several incidents in 2020, however, made Cornette very critical of Jericho, especially Jericho's public support of Donald Trump (and his later less-than-convincing attempts to sound apolitical) and his decision to play the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2021, Cornette finally confirmed that he and Jericho are indeed no longer friends.
  • Cornette also burned bridges with Wrestling With Wregret's Brian Zane after the latter tweeted in defense of comedy wrestling and asked an "old man" to "let people enjoy the clowns." Although Zane wasn't referring to anyone in particular, just referring to what he considered "old man mentality", he was snitch-tagged by one of Cornette's followers, leading to Cornette cutting ties with Zane and blocking him from Twitter.
  • Cut a promo on Dave Meltzer on his podcast after Dave said that The Young Bucks were the modern-day equivalent of The Midnight Express. He concluded the promo by announcing that their friendship was over, and Dave was dead to him. Cornette later elaborated on, accusing Dave of having slandered him for disliking Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks, and that he'll never mend fences with Dave.
  • He was childhood friends with Kenny Bolin, but after a series of incidents that he considered All Take and No Give from Bolin, Cornette started to view him as a poisonous friend which led to their infamous debate on the "Who's Slammin Who" podcast. They later became friends again, but that soon went south once more after Cornette found out that a phone call between himself and Bolin was recorded during Vince Russo's podcast, which angered him.^note Bolin was a co-host at the time. Being shunned over this, on top of feeling that he was now the one suffering from All Take and No Give, such as Cornette forcing Bolin to cooperate with a man who he condsidered "his Vince Russo" during Mama Cornette's funeral, is what led to Bolin being the one to end the friendship this time. Though Bolin has stated that he's open to make amends, him seemingly supporting the accusations made against Cornette during the #SpeakingOut movement shows that it won't be anytime soon.
  • Believe it or not, but Vince Russo. When he was first brought onto the creative team, Jim wanted to train Russo about wrestling. They would ride in a car together and actually enjoyed playing up The City vs. the Country dynamic between them- Russo as the New York City slicker that eats healthy and that knew nothing about "wrasslin'" and Jim playing the part of the country boy that likes fried/fatty food and is a wrestling encyclopedia. After a few weeks, Jim noticed that Russo didn't care about wrestling and the friendship terminated.
• Wimp Fight
  • Jim was initially terrified when he, a manager, was asked to participate in matches. Jimmy Hart reassured Cornette that they need only roll around.
  • In regards to women in the sport, he has said women do not make as good as managers as men, because it's not as acceptable to beat up on a petite woman as it is a wimpy man. He's also said there is nothing worse than pretty women who can't wrestle trying to do pro wrestling. He has said there is money to made in building two pretty women who can't wrestle towards a cat fight though. (For the record, he ended up dating and marrying a female manager.)
• Worked Shoot:
  • He had several during the Monday Night Wars when he was still employed by the (then) WWF as on-screen talent. Of course, how much was "worked" and how much was "shoot" was up for debate, since apparently his instructions were limited to "Don't curse, don't get us sued." A few even lambasted then-current WWF stars, as Cornette said later "I'm going to hit us for jaywalking and petty theft so when I hit them for arson and murder no one can say I was only taking shots at one side." These segments are basically the Spiritual Predecessor to his now-famous rants from so many online sources.^note Though really the first documented one of his rants happened a couple years beforehand during his brief return to WCW in 1993, where he cut a worked shoot promo on the company that was so nasty that Eric Bischoff bleeped a lot of it before it aired and killed the proposed SMW/WCW crossover right out of the gate (though Cornette ended up just taking it to the WWF instead, where he got SMW even more exposure than he would have with WCW). This promo also got executive producer Bill Watts fired... and replaced with Bischoff, which caused Jim Ross to quit and head up north. Bischoff, of course, is the guy that thought Steve Austin, Mick Foley, Triple H, and Edge (among others) couldn't draw money. We know how that worked out. Pretty crazy how one little insignificant promo that never really went anywhere had such long-lasting effects on the business, right? Ironically they started when Jim decided to go off on web show Byte This, figuring no one watched them. Someone did, and there was a demand to see more on Raw.
  • During the feud between Jim Cornette's The Midnight Express, and Paul E. Dangerously's Original Midnight Express, Jim and Paul were booked in a tuxedo match. What fans (and the bookers) were expecting was a brief comedy match between two non-wrestlers with minimal bumps. The two got together and decided to make it look like a legit brawl between two non-athletes who didn't know how to fight but wanted to cripple each other. It looked for all the world like Cornette and Paul had decided to settle their bad blood in the ring, that they really hated each other in Real Life, and that this feud was not a performance.
• Wrestling Managers Are Heels: He was so viciously hated early in his career that several fans were apparently arrested for trying to assault him during shows. Cornette has often joked about keeping actual death threats from young fans of the Rock N' Roll Express as mementos of the heat he had, even showing off examples for a scrapbook of photos and other memorabilia from his time managing The Midnight Express.
• Writer on Board: Cornette has a low tolerance for head drops, never mind garbage wrestling. Also little for "cartoon wrestling", rapping, breast implants...which made him an ill fit for promotions that run off of one or more of those. Most famously, he always ranted about the WWF production crew while he was on commentary rather than admit Undertaker's special effects came from a supernatural source. It was also Cornette who decided Boogeyman just thought he was the Boogeyman. Banning pile drivers in Ring Of Honor turned out not to be a case of this, but an attempt to get heat on the wrestlers who would inevitably keep using them anyway. This had worked for NWA figures the fans tended to like but not in ROH because the fans hated Cornette and gave him heat instead of any wrestlers (so he had to be removed from sight).
• You Wouldn't Hit a Guy with Glasses: Averted during his career as a mostly Heel manager. Comes with the territory.
• Yoko Oh No: Discussed by Jim on his podcast. It's usually averted, as Cornette points out how many wrestlers and managers who were either introduced to the business by a significant other or got together while working in the business went on to successful careers. However, he does note a few cases where a wrestler's significant other caused him or her major problems:
  • Allison Horner, the wife of Tim Horner in Smoky Mountain Wrestling. She shared her husband's belief that he was a bigger star that deserved more pay and better booking than Jim thought he did, which caused him no shortage of problems. The Last Straw for Horner in SMW was when Allison humiliated Cornette at a TV taping by yelling at him about not paying her husband enough in front of nearly the entire roster while holding her newborn baby in her arms. Cornette, knowing full well that Horner put her up to it, fired him the next day.
  • One of Cornette's many problems with Sable was how she buried her husband Marc Mero by powerbombing him on national TV, essentially killing any chance of him ever being taken seriously as a main event talent. According to Cornette, she just got in the business to get famous and didn't care about actually helping anyone else—even her husband—get over, and as soon as she got more famous than him, she divorced him.
  • Cornette's not a big fan of Bonnie Steamboat, the wife of Ricky, finding her incredibly controlling and hard to work with both in and out of kayfabe. He cites her as a major reason why Steamboat's 1989 Family Man gimmick got so much hate—she came across to the fans as a stuck-up bitch, and the fans didn't want to see their hero look like a Henpecked Husband. Outside the ring, she earned Cornette's disdain for refusing to let Ricky appear at a NWA/WCW tribute event Cornette was helping run that was less than 15 miles from his house.
  • He often talks about how Brandi Rhodes is someone who just drags Cody down, as he's annoyed by the sheer amount of screen time she got in AEW, both in her husband's feuds and outside them, despite, in Jim's opinion, not having the talent as a wrestler, manager, or even other on-air talent to deserve it.

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"Thank you. Fuck you. Bye!"

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