Would a Sane Person Want This Job?

The Original Horrible Boss Photo Credit: WWE.com

Mike "Christmas Ape" Tunison, the managing editor and lead dick-joke slinger at the world's best National Football League-related blog Kissing Suzy Kolber, passed along this link for the head writer job at WWE on Wednesday. Do I think he has the writing ability to do the job? Of course I do. I bought his book, for crying out loud, although football non-fiction is a different game than script-writing for professional wrestling. Still, the same kinds of skillset is involved, and good writers are good writers are good writers. Hell, I don't mean to be haughty, but I think I'd hack it pretty well as a WWE writer, head or otherwise. But I don't think either one of us has the mental makeup to be able to write for WWE. I mean, sure, Tunison drives himself crazy every Monday parsing human platitude generator and evil foul ball thief Peter King, but that's a different kind of crazy than what is heaped upon a person by one Vincent Kennedy McMahon.

Every week, there seems to be a new story about how the script from RAW gets rewritten a billion times because McMahon is loony-tunes in the noggin about how his product should go. I would summarily dismiss them as typical dirt sheet speculation retroactively explaining why the author of said report thought RAW sucked, but this is the one case where I believe those shadowy-sourced reports. It seems every writer who has come out of the McMahon-Helmsley think tank has needed a prescription for Lexapro and a long, relaxing vacation as far away from Stamford, CT as possible. Having to deal with Triple H barking "AM I GOING OVER?" and flying to McMahon's front door for an urgent meeting just to have him tell you to go home sounds like the tip of an iceberg of insanity.

So many people are bully over the direction of WWE right now, and it's hard to quash that enthusiasm. The product on the screen, when not populated by the McMahon-Helmsley Hydra (credit: Bill Bicknell), borders on phenomenal. They're slurping up all the right guys from the indies and following through on them in meaningful ways once they get to the main roster. Every show they produce has at least one match that they allow double-digit minutes to. They're opening up their Performance Center today to help streamline the developmental system. There are so many cogs at work in that corporate machine, but it feels like all that production is doing is making the show succeed in spite of its muddled creative mess.

The fact that this job posting isn't the first time WWE has put out a search for a new head writer is telling. I don't need specifics to know that working for McMahon specifically is probably hell, especially now that he's heading up the long, dusty trail into old age. It's hard for anyone to say he should give the company up, because even though it technically belongs to the shareholders, WWE is, and has been for the last 30 years, his baby, his vision. However, what happens when that vision gets muddled and cloudy? What happens when it turns into megalomania? What happens when it causes people not to want to work for you?

I am not a psychologist, but if I had to guess, I'd say there's a very high probability that Vince McMahon's neuroses are more numerous than the average human being's. I don't think sane is an absolute term; it's all relative. We all have our quirks. But it's clear that it takes a person with a very specific set of quirks to be able to deal with McMahon's demonic mental output. Would the average job seeker with the same talent pool that is required to be a head writer for a wrestling company that produces six-to-ten hours of first-run product every week also have that same mental makeup? That's a good question to ask. I don't know if it has an answer.