During an interview with the SPORT1 Wrestling podcast, CM Punk talked about the creative process of his 2011 ‘pipebomb’ promo in WWE:
“I had to make an outline for Vince [McMahon] and I didn’t say anything I wrote in the outline, I just know that I needed him to agree and then I went out there and said whatever I wanted. I knew what I wanted to say, I knew I wasn’t stepping over the line and I knew nobody was going to be pissed at me. The thing with live television is, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. If I would have asked him to say all that stuff, he would have been like, ‘Don’t mention Brock, don’t mention Paul Heyman.’ Those guys, at the time, were persona non Grata. He would have been like, ‘What the hell is Ring of Honor? Don’t mention New Japan.’ I knew to make it the special piece of art that I wanted it to be, I had to go out there and say all of that. I wrote up a mock draft of it and he said, ‘Yeah, this is great.’ He asked me to add something making fun of Stephanie. I was like, ‘Okay.’ I went out there and I did it and it was good so it doesn’t matter.”
“They are a content company. It’s a lot and when you have that much, quality slips. It’s constant. You have to be on everything. When Rock came back on the first Raw, I was on like eight segments on that show. That’s oversaturation with a capital O. To rely on me that much and then to say that I wasn’t really that good is a little bit ridiculous, but they like their revisionist history. I think there’s a happy medium somewhere that we’re finding with AEW where everybody doesn’t need to be on every show and we have tons of main event talent that can fill those other gaps.”
