Daniels and Kazarian: An Appreciation

ZUBAZ! FANNY PACKS! EXCELLENCE!
Photo Credit: Impact Wrestling.com

Wrestling as an artform gets a rap of being stuck interminably in the past. While I don't think it's a function of anything inherent within the spectacle, the fact that its performers and fans seem to always be a bit behind the times makes it pretty easy to levy that kind of charge against it. I always use the example of Bob Backlund's Opie-looking ass being the flag bearer for the WWF during a time when the disco era was shedding the disco but keeping the cocaine to punctuate this. Even today, John Cena is probably a couple of years behind the times. Even if that's still better than Backlund being two decades behind what was chic, there's still room for improvement.

So, if you were an enterprising wrestler who actually got pop culture and wanted to make fun of the business, what would you do? Well, first off, you'd be late to the party, because Frankie Kazarian and Christopher Daniels have beaten you to it, at least for one night. After coming out in the opening segment looking like bad parodies of skater kids, they wrestled the main event in Zubaz pants after coming to the ring with fanny packs. Real, honest-to-God Zubaz pants. I wasn't sure whether to be horrified or to rejoice in the fact that the Zubaz pant hasn't gone extinct and upset the balance of the ecosystem.

The thing about that whole thing wasn't that they were wearing old clothes; it's that they were making fun of not only wrestling's propensity to be stuck in the past, but the inclination of wrestlers to still wear Zubaz, fanny packs, and other fashion atrocities. To someone not in on the joke, their attire and their chosen language in the opening segment could have come off as hokey, but in the ironic sense, the sense that Kaz and Daniels came out to take the piss out of the crowd because that's what they enjoyed doing? Then their presence on Thursday was awesome.

Of course, this is par for the course for those two. K. Sawyer Paul has noted that they're the only two guys on Impact who look like they're having fun. I would expand that to include Robbie E, Jessie, Tara, and perhaps Joey Ryan. Even so, none of those guys look like they're loving life as much as Kaz and Daniels are. I mean, who else is going to go full on Gangnam Style in the middle of a match? As confused and resistant to it as Taz is to seeing them dance mid-match is how awesome I find it.

Then again, is it any shock that in a company full of people who are always angry and wearing shitty, Affliction/Ed Hardy-clothing that the bad guys are the ones who have fun? Impact's main selling point is that they have more wrestling than WWE, even though I'd say that's not the case at all. It feels like everyone who is good has to be serious. Even Jeff Hardy, a guy who paints his face in a way that would suggest he likes getting down with his bad self, has this weird inner monologue thing where he's always talking about his feelings 'n shit. When did fun become such an awful thing?

That's why no matter what the alignment of their characters might suggest, I'm always rooting for Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian. Of course, that's always been the case, but it's even more magnified now that they are out there, provoking laughs and being loose and free and funny. Pro wrestling is very much a theater of the absurd. To embrace it is to excel at it. I very much appreciate that the team self-appointed as Bad Influence is hugging the shit out of that absurdity, because they're pretty much the best reason to tune into Impact right now.