We’ve inducted a lot of stupid feuds here on WrestleCrap, but Shane McMahon vs. Braun Strowman, the subject of this week’s induction, is a little bit different.
It was a “stupid” feud, alright, because it all revolved that very word: stupid.
Also, because it was so insultingly dumb.
Like so many other storylines and segments during WWE’s ThunderDome era, this one benefited (or suffered) from the total lack of live feedback from the crowd. With no one around telling them how much it sucked, WWE could be as boring or as juvenile as it wanted (and in this case, both).
This storyline began when Braun Strowman was excluded from the Elimination Chamber match in 2021. That year, Raw’s Chamber match was reserved for former WWE champions, with the winner challenging for that title at WrestleMania.
Furious (but not furious enough to neglect branding), Braun demanded a WWE Championship opportunity the next night.
Shane McMahon vetoed it, dismissing Braun’s concerns and talking down to him. Braun’s brain, he suggested, couldn’t comprehend the idea of an Elimination Chamber just for former holders of the WWE Championship.
Not beating the accusations, Braun argued that, as a former Universal champion, he was “far more clarified” [sic] than Bobby Lashley, Miz’s challenger that night.
Braun came to suspect that “Adam and Pearce [sic] and Shane McMahon” had something against him, and he had no idea why. His proof? Two examples of unfair treatment, the first being his suspension for head-butting Adam Pearce.
Again, it seemed Shane McMahon had a point about Braun’s intellect.
Shane, on the other hand, used lots of big words like:
- myopic
- summation
- abhorrent
- kinesiology
- self-introspection [is there any other kind?]
In his ASMR voice, Shane told Braun that in his MBA classes, he’d learned about conflict management. The course texts, however, would be “way above” Braun’s reading level.
The next week, Braun demanded Shane apologize for this dig…
…and Shane complied by stating, simply, “I apologize”. But Raw must have been running ten minutes short or something, so the two men had another segment later in the night.
This time, Shane cut a style of promo wholly unfamiliar to wrestling fans, but quite familiar to Office fans.
Shane O’Mac hemmed and hawed and y’know’d his way through a four-minute improv-ersation…
…while a loop of white noise filled in his many awkward pauses. The gist of this marathon promo…
…was that Shane was calling Braun stupid while denying doing so.
Along the way, the boss listed off a great many insults that he found most objectionable, such as:
- “Stupid is as stupid does”
- “You fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down”
- “This guy is so stupid”
…and, giving the s-word a break, “Big man, little brain”.
But when he called Strowman, “Buh-buh-buh-Braun”, the big man chased after him at five miles an hour…
…just slow enough to watch Shane make his apparent getaway…
…and just far enough not to see Shane re-appear and call him stupid.
The next week, Braun challenged Shane to a match, and McMahon accepted, but not before stuttering un-ironically through the following insults:
- “If we could be inside your brain, we’d hear <<beeeeep>> nothing”
- “You look stupid, you act stupid, you definitely talk stupid”
- “You fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down”
- “Stupid is as stupid does”
- “You’re just plain stupid”
That night, Shane played hopscotch to teach Braun how to count…
…ambushed him when the big boy chugged around the ring like a choo-choo…
…and finally, Nickelodeon kid that he was, dumped a bucket—
—make that two buckets of green slime on him.
“Stupid is as stupid does, Braun!” taunted Shane once more.
As the match had never officially gotten under way, the two men were to meet that Sunday at Fastlane. Instead, Shane hurt his knee in training.
Slime is one thing, but there’s nothing funny about a leg injury…
…so McMahon had to pull out of the match. He did, however, show off his latest parody t-shirt. X-Punk? Mr. Sucko? Those look like barbs from the Algonquin Round Table compared to “Stupid Express”.
Now aligned with Elias, Shane penned a tune called, “Braun is Stupid”…
…which again referenced the stupid tree (Stupidasfuchsia simplicicaulis).
Fed up, Braun challenged Shane to a match at WrestleMania…
…a match Shane accepted unconditionally because—well, why do you think?
Further proving his point about Braun being stupid, Shane dug up Strowman’s fifth grade report card, where the Monster Among Men earned straight Ds.
It wasn’t just Braun who was stupid, but apparently the audience, too. Why else, besides a pandemic-era need to fill airtime, would Shane need read the teacher comments (the same ones displayed on screen) aloud to the viewers?
Hammering the point home about Braun Strowman (that point being that he’s stupid)…
…Shane showed off a Photoshop of a young Braun Strowman in a dunce cap and “2+2=5” written on the chalkboard.
The clincher was the logo on his sweater for WrestleMania XV—you would have to be stupid to like that one.
That’s when Braun Strowman dropped the bombshell: He was making their WrestleMania match (the one Shane had agreed to unconditionally) a steel cage match. Now who was stupid?
The answer: still Braun, who picked the one type of match Shane could win just by running away.
Strowman vowed to win his match for everyone who’d ever been called stupid. This drew a huge simulated pop from the Thunder Dome’s noise machine, really illustrating what WWE thought of its own viewers.
Any physical punishment Braun could dish out, however, wouldn’t match the agony in his soul whenever Shane called him stupid. Braun said this himself, for the record.
And so at WrestleMania, Braun threw Shane off the cage for his annual big bump…
…made McMahon know how bad it feels to be called Buh-buh-buh-Braun…
…and won for all the dumb-dumbs who’d ever been told they’re too stupid to win a cage match.
