Pure vanilla is actually quite rich in flavor: some thoughts about characters in wrestling
A couple of days ago I tweeted something about how there’s a difference between having a personality and having a character. It was in response to this really bad Dolph Ziggler promo where he was going off about how he’s a real athlete and doesnt wear fancy robes or something. I said something about all the other real amateur guys getting how this was supposed to work then the “personality vs character” thing.
There’s a concept in wrestling known as the “vanilla midget”. Invented by Kevin Nash of the good half of the Kliq, this label originally referred to the smaller workrate guys like Chris Benoit or Dean Malenko and now gets applied to anyone who’s under six foot three and has worked in the indies for more than three months.
Ironically, Chris Benoit was probably one of the worst examples you could possibly use. It’s true that for most of his career he never really had a gimmick. But he was incredibly believable and credible looking as someone who was playing the part of a professional fighter. He was pretty much all intensity, which is why I’m using the past tense but that was covered in great detail by countless media outlets. In any case, when you heard his music and saw him walk down to the ring you knew somebody was going to get fucked the fuck up. Even though he didn’t have the intangibles to be a constant presence at the top of the card, his raw intensity as a performer allowed him to get two world championships and a spot as a gatekeeper to the main event. Although he was primarily an upper midcarder and tended to go for secondary belts he had enough credibility that you could have put him in a world championship match without anyone blinking an eye. If you got a victory against him, you instantly became a contender. Hell, Edge actually began his run as a main eventer by having a feud with Benoit. If Benoit were a vanilla midget there’s no way he would have gotten that far in the first place.
The most egregious use of this term is when I see it applied to Daniel Bryan/Brian Danielson. Aside from when he wore a mask as the American Dragon, Bryan has never really had a gimmick or a character. However he’s been over pretty much anywhere he’s gone because of his own charisma. There’s something that he projects that makes you want to root for him and that makes you vested in every match he’s in. He literally got the word “Yes” over as a chant to the point where college football games were Yessing after touchdowns. Even when he first turned heel, he wasn’t really playing any kind of character. At most he just did things like play up his real-life veganism and celebrate his victories more obnoxiously.
When I talk about “personality vs character” this is what I mean. It’s the difference between a three dimensional human being and a cartoon. To get over in any type of theatre or performance art(and wrestling is literally comedia dell’arte style theatre mixed with combat sports), the members in whatever audience you’re performing for has to find themselves in you somehow, whether good or bad. Either they relate in someway to the struggles and tribulations that you face or something about you forces them to reckon with something they hate about themselves. Most wrestlers that have broken through and gotten truly over toned down their characters and basically just played themselves but more intense. Or they just have motivations and responses that actually seem human. Look at Shawn Michaels, who was a boring curtain-jerker who could do cool shit back when he was carrying a mirror to the ring but who became a big deal when he achieved his “boyhood dream” and who really blew up during his real-life beef with Bret Hart. Hell, look at Bret Hart whose best work was when he felt that the company he sacrificed 13 years of his life for was passing him by for some rude newcomer who flipped people off and attacked cameramen.
On the other end, you have people like Bray Wyatt and the WWE version of Shinsuke Nakamura. I’ll start with the latter. He’s a rockstar and/or artist of some kind. He has seizures. He has a thick accent and is forced to give lengthy promos in a language that isn’t his and that has almost no roots in common with his. Contrast this with the “King of Strong Style” that he portrayed in NJPW. You have to start at the beginning where he started out as a legitimate mixed martial artist in early 2000s NJPW which had a bizarre focus on proving that their wrestlers could also be shoot fighters. This was an era where a lot of promising up-and-comers left because of injuries and health problems sustained in shoot fights or unnecessarily stiff matches that didn’t really go anywhere. Nakamura from about 2012 to the end of his NJPW run was the last of a dying breed in a sense. Guys like Hiroshi Tanahashi, his main rival eschewed the concept of “strong style” as overly violent nonsense, which it was in a lot of ways. But you have Nakamura the survivor hitting people with these really rough knees and slapping the shit out of people basically serving as a warrior demi-god of sorts. This is where all of the pageantry and the leather and the Crip walking comes in. Nakamura, as the last survivor of the strong style era of NJPW, is so non-plussed by his competition or the notion that he even has competition that he just fucks with his opponent’s heads. It almost does make sense in a boxing kind of way. The King of Strong Style was kind of a gimmick, but one that stems from the reality of Shinsuke Nakamura the man as he progressed through puroresu.
Then there’s Bray Wyatt, who’s a failed cult leader of some kind and has a cool entrance. He’s kind of pointless and boring and gives really pointless, boring Reddity promos. But he pulled Jojo so I guess there’s something there, I don’t know.
Off the top of my head the two people who have actually pulled off three-dimensional characters in the WWE are the Undertaker and Miz. They both kind of started out as one-dimensional characters, Undertaker as a mortician zombie biker and The Miz as…I’m guessing a pick up artist. As their careers progressed, Taker stayed a zombie and Miz, who starred in a bunch of straight to DVD movies, became a stereotypical Hollywood douchebag.
When the Undertaker came back as his zombie character in 2004, he had been in the company for 14 years. He was the last link to the Hulk Hogan era which when the WWE first became a national promotion, which is actually somewhat similar to Nakamura’s King of Strong Style persona. Unlike other wrestlers from that era he was still having great matches. If anything he was much better in his autumn years. . Bizarrely enough this added another level to the character of the Deadman, as his “powers” were increasing the older he got. When he lost to Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania 30, it was almost a supernatural occurance. The Deadman was a mere shell of his former self and when he finally succumbed to Roman Reigns this at this past April’s Wrestlemania he could barely pick him up for his signature Tombstone Piledriver. At the end of the match, the arena was crying because they would probably never see a zombie mortician biker again. That’s how much nuance the Undertaker ended up developing.
The Miz always blurred the lines between his wrestling character and the real-life person Mike Mizanin, formerly of The Real World: New York. His history on reality TV was always a point of contention both backstage and in kayfabe, despite John Cena being on a reality show during his indy days and future tag champion and announcer David Otunga being a contestant on I Love New York 2. Miz, who was a lifelong superfan(he showcased his persona on Real World while holding a replica belt) and who actually trained at the same indy Cena started in before going on Tough Enough, was and to a degree still isn’t taken seriously because he was on MTV for a few months. This created a fascinating dynamic where, through hard work and dedication, he had achieved his lifelong dream of being a star in the WWE but he was a heel because of it. Mizanin the person was not accepted by the fans so he fell deeper and deeper into the persona of The Miz, who at that point was the same type of corporate shill that John Cena gets accused of being. Miz, company man that he is, starts doing all of those shitty WWE Studios movies and decides that he’s an A-List actor and acts like he’s above the WWE. This is where the character of The Miz has been for the past few years.
Watch the promo above, where The Miz lambastes Daniel Bryan for being a quitter and not loving the fans. The whole premise of the current Miz character is that he’s a deluded Hollywood wannabe that is too good for the world of professional wrestling and that we should be grateful that he is sullying himself by entering a ring and performing for us rubes. Yet the entire premise of this promo is that he prides himself on performing day in and day out without risking his career and doesn’t get any credit for his dedication to his craft. This is one of the moments where the carefully crafted Miz persona cracks and the person Mike Mizanin emerges to show how anguished he is that he will never get the respect that he deserves. That underneath the expensive haircut and the four thousand dollar three piece suits is the same young man who wants to feel the adulation and love that he and millions(and millions) gave The Rock every time he sauntered down to the ring. Over the past year more and more cracks have shown up and this past Monday on the Raw after Summerslam, Miz got one of the largest pops of the night. The faux hawked, fedora-clad fuckhead from Real World has become one of the most compelling and subtly tragic superstars in the company.
So with all that said, what exactly is a vanilla midget?

This guy.

Or him.
