CM Punk’s WWE return didn't work. Here’s why.
On narrative, character development and world building in professional wrestling. Yes, seriously.
CM Punk returned to WWE this week and, naturally, it was a big, ridiculous, polarizing deal for marks, smarks and industry insiders across the land.
Titillating and/or enraging professional wrestling people is what Punk (government name: Phillip Jack Brooks) does best, after all.
At 45 years old and wobbling down the back stretch of what has already been a very weird career, the man can still cause a scene.
After a legitimately surprising appearance at the end of WWE’s Survivor Series pay-per-view in his hometown of Chicago on Saturday, the company rolled him out for around eight minutes of live mic time at the end of its flagship Monday Night Raw TV show this week in Nashville.
From a technical standpoint, it went fine.
Brooks remains one of wrestling’s best promos. His timing was rough here and there, but he capably navigated a monologue written in the distinctive style of today’s WWE—meaning it felt over-produced while somehow also poorly thought out. He brought the live crowd up and down at the right moments, even if Nashville was less excited about the whole thing than Chi-Town had been.
It was a decent bit of mic work.
Otherwise? Eh. Night two of CM Punk’s WWE comeback kind of sucked.
It sucked for reasons big and small and friends—as this Substack’s resident professional fiction writer, who knows as many as two things about craft—I am here to tell you why.
Start with the obvious stuff:
For a guy returning after nearly 10 years away to reassert himself as one of WWE’s top talents, this promo was a flat tire.
It included none of Punk’s trademark blistering rhetoric, which so enticingly straddled the line between fiction and reality during his previous WWE run. Nothing here came close to his legendary "pipe bomb" promo, which pretty much single-handedly brought me (and many other lapsed fans) back to wrestling in 2011.
If viewers expected the fire-breathing, Molotov-cocktail throwing Punk of those days, they were no doubt disappointed. The only moments that called up the fourth wall-busting guy we used to love were references to his real-life, retired-wrestler wife AJ Lee (government name: April Jeanette Mendez) and a throwaway ad lib about hockey.
(One of those references drew cheers, the other only seemed to confuse people. I’ll let you guess which did which.)
Worse, Punk’s promo featured no real call to action. He dropped some vague references to other WWE wrestlers he said weren’t happy with his return, but he didn’t name names. He didn’t call anybody out. He didn’t set up a hot feud or an upcoming match or even a cliffhanger ending to get all the little Punk-a-Maniacs out there to tune in next week, brother.
You’d think doing at least one of those things would be a bedrock requirement of a decent wrestling promo, but this one did none of them.
So, yeah, if you sat through three hours of Raw waiting for Punk’s mighty return, it probably bummed you out.
But those surface-level flaws weren’t what bothered me most. The thing that really stuck in my craw went deeper.
The real problem here was that throughout this promo, CM Punk seemed to have forgotten himself. Or, rather, Phil Brooks (the man) appeared to have forgotten what made CM Punk (the character) work.
Because that was not CM Punk out there on Monday night.
I don’t know who that guy was.
“I’m trying to come up with the words and the language to explain to all of you exactly how I feel …,” Punk said early on. “And this is the truth ..."
Pause for emphasis.
“I’m home.”
And the crowd goes (momentarily) wild.
Hold on. What? No.
No-no-no-no-no.
Anybody who knows anything about the CM Punk character knows the guy has never felt completely at “home,” least of all in a WWE ring. There is no way Punk would feel that way upon returning to the company he left in a blaze of finger pointing and acrimonious “shoot” interviews in 2014. No way he’d be thrilled to be back in the belly of the sanitized, focus-group led beast he claimed to hate so much.
There’s no way the real Phil Brooks feels any warm fuzzies about it, either, considering the circumstances.
On screen, Punk is a malcontent. He’s an agent of change. It was sort of his WHOLE THING in WWE. The key to his appeal there was always his perennial underdog status. He was the guy who had been so mistreated by the system that he wanted to burn it all down.
And honestly—even though it all might have been a lie—it worked for him.
At his most compelling (that “pipe bomb” promo, for example) Punk seemed so fed up with the status quo he broke the cardinal rule of wrestling by going “off script” and speaking directly to the audience as some (probably imaginary) version of Brooks himself.
So, when you send CM Punk out there on his first night back in WWE to tell me he’s “home” and “this is where [he] belongs,” that feels like a lie. Dare I say, it feels like a betrayal.
It doesn’t fit the character or the narrative he’s spent almost 20 years building or how he’s always interacted with the WWE world. It definitely doesn’t fit with the off-screen version of Phillip Jack Brooks, who has never been happy a day in his professional life.
Brooks has, in fact, made a career out of playing the victim, despite consistently being given everything he ever asked for in wrestling and beyond.
As an indy darling of the early 2000s, he moaned that wrestling’s biggest mainstream promotions wouldn’t take a chance on a guy like him.
Then they did.
After signing with WWE in 2005, he moaned that the company wouldn’t risk making him its top champion.
Then it did.
As champion, he moaned about his schedule, about his place on the card, about the lack of respect and care he felt the organization showed him. Even at the mountaintop, he couldn't enjoy himself.
So, he bailed.
Brooks next tried to become a UFC fighter—a plan doomed to fail spectacularly—and rode his preexisting wrestling celebrity to a seven-figure contract that allowed him to immediately compete at MMA’s highest level. Not too bad for a 40-year-old man with almost no legitimate martial arts experience.
After his UFC career crashed on takeoff, Brooks washed up in All Elite Wrestling, an upstart challenger to WWE providing new opportunities and a new vision for what wrestling could be.
Things in AEW started promisingly enough, with Punk cast as the wise veteran who would finally—as he always claimed he wanted to do—help push up-and-coming talent to the exposure and prestige they deserved. But it didn't take long for reports of backstage heat, general moaning and at least one incident of very real violence to get him fired.
Then, this week, he popped-up again on WWE TV.
“I guess hell froze over,” Punk said to begin his promo, before going on to tell us how happy he was that it had.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying: This guy didn’t return to WWE because he wanted to come “home.” He did it because he got fired from the last place he worked and had nowhere else to go.
Punk knows this. Brooks knows this. Fans know this. Everybody knows this.
So, when you drag Punk out to the ring to say, “Gee-wilikers am I glad to be back!” it rings hollow.
And that sucks.
Wrestling people love to talk about “the business” as though it requires some kind of mysterious alchemy that normal people could never understand. But the truth is, this ain’t rocket science. It’s not even really that hard.
Wrestling is storytelling and, even when you’re working in the broadest possible strokes, storytelling is storytelling is storytelling. And making a story work requires a basic understanding of your characters and how to use them.
Whether you’re trying to win the National Book Award or booking a shitty wrestling show on a Monday night in Nashville, the principle remains the same. As the writer, there are three questions you have to ask yourself at every twist of the plot: 1) How would my character react to this situation? 2) What would it mean to them? and 3) Most importantly, what would they do about it?
In this case, the answers are easy. In CM Punk’s mind, he would have been fired from AEW because he was too dangerous for its billionaire owner, Tony Khan. Because he was too much of a badass for a locker room full of wannabes and millennial crybabies. Because he was too raw. Too Punk.
According to his own world view, he wouldn't be back in WWE because it made him feel good. He’d be back there to prove a point. He’d be back to show the world that Corporate Wrestling Still Sucks and that the company hadn’t broken his spirit the first time around. He’d be back to finish what he started.
See? Doesn’t that sound more like something he’d say? Doesn’t that sound like a professional wrestling promo that writes itself?
Yet somehow, WWE and Phil Brooks botched it. That’s sort of amazing, considering Brooks has been pretending to be CM Punk for something like 25 years now. You’d think the guy would know what makes his own alter-ego tick.
If anything, his return promo essentially conceded that Punk’s underdog status is gone. Now, he’s the guy who holds all the cards. He’s the guy with, as he put it, “the brass ring in [his] pocket.” He’s no longer interested in curing wrestling’s many injustices. He no longer wants to smash its longstanding caste system. He’s not interested in taking down the establishment from the inside.
This version of Punk—by his own telling—is just here to remind us that he’s already on top. That he never stopped being the best in the world, even during the decade he spent away doing other things.
Frankly, that version of CM Punk is pretty shitty. It eliminates many, if not all, the qualities that made him must-see wrestling TV in WWE the first time around. Perhaps it also signals a major disconnect between Brooks and his own character.
In fairness, he did warn us that some of what he had to say on Monday wouldn’t “sound like CM Punk.” At least on that score, he drove the nail flush.
Yes, this is only one promo. There are published reports it had to be cut for time on live TV after another match ran long. So, maybe it wasn’t exactly what he wanted it to be. It’s possible WWE has more CM Punk-ish things planned for him moving forward. Or maybe he won’t be there long enough for it to matter. He did return just in time for the build to the company’s two biggest PPVs of 2024. It’s entirely possible this could be a short run.
One thing Punk said his first night back on Raw did ring true, however.
After he’d wrapped-up his just-happy-to-be-here promo and jogged around the ring smiling and waving like he’d won the 1994 Mr. Kenosha Beauty Pageant, he looked into the camera and quipped:
“I'm not here to make friends. I'm here to make money.”
Ah-ha. Perhaps that explains it all.
Maybe the version of Phil Brooks who came back to WWE doesn’t need to do justice to CM Punk.
Maybe he just needs CM Punk to be a cash grab for Phil Brooks.