Last week, as you probably remember, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes appeared on the debut episode of AEW Dynamite. They sat in the front row for the entire show, and were interviewed by Chris Van Vliet about their upcoming movie Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which features Chris Jericho, in a short segment that also included tag teams the Hybrid2 and Private Party.
Smith and Jericho appeared together and talked about AEW on the Rich Eisen Show. Kevin Smith claims to have less experience with wrestling than I would have expected, but he did clearly enjoy Dynamite:
I went to the world debut of AEW on TNT. And I’d never been to a match before. Certainly not one of that size. And it was dazzling. I had a really great time. Just dazzling, like that audience, the energy? They’re part of it. Everyone’s involved in a performance, and the audience is part of that performance, more so than any other sporting event I’ve ever been to in my life, where people spectate. They are engaged with wrestling. Like, it doesn’t happen without them. They are the other character. Pretty fascinating, man.
What’s particularly interesting, though, is that he and Mewes appearing on that show led the cancellation of another appearance they’d already planned for later that week:
We were supposed to go do WWE, me and Jay, the very next day — Smackdown. And then the morning after, because we were on the AEW show, trended, like there was a lot of coverage and stuff. And so the next morning we were told that WWE was like, “You can’t come on anymore,” and they canceled us. They kicked me and Jay off the show.
It’s an easy mistake to make, when you think about it. Being Hollywood guys, Kevin and Jay and whoever books their publicity appearances probably thought being on wrestling was like being on a talk show. Stephen Colbert doesn’t cancel your booking because you were also on Jimmy Fallon. But obviously WWE doesn’t work that way. Or as Chris Jericho put it:
The first casualty in the wrestling war was Jay and Silent Bob.
