We love Ron Funches around here in the With Spandex offices, as evidenced by this post a while back, which was inspired by Ron’s boundless, longtime love for professional wrestling. He’s got a great bit about how to handle people who tell him wrestling is fake, and it remains a good defense mechanism for keeping the haters in your life at bay. A refresher for you:
Comedians wanting to be pro wrestlers is nothing new. It’s like athletes who want to be rappers. Those clips on YouTube touting “comedian destroys heckler” is the “shoot interview” of the comedy world. Retired wrestlers are replacing appearances in bingo halls with shows in comedy theaters.
But Ron is taking his love one big boot further — dude is actually taking wrestling classes! He told us all about it on Conan, including his reason behind enrolling. No footage of Ron running ropes has made it on to television (yet), but we were graced with this photo of his class, yellow circle on Ron courtesy of the good people at Team Coco. (Look close and you might spot someone else familiar to With Spandex readers.)
You may have seen Funches on NBC’s Undateable or Comedy Central’s @midnight, but no telling if you’ll see him in an actual wrestling ring anytime soon. If we did, the people we’d most like to see feud with Ron looks like this:
- Kevin Owens (who would for sure make a great stand-up comedian)
- Dolph Ziggler (who is already a stand-up comedian)
- R-Truth (Ron vs. Ron match, high comedy potential)
At the very least, he would certainly make for a great mouthpiece so if any wrestlers out there are looking for a manager, maybe give Ron a call.
Here’s the full segment from the show, which includes him putting the moves he’s learned on Conan O’Brien, and complete with a thousand YouTube commenters all suggesting some play on the name “Ron Punches Funches”:
Cue WWE scooping him up for a WrestleMania appearance in 10, 9, 8 …
