Jim Cornette Shares His Side of Recent NWA Controversy & Resignation; Claims Joke Was Not Racially Motivated

On the latest edition of his podcast, the Jim Cornette Experience, the veteran manager-turned-announcer goes into detail on his recent resignation from the National Wrestling Alliance, as well as the controversy surrounding the entire situation.

This past Tuesday night, a new episode of NWA Powerrr was released on YouTube wherein Cornette made a controversial comment about heavyweight wrestler Trevor Murdoch, calling him “the only man I’ve ever known that can strap a bucket of fried chicken to his back and ride a motor scooter across Ethiopia.”

On his podcast, Cornette claims that the comment, which he has told multiple times over the last 30 years, was not racially motivated, but instead originated during a time period where jokes about starvation in Ethiopia were common in popular culture.

“In the 80s everyone was telling Ethiopian jokes because it was huge news, on a mainstream basis. Live Aid was for the Ethiopian famine. Every comic on television was making Ethiopian jokes, and every kid in school was making Ethiopian jokes. I remember the first time that I said it, because I was in the car with Big Bubba Rodgers. When Bubba rode with us we would always drop our cars off at the Holiday Inn in Charlotte, and right next to it was a Bojangles Chicken, where we would often get chicken. So I may very well had just finished eating some chicken. I [was]always looking for ways to *** get Bubba over on *** television in the promos. … It’s a starvation joke, not a race joke. Starvation’s a hilarious topic. Everybody was doing it. Whether it’s a good joke, or a bad joke, it is a joke that has been told on TBS, USA Network, broadcast television stations across America over a variety of locations, for the past 30 years.”

Shortly after the episode first aired, the controversy began spreading across social media, and the NWA quickly removed the show from their YouTube account and edited out the comment. The following day it was announced that Cornette had resigned from the company, and would no longer be working on future episodes of NWA Powerrr.

During hid podcast, one of Cornette’s major complaints was that the show was pre-taped well in advance, and at no point during the television tapings, or in post-production before it aired, did anyone raise the issue with him or request that he not make the joke.

“If anywhere during that process, if when I had said it the producer – one of whom is Dave Lagana, but there is a variety of people who can talk to us on our headsets – had said ‘Jim don’t say that’, then okay. Sorry. If after the show [they said]‘Well we’re going to have to take that one joke out,’ okay fine. Sorry to make you have extra work. If anybody had called me up and said, ‘Jim you told that joke you’ve told a bunch of times, and it’s racist!’ Okay I didn’t know that. I was thinking it was *** funny because the people in Ethiopia were hungry. I was a big fan of the Starvin’ Marvin episode of South Park. … If anybody had called me and said ‘We have to take it out’, then okay. I wouldn’t have realized, thank you for bringing it up. I won’t use it again. Sorry to cause you extra work.”

Cornette also insists that he would have been “on board” with the NWA issuing an apology or some kind of statement about the incident, but believes the situation did not merit the severity with which they handled things.

“If their statement – if instead of taking the thing down and issuing this statement that it sounds like I was in favor of sodomizing the nuns at the *** convent, or some just unspeakably horrible ***, to get everybody to jump on it even further and to call attention to it… If instead a statement had been put out, ‘Hey one of the announcers told an old joke that was in poor taste, and we missed it in editing, and we sure do apologize and won’t do it again.’ I can pretty much be on board with that. Especially since – and I’m not trying to bury him – Dave was the one who edited the show, and he’s the one writing the apology. He didn’t include himself. He didn’t mention me by name, but I think everybody knew who he was talking about.”

Finally, Cornette noted that the NWA job was “becoming not fun anymore” due to multiple instances of controversy, which not only took time and energy away from the team putting the show together, but took the focus off the performers themselves.

“This was rapidly becoming not fun anymore, for anybody. I’m sure they don’t want to go through this ***.  But the only reason I was doing this program – it’s was not as a career, it’s because I like the NWA, I like old-fashioned wrestling, and I wanted to help the program and have some fun. I was being compensated, but this is not going to effect my standard of living. It was about just doing something once in a while that was contributing to a program that’s actually trying to do wrestling. So if it ain’t fun for me, because I gotta put up with every two weeks being asked to apologize for *** that I’m either not sorry for, or that I didn’t say, or that I’m not sorry for to a degree that people are wanting me stuck up the *** with a telephone pole and swung around downtown… I’m not that sorry. It was a joke, and if you don’t like the joke that’s fine. And I’d even apologize for a bad joke, but this *** feedback was above and beyond the offense, and I didn’t mean it in any racist way.”