CM Punk recently shared a funny story about his famous Pipe Bomb promo. He also revealed Vince McMahon’s unexpected reaction before it aired.
WWE Undisputed Champion discussed the moment on Stephanie McMahon’s What’s Your Story podcast. The Pipe Bomb aired in June 2011 and remains one of WWE’s most iconic promos. At the time, Punk believed he was leaving the company after his contract expired.
WWE star CM Punk recalls Vince McMahon’s reaction before the Pipe Bomb
Punk said WWE told him to go on television and “air your grievances.” He admitted he did not fully believe that instruction. Instead, he trusted his instincts while writing the promo. “Now, mind you, the context is I’m still very much leaving, right? Yeah. I have no new contract. I’m looking forward to, I think, the next day we were flying to, like, Australia, New Zealand, and it was going to be my last tour, you know? And I was told this unbelievable thing. ‘I want you to go out there and air your grievances.’ No, you don’t. You don’t want me doing this.”
He continued, “And to bring it back, instinct. I knew if I told your dad, ‘This is what I want to say,’ he would say, ‘No. Can’t say that.’ Okay. I trusted myself. ‘Cause, I think the thought was, you know, ‘He’s gonna swear. He’s gonna get us fined by the FCC. He’s going to get us thrown off the air.’ You know, like, ‘He’s going to whip his dick out.’ I don’t know what the, you know.”
“My intent was never to do anything like that. Like, in the confines of the television show that we do, I have too much respect for the business to go so far that I’m just burning a bridge for no reason, just to do it. ‘I want you to go out there I want you to go out there and air your grievances.’ So I said, ‘Okay.’ Nothing I did or said was outside of what we did on our television show, right? But, knowing my instincts, saying things like New Japan Pro-Wrestling, wildly provocative for some reason, right? Because I think everybody knew the rules, and everybody knew.”
Punk explained he intentionally left out certain ideas. He knew mentioning names like Paul Heyman and Brock Lesnar, who were not in WWE then, would never get approved. Instead, he wrote a version he believed Vince McMahon would accept.
“So I wrote up this bullshit, and I gave it to him. What I’m gonna say. And he read it, and his only feedback was, ‘All right, this is good, good. Just make fun of Stephanie.’ Punk said Vince even wanted Stephanie added into the promo. “And I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, add her in there.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.'”
Stephanie laughed while recalling the moment herself. “Thanks for taking it easy on me. I was just an idiot.” Punk also addressed the long-running debate about the Pipe Bomb. He said fans still argue whether it was fully approved or not.
“And the funny thing is, is like, people will still, like, you know, the Twitter smart fans will still argue about it. Like, ‘Oh, it was approved, it was this.’ It was both. It was approved, and it wasn’t. It was approved to a degree, and my instincts told me, like, ‘I’m not saying anything too bad.'”
“Like, you can’t If he’s gonna be mad at me, he’s gonna be fuckin’ mad at me. But it’s not like a, ‘Oh, I’m mad at you, and you’re just straight up fired,’ although I did think maybe there was a possibility of that.”
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