They say you can’t build a better mousetrap, but that doesn’t mean you can’t build one that’s friggin’ ginormous. While many of us were delighting in a particularly excellent Grammys on April 3, wrestling’s biggest (second) night was delivering a master class in the art of slapstick comedy. Night two of WrestleMania offered many delights: Vince McMahon was felled by a light touch from “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Sasha Banks won a WrestleMania match for the first time in her career (after arriving in a car), and Johnny Knoxville defeated Sami Zayn using Jackass technology 20 years in the making. The silliness of Knoxville’s bargain-bin superhero costume belied the thoughtfulness with which the match to come was crafted by his entire team: Party Boy jumped into the ring to dance in a denim thong, Wee Man popped out from under the ring to deliver a punishing body slam, and the contraptions — oh, the contraptions!
It began when Zayn went under the ring to pull out some tables — a de rigueur act in the art of wrestling — only to be injured by the plethora of mousetraps Knoxville had glued to a booby-trapped table. Incensed, Zayn set up the mousetrap table, hoping to use the Jackass star’s own weapon against him, not realizing this was a mere foreshadowing of punishments to come.
Utilizing a nut-kicker machine, bowling ball, and Batman Returns–style Taser, Knoxville chased Zayn into a gigantic slapping hand, a sight gag that can be read as commentary on all of us being chased into days of the Slap discourse by another very famous guy from our childhoods.
From here, you may ask, Where else is there to go? And the answer for any student of comedy is, of course, back to the beginning. Knoxville threw Zayn into the very mousetrap-filled table he helped set up, and his Jackass cohorts joined him to set up a massive man-size mousetrap they’d hidden under the ring. Wee Man and Party Boy helped throw Zayn right into this astronomically large pest-control device as the announcers attempted to warn him that “that’s where the cheese goes!”
In a way, the entire match was one big mousetrap in which Zayn didn’t realize he’d been caught until the very end, when Knoxville pinned him. Agatha Christie, eat your heart out! To see the full match, you’ll need to watch the replay on Peacock, and it’s worth it if you want to see two masters of their craft execute some of the most punishing hits to the testicles ever filmed.
