Chris Jericho On How He Started Doing Commentary For AEW Rampage, His Commentary Style

Chris Jericho is part of the commentary team for AEW Rampage, and he recently discussed how that came about. Jericho was a guest on In The Kliq and he talked about how his work doing commentary for shows just before the pandemic lockdown led to him being made part of the Rampage commentary team by Tony Khan. You can check out some highlights below:

On how he ended up doing commentary: “So what happened was, right before the lockdown, I believe it was March of 2020. We were told that everything was going to be locked down. April, the whole month. Atlanta was shut down and Jacksonville — everything was shut down. So Tony Khan, my boss, we had to go to Atlanta to QT Marshall’s wrestling school, which we had to quickly make into a television studio, and film 30 matches. Now, Wednesday night is when we found out that everything’s shutting down Thursday night at midnight. So in the course of this two-hour period, Tony wrote 30 matches. And I was originally supposed to be off that week. If you remember I did a vignette in my house with my dogs and Vanguard-1. So that was that was happening, lockdown or not. That was my role for the week. And then the next week I was gonna do commentary for whatever we had going on.

“And I said, ‘Well, since I’m supposed to do commentary for that week, why don’t I come to Atlanta and just do commentary for the whole show?’ And so Tony Schivone and I did commentary for 30 matches. A, it was really hard. B, we had no choice. C, we only had 30 percent of the roster because we weren’t even allowed to travel at that time. Airports were shut down, so only guys that lived in Atlanta and can drive from Orlando. And I did the commentary, and as a result Tony Khan liked it. And when Rampage started he said, ‘I want you to do commentary on Rampage.’ That’s the reason why, because for those 30 matches, by necessity I did the commentary.”

On his commentary style: “When I started doing it, my my role models in commentary is Jesse Ventura and Bobby Heenan. I always thought they were the greatest. And the pop culture thing is almost like, I treat it like an episode of like The Family Guy. If you get it, you get it. It’s great. If you don’t, we just move on to the next thing and no one knows the difference. So when I throw out like a Rush lyric or a Loverboy lyric, or a Metallic reference, or a hockey — whatever it is, like this is a great example. A couple weeks ago Danhausen was playing a ukulele, and I think Jeff Jarrett broke it. I said, ‘George Harrison would not be happy now.’ If you get that George Harrison’s favorite instrument was the ukulele — maybe 10 of the fan base got it. But the ones that did were like, ‘That is the greatest reference I’ve ever heard in my life in wrestling!’ So I like to do that just to pop myself, and if you get it? You get it.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit In The Kliq with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.