Josh Barnett On Why He’s Impressed With MJF, Weighs In On Pro Wrestling As an Art Form

Josh Barnett stays busy in pro wrestling alongside his MMA career, and he recently weighed in on wrestling as an art form as well as MJF. Barnett, who promotes his own events through GCW as Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport, was a guest on Adi Shankar’s The Bootleg Universe Podcast and talked about professional wrestling. The show sent along some highlights that you can check out below:

On MJF: “I have been quite impressed with what I have seen of him as far as his persona work. And I like his promo stuff, not simply because it’s clever or makes your laugh or it’s a good dig, it’s because he’s embodying being a heel – at least what I remember – fully, which is something that has been completely abandoned almost entirely in professional wrestling, because people want to always now be the cool bad guy. They want to sell their merch, they still want to be buddies with the fans, they want to do all this stuff and be able to be the bad guy on the show and then show up on like Twitch or something else and be everybody’s buddy. It’s like, well, okay, I know “Kayfabe’s dead, so who cares?” Well, it’s certainly dead if you keep it dead. … And MJF, trying to embody that legitimate heel persona, it gives you the ability to invest in what’s happening and actually choose a side.”

On professional wrestling being an art: “I feel like there is an artistry that comes with it to a degree, but if you treat it just as art then you lose the fundamental aspect of it, which it’s combat. It is heroic storytelling. It is a heroic ideal. It is basically every story that has ever been told since Gilgamesh. And pro-wrestling is often a massive mirror to its current society’s paradigms too… [which is art] in a way, but the art will come but you still have to be a fighter. … The thing is, if you really know how to fight it makes it that much easier then to portray the action in the ring as being as legitimate as possible, as keeping things within a certain realm of believability, but also knowing what it’s like to even do these things and what effect they would have. So if I was to legitimately put you in a certain hold, how would you respond to that, how would you even get out of it? Instead of going from zero reference point and just making it up and then expecting everyone to believe it. ”