Orange Cassidy

By the strange but very real standards that govern these sorts of things, All Elite Wrestling’s video announcement on its Twitter page that it had signed Orange Cassidy earlier this week qualified as a relatively significant amount of fanfare. Contrast that with Marko Stunt, who announced his AEW signing himself on July 30 as part of his 23rd birthday celebration, and it’s clear why fans might have found the pomp and circumstance surrounding Cassidy’s signing divisive. But most of that has to do with Cassidy, a one-of-a-kind weirdo whose comedy shtick lands somewhere between minimalism and pure dada. Cassidy wrestles significant chunks of his matches with his hands in his pockets and his sunglasses on, throwing weak strikes and moving at a glacial pace out of “laziness.” He will sometimes grant the powers of his laziness to his opponents via his sunglasses. Some people love this. Others very much do not. In the most high-profile booking of his career so far, at AEW’s inaugural event in May, Cassidy unofficially entered the show-opening battle royal to deliver slow-motion kicks to Tommy Dreamer, who noticeably dwarfed him in size. Dreamer unceremoniously eliminated him, but the cameo led the love/hate dichotomy around his act to grow even stronger. There was a great deal of criticism directed at AEW for signing a wrestler that a decent chunk of fans view as so small and untalented that he has to rely on a low-effort comedy shtick to get fans. That’s uncharitable to Cassidy, though, and to the oddball tradition in which he works. The signing might work or it might not, but Orange Cassidy isn’t just a stunt performer. Cassidy’s wrestling skills were always there, and when they fell into balance with his poker-faced comedy act something clicked. Cassidy has broken out as a top independent attraction over the last nine months, starting with a fantastic match with David Starr on a Beyond Wrestling show in November that has become the go-to proof that Cassidy really is good at this. All of this was a big change from a year earlier, when Cassidy told Johnson that he felt as if he’d been pigeonholed as a sideshow. The complicating factor, here, is that Cassidy’s low-effort routine only works when it works; when it doesn’t, it does have a kind of stilted sideshow feel. He was widely expected to be one of the breakout stars of the independent shows during WrestleMania weekend this year, but that didn’t really happen, at least not to the degree it was expected. How much of it was his fault—or that of his opponents, or the matchmaking—is difficult to discern, but far too many of his matches felt rote, or like introductions of his basic routine for fans who had never seen him before. Cassidy’s most vocal critics seem not to have seen him wrestle even in that introductory mode, or perhaps at all beyond his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it battle royal cameo and some GIFs on social media. (For his part, AEW wrestler/executive Cody Rhodes has defended the acquisition on Twitter.) The persistent perception that AEW has signed too many non-serious wrestlers is based in large part on the constant vocal criticism of longtime wrestling jack of all trades turned podcaster Jim Cornette. There’s some merit to the knock, for what it’s worth, given that a company with an official roster that by my count stands at 46 wrestlers now includes four wrestlers with explicit comedy gimmicks in Cassidy, baby oil-loving Michael Nakazawa, and The Librarians, Peter Avalon and Leva Bates. That is arguably a bit much, especially since the Librarian shtick hasn’t landed at all yet and Nakazawa’s only singles match so far was an utter embarrassment in which he faced video game tournament promoter Alex Jebailey, who visibly started laughing while being hanged by his throat over the top rope. If you’re less familiar with the rest of the roster and have only experienced them through AEW and GIFs—as Cornette and some of his listeners and followers surely have—it would be easy