Brock Lesnar with the WWE Universal Championship. (WWE.com)
Tonight on Monday Night Raw, Brock Lesnar will return after a two-month absence. As usual, we should expect Paul Heyman to do most if not all of the talking here, as Lesnar’s gimmick in recent years has involved him remaining silent while his manager speaks for him. So why is it that Brock Lesnar never talks during his promos?
Although neither Heyman nor Lesnar has talked much about the thinking behind this, the main reason for keeping Lesnar silent seems to be a fairly simple one: Paul Heyman is just much better at promos than Brock Lesnar.
After all, Lesnar has spoken during previous WWE runs, and his promos, while not horrible, were never particularly Earth-shattering. He’s a much better speaker during interviews than during live segments, and there have been a few instances of promos where Lesnar spoke and was subsequently mocked for his performance, with one example being an infamous segment with John Cena in which Lesnar used the words “feel” or “feeling” six times in 25 seconds.
“I’m liking what I’m feeling,” Lesnar said. “I like it a lot John. You know why? You know what I’m sensing? This is real, John. This is a real feeling that you’re feeling, because I can feel it. I’m the reason you’re feeling the way you’re feeling right now, John.”
There was also the time that Lesnar’s voice cracked while screaming during a match, and this subsequently spawned dozens of online memes and remixes on YouTube.
On the other hand, Paul Heyman delivers perhaps the best promos of anyone in the WWE right now, and so when you have someone who is only okay and sometimes downright bad on the mic, and someone else whose mic skills are absolutely legendary, it just makes sense to have one speak and the other not speak.
Plus, this has the effect of making Brock Lesnar seem even more intimidating, as he comes across as a guy who is just so boiling with rage that he needs someone to channel that anger into actual sentences. And on a practical level, establishing a person who represents Brock Lesnar allows this spokesperson to fill in for Lesnar when he’s gone; Lesnar only very occasionally appears on WWE programming, but when it’s necessary to continue his storyline without Lensar actually being there, Paul Heyman can go solo.
It’s not that Brock Lesnar has completely sworn off talking, as even after he already began to cut down his promos on WWE programming, he did a full interview with Stone Cold Steve Austin on the Stone Cold Podcast. During the show, Stone Cold actually asked Lesnar why he doesn’t speak as much anymore, and Lesnar jokingly suggested that it’s because he’s got to give Paul Heyman something to do.
“I gotta feed the Jew,” Lesnar said, referring to Paul Heyman. “He’s gotta eat.”