WWE: 10 hilarious gimmick matches to distract you from quarantine

3. Asylum Match: Dean Ambrose vs. Chris Jericho (Extreme Rules 2016)

In February 2020, Jon Moxley defeated Chris Jericho at AEW Revolution to become the AEW World Champion. A little less than four years earlier, those two men also clashed in WWE’s first and only Asylum Match at Extreme Rules. The match, or the rivalry itself, weren’t nearly as good as their AEW clashes, but this wreck is still fun to watch.

After Chris Jericho destroyed Mitch the Potted Plant, a permanent fixture of the short-lived Ambrose Asylum talk show in WWE, Ambrose looked for retribution in this Asylum Match. WWE took a steel cage and painted it black before hanging eight weapons above the cage around the ring.

Those eight weapons included: a straitjacket, a bucket and mop, a leather strap, a potted plant, two kendo sticks, a barbed wire 2×4, and a fire extinguisher. Despite the absurd concept and less than ideal storyline that led to it, Dean Ambrose and Chris Jericho gave everything they had and produced a hardcore match in the PG era of WWE that a few truly unforgettable moments.

It struggled early on as some of the less spectacular weapons were used, but things really picked up when Ambrose pulled a bag of thumbtacks out of the mop bucket and poured them onto the ring. In an era when WWE avoids extensive use of blood, we didn’t see much until near the end when they started landing thumbtacks.

If you want a glimpse of what these two were just a few years before AEW even existed, this wreck shows them trying to turn WWE’s worst chickensh*t into chicken salad, and no doubt contributed to the creative frustration that led both men to leave the company and ultimately end up in All Elite Wrestling.