Chairshot Top 5: Grossest Moments in WWE History

From Boogeyman eating Jillian Hall’s mole to Mae Young giving birth to a hand, these are five of the grossest moments WWE ever aired.

WWE has spent decades finding increasingly creative ways to make its audience uncomfortable, and not all of them involved violence. From live worms and projectile vomiting to one of the strangest births in television history, these moments tested just how strong wrestling fans’ stomachs really were.

Professional wrestling is built around making an audience react. Cheers and boos are the obvious goals, but disgust has always had a strange place in WWE’s toolbox as well.

Sometimes the gross-out moment was part of a legitimate attempt to make a villain more hated. Other times it existed almost entirely because someone backstage apparently wondered how far television could go before viewers started reaching for the remote. The results have included bodily fluids, questionable meals, live animals and images that remain difficult to explain even several decades later.

This ranking is specifically about moments designed to produce a physical reaction. That means some infamous WWE angles that were disturbing, tasteless or controversial for completely different reasons are being left out. There is more than enough material without turning this into a ranking of the company’s most offensive storylines.

Longevity matters too. A wrestler throwing up once might be disgusting in the moment, but the truly elite entries in this category are the ones fans still bring up years later because the visual was simply too bizarre to forget.

These are the Top 5 grossest moments in WWE history.

#5 — Titus O’Neil Loses His Thanksgiving Dinner

WWE probably should have known where this was heading when Titus O’Neil entered a food-eating contest before wrestling Antonio Cesaro on the November 29, 2013 episode of SmackDown. The show aired during Thanksgiving weekend, and the backstage contest established that Titus had consumed far more food than anyone should eat before being spun repeatedly around a wrestling ring.

Cesaro was deep into the run that turned his Giant Swing into one of the most popular attractions on WWE television. The move required him to grab an opponent by the legs and rotate repeatedly, and under normal circumstances it was impressive enough to make audiences count along with every revolution.

After Titus had already stuffed himself during the Thanksgiving celebration, Cesaro started swinging him around the ring. Darren Young eventually entered to stop the punishment and caused a disqualification, but the intervention arrived after Titus’ stomach had apparently made its own decision about how the match was going to end.

Titus vomited at ringside, including into JBL’s cowboy hat. He then placed the hat on Michael Cole before getting sick again, this time in the direction of Zeb Colter.

The entire sequence felt like WWE constructing a complicated machine with one obvious purpose. First feed somebody too much food, then put him in a move specifically designed to make a human being dizzy and wait for biology to handle the finish.

What keeps the moment at No. 5 is that the grossness was temporary. WWE has produced plenty of vomit angles, and once the scene ended, there was not much mythology left behind.

It still accomplished exactly what it set out to do. More than a decade later, the sight of Titus discovering the worst possible consequence of the Cesaro Swing remains one of WWE’s most memorable examples of physical comedy going directly through the stomach.

#4 — Papa Shango Makes Ultimate Warrior Vomit

There was a period in 1992 when WWE asked its audience to accept that Papa Shango possessed actual supernatural powers. The company did not merely suggest that Ultimate Warrior was frightened by him; Shango’s voodoo was presented as something capable of causing visible physical consequences.

Papa Shango had already been introduced as an ominous witch doctor complete with skull imagery, smoke and elaborate face paint. His rivalry with Warrior pushed the character beyond intimidation when Shango supposedly placed a curse on the former WWE Champion.

Warrior soon began experiencing increasingly bizarre symptoms. During one memorable segment, a strange dark liquid appeared on his head while he spoke with “Mean” Gene Okerlund, and the storyline eventually escalated to Warrior becoming violently ill backstage.

The vomiting itself was enough to make the angle memorable, but presentation made it worse. Warrior was one of WWE’s great superhero figures, a wrestler normally presented as almost physically indestructible, and suddenly he was doubled over while mysterious fluids emerged from multiple parts of his body.

For younger fans watching in 1992, there was also very little ironic distance available. Papa Shango was not presented with a wink acknowledging how ridiculous everything was supposed to be. WWE treated the curse seriously enough that the gross-out effects became part of an attempt to make the character legitimately frightening.

Time has turned the angle into something closer to wrestling camp, but the visual remains effective. There is a reason WWE still includes Warrior’s reaction to Shango in collections of its strangest and most unsettling moments.

The industry has produced countless supernatural characters since then, but few have demonstrated their mystical powers by apparently giving a former world champion the worst stomach virus imaginable.

#3 — Big Boss Man Feeds Al Snow His Own Dog

Most gross wrestling moments lose some of their impact because everyone understands the substance involved is fake. Fake vomit is still unpleasant to watch, but the mind can eventually separate the visual from what it supposedly represents.

The Big Boss Man feeding Al Snow a meal made from Pepper worked differently because the disgusting part was the idea. During their 1999 rivalry, Boss Man kidnapped Snow’s Chihuahua, Pepper, and Snow desperately wanted his dog returned.

Boss Man eventually invited him to a hotel room for what appeared to be an attempt at reconciliation over dinner. Given everything already established about the character, accepting the invitation probably should have come with considerably more suspicion.

Snow ate the meal while Boss Man watched, and the conversation eventually revealed what WWE wanted the audience to believe had happened: Boss Man had killed Pepper, cooked the dog and served it to his owner.

Nothing graphic needed to appear on screen. Once the suggestion was made, the audience’s imagination handled everything WWE needed it to handle.

The angle worked as heel behavior because it attacked something more emotionally powerful than a championship. Wrestling fans had watched Snow interact with Pepper and knew the dog mattered to him, which meant Boss Man was no longer simply an opponent trying to win matches. He was being presented as someone willing to commit an almost cartoonishly evil act purely because hurting Snow amused him.

It was also gross in a very different way than most entries on this list. There were no worms hanging from anyone’s mouth and no fluids covering ringside. Instead, WWE turned an ordinary dinner into something revolting simply by telling the audience what was supposedly on the plate.

Boss Man would continue taking the feud into increasingly ridiculous territory, including the infamous Kennel from Hell Match. Nothing in the rivalry, however, produced quite the same combination of disgust and disbelief as Al Snow realizing what he had just been told he had eaten.

Even by Attitude Era standards, that was a lot.

#2 — The Boogeyman Bites Off Jillian Hall’s Mole

The Boogeyman built an entire WWE career around making other people look uncomfortable. He smashed clocks against his own head, crawled toward frightened opponents and carried live earthworms that he routinely shoved into his mouth.

After matches, those worms often ended up on somebody else as well, including the unforgettable WrestleMania 22 sequence in which he kissed Sharmell with a mouthful of them. Somehow, the worms were not his grossest moment.

Jillian Hall entered WWE television with an enormous growth attached to the side of her face. The exaggerated mole was intentionally distracting and became part of her presentation while she worked alongside JBL.

On the January 13, 2006 episode of SmackDown, Jillian and JBL appeared on Piper’s Pit. The Boogeyman interrupted the segment, cornered Jillian and eventually did what wrestling fans had probably feared somebody might attempt from the moment the prosthetic first appeared.

He bit it off and then treated the mole like food. WWE’s own retrospective of the character specifically remembers him biting the growth from Jillian’s face, adding another item to the collection of things viewers had watched disappear into his mouth.

What made the moment particularly effective was how perfectly it fit the character. The Boogeyman did not need a logical motive because logic had never been part of the presentation. He existed to appear in places where nobody wanted him, terrify whoever happened to be nearby and then do something disgusting with his mouth.

The mole segment combined every part of that formula into one scene. Worms became Boogeyman’s trademark and probably remain the first thing most fans associate with him, but eating worms at least falls within the boundaries of something human beings actually do in parts of the world.

Biting a giant growth from somebody’s face and apparently consuming it pushed the character somewhere else entirely.

Honorable Mention — Mr. McMahon’s Kiss My Ass Club

Vince McMahon understood that few things generate immediate humiliation quite like forcing another adult to kiss his exposed backside on national television. Unfortunately for several WWE performers, that realization eventually became an actual recurring storyline.

The Mr. McMahon Kiss My Ass Club began as one of the Chairman character’s favorite methods of degrading people who had crossed him. Wrestlers and authority figures would be ordered to literally kiss McMahon’s rear end, usually while he enjoyed the power imbalance far more than anyone should.

William Regal became one of the earliest members, and the concept kept resurfacing for years. Shawn Michaels was forcibly added in 2006 after Shane McMahon incapacitated him, while other performers found themselves threatened with the same punishment whenever Mr. McMahon needed to demonstrate his control.

What makes the recurring bit worthy of an honorable mention is that WWE never needed elaborate effects to make it disgusting. There was no fake blood, supernatural slime or carefully prepared prop meal involved; the entire premise was simply that viewers were going to spend several uncomfortable minutes wondering whether someone would actually have to do it.

It became one of those concepts that could only have survived inside professional wrestling, where humiliation sometimes functions as both storyline motivation and televised spectacle. The fact that the club returned repeatedly suggests WWE believed audience revulsion was part of the appeal.

#1 — Mae Young Gives Birth to a Hand

Trying to summarize the Mae Young and Mark Henry storyline for someone who did not watch the Attitude Era sounds less like describing professional wrestling and more like recounting a dream after waking up with a fever.

Henry was performing as “Sexual Chocolate” when he entered a relationship with Mae Young, who was more than five decades older than him. WWE then announced that Young was pregnant, creating a storyline that became increasingly bizarre every time television attempted to advance it.

On the February 28, 2000 episode of Raw, the pregnancy reached its conclusion. Mae went into labor backstage and was surrounded by people attempting to help deliver the child.

The segment leaned completely into gross-out comedy, including bodily noises, disgusted reactions and an emergency medical worker visibly struggling with the situation. Then the baby arrived, and it was a hand.

Not a baby holding up one hand, not some misunderstood camera angle and not the beginning of an explanation WWE intended to provide the following week. Mae Young gave birth to what appeared to be a mucus-covered human hand, while Mark Henry stared at the result and questioned whether he was actually the father.

The scene has survived because it sits at the intersection of nearly every strange instinct WWE television had during the Attitude Era. It involved shock humor, sexual comedy, a legendary older wrestler willing to participate in almost anything and a creative team operating in an environment where generating conversation often mattered more than making logical sense.

Even people who watched the segment live struggled to explain what they had just seen. Years later, WWE acknowledged the absurdity by bringing the concept back for Raw 1000 in 2012, when Mae Young appeared with a grown man dressed as a hand and completed a joke that had somehow required twelve years to reach its payoff.

That callback only strengthened the original moment’s place in wrestling history. Vomit can be cleaned up, worms can be removed and even the Boogeyman’s mole meal eventually becomes another strange character beat.

A woman giving birth to a hand is forever.

When WWE Decides to Test Everyone’s Stomach

Wrestling has always depended on spectacle, and spectacle does not necessarily have to be pleasant. WWE learned long ago that disgust creates a reaction just as reliably as excitement, which explains why its history contains everything from Papa Shango’s supernatural sickness to Titus O’Neil discovering why competitive eating and the Cesaro Swing should never share the same evening.

The best gross-out wrestling moments usually combine something visually unpleasant with an idea strange enough to survive beyond the original broadcast. Big Boss Man did not need to show viewers what was in Al Snow’s dinner because the suggestion was worse than anything WWE could have put on the plate, while The Boogeyman turned eating disgusting things into such an essential character trait that worms alone were no longer enough.

Mae Young’s hand exists on another level because there is almost no comparable moment anywhere else in mainstream wrestling history. WWE took one of the strangest storylines it had ever produced, reached the point where some kind of payoff was required and responded with an image nobody watching could have reasonably predicted.

That is why these moments endure. Wrestling fans forget plenty of technically better segments, but apparently there is a permanent section of the brain reserved for worms, vomit, questionable dinner ingredients and one inexplicable newborn hand.

Meta Title: Top 5 Grossest Moments in WWE History

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Research included archival material and historical features from WWE.com.