Author: What starts as a joke for an audience of two doesn’t usually end up with millions of readers, a cameo from Mae Young’s baby hand on Monday Night Raw, and a back-cover blurb that reads “get a life,” courtesy of Paul Bearer. But that’s exactly the kind of unreal story you get when you spend 14 years running Kayfabe News, professional wrestling’s answer to The Onion. And now, for the first time, the man who built it is telling the whole story.
The Kayfabe News Origin Story: How Wrestling’s Most UNREAL News Site (and Book) Came To Be
Colin Hunter — longtime newspaper reporter, former Pro Wrestling Illustrated contributor under the pen name C.F. Hunter, and the sole voice behind nearly 4,000 satirical wrestling articles — has just published the Kayfabe News book, collecting the funniest and most popular stories from the site’s 14-year run. What follows is his story, in his own words.
After 14 years of writing satirical wrestling articles on the Kayfabe News website — widely known as "The Onion of Wrestling" — I’ve just published the Kayfabe News book collecting the funniest and most popular stories.
Kayfabe News originally had a target audience of two: my dad, Ian, and my best friend, Marshall.
These two intelligent, thoughtful men — both well-educated aesthetes and newspaper columnists — also loved professional wrestling, just like me. I grew up watching it on Saturday afternoons with Dad. He took me to my first live wrestling show — a WWF TV taping at the Brantford Civic Centre, where I was spellbound by the feats of Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, The Junkyard Dog, and Randy “Macho Man” Savage. We always saw wrestling as comedy — a circus of absurdity populated by bizarre characters and cavernous gaps in logic.
I met Marshall by chance in my early 20s while waiting in an hours-long line-up to get an autograph from Ozzy Osbourne. He loved wrestling more than anyone I’ve ever met, and our near-daily conversations for two decades always included uproarious laughter about something related to wrestling.
So when, in 2012, I hatched the idea of launching an Onion-esque satirical news site about wrestling, the initial goal was simply to entertain myself, my dad, and Marshall.
To my never-ending surprise and delight, Kayfabe News has entertained substantially more people than I’d anticipated. To borrow a catchphrase from some jabroni, millions — and millions — of people have visited KayfabeNews.com since I launched it in 2012.
I forget which story I published first — maybe “Paul Bearer suddenly realizes his name is a pun,” or “WWE Hall of Fame closed for renovations” — but after that, I challenged myself to write one article every day. I had already been a “real” daily newspaper reporter for nearly a decade, and was also a regular writer for Pro Wrestling Illustrated and its sister magazines. So the Kayfabe News “voice” — a deadpan seriousness reporting on wrestling’s absurdities — came naturally to me.
When WWE Took Notice: Vince McMahon, Mick Foley, and Mae Young’s Baby Hand
I was thrilled in the beginning when Kayfabe News accumulated 100 social media followers. Then 1,000. Then 20,000, then 50,000, and more. People within the wrestling industry began taking notice and sharing articles. Some stories went viral, often because the satire was just plausible enough to be believable — when a WWE Hall of Famer wins the American presidency, twice, the lines between kayfabe and reality fade somewhat.
The Kayfabe News book contains an article by former WWE lead writer Tom Casiello, who describes showing a Kayfabe News headline to Vince McMahon, who laughed out loud at it. Wrestlers began to play along. After Kayfabe News reported that Mae Young’s baby hand is all grown up now, Mae Young and a guy in a hand costume performed the same punchline on Raw’s 1000th anniversary special.
Mick Foley collaborated with Kayfabe News on a video explaining that his infamous fall from Hell in a Cell was “completely fake.”
The only wrestling personality who seemed to dislike Kayfabe News was Paul Bearer, who told me to “get a life,” which is now a blurb on the back of the Kayfabe News book.
My formula was always simple. Try to make Dad and Marshall laugh. Be funny, not cruel. Don’t make fun of wrestling — have fun with wrestling. That last bit was a piece of advice from comedy wrestler Colt Cabana, an inspiration and early booster of Kayfabe News. Mick Foley, another longtime supporter and occasional collaborator, reminded me once that Kayfabe News brings humor to complete strangers who may be in serious need of some levity during challenging times.
The Loss That Silenced Kayfabe News — And the Reason It Came Back
Marshall, my best friend of 20-plus years, died unexpectedly in late 2023. It was a devastating loss for his family, many friends, and the large community he built as an artist, columnist, and podcaster in his hometown of Waterloo, Ontario. By some strange cosmic fluke, his funeral was overseen by the same funeral director as Owen Hart’s.
My friendship with Marshall was so deeply connected to wrestling that, for some time, I found it difficult to watch — or attempt to satirize — wrestling. Kayfabe News went quiet for a while. But I came to realize that Marshall would, if he could, mock me ruthlessly for being a crybaby over his death. He’d insist I quit moping and watch some grainy old Bruiser Brody carnage from Puerto Rico, or hurry up and write something funny on Kayfabe News.
To Marshall, to my Dad, and the countless strangers who have read and enjoyed Kayfabe News over the years — thank you. Your readership has made it all worthwhile, because the revenue most certainly has not.
Kayfabe News has been my own gateway deeper into the strange parallel universe of professional wrestling. Over the past two years, I trained to become a wrestling referee — a journey chronicled in the film The Ref Didn’t See It!, the world’s first documentary celebrating the unsung heroes of the squared circle. As a referee, I’ve been duped, distracted, bumped, bribed, and belittled more times than I can count — and I’m having the time of my life.
Wrestling is not fake. It’s unreal, in all the best ways. That’s why the tagline for Kayfabe News from the beginning has been “Unreal News About an Unreal Sport.” Everything I wrote above is true. Unlike everything else I wrote on the website, and now in the book.
BeLIEve Kayfabe News. Then. Now. Whenever. Get the Kayfabe News book on Amazon today!
These stories may also interest you:
- Kayfabe News Creator Becomes Wrestling Ref in New Doc
- Kayfabe in Wrestling: Stories Fans Shouldn’t Know!
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