Subhojeet Mukherjee on October 6, 2025
Chris Jericho just revealed how close AEW’s infamous “Dinner Debonair” musical segment with MJF came to getting scrapped entirely—and it happened just hours before Dynamite went live.
On the Busted Open Podcast, Jericho looked back on 35 years in wrestling and zeroed in on one of AEW’s most surreal moments: the over-the-top dinner-and-dance sequence he performed with MJF during the pandemic era. It was theatrical, risky—and almost never saw the light of day.
Jericho said the idea came from MJF after watching the Rocketman movie, and that AEW president Tony Khan initially wanted the segment to feel grounded. So Jericho pitched something bigger.
“Tony didn’t want it to be fantasy; he wanted it to be real. So I said, well, why don’t we do like a big kind of a Busby Berkeley dance routine from like the 40s?”
“We were eating dinner, and then suddenly the whole back room opens up and here we are doing this huge singing and dancing routine.”
Everything was ready—until legal chaos hit just two hours before air.
“The version we used had been signed off on… and then two hours before airtime, we got a message saying, ‘If you guys use this version, we’ll sue you.’ “ guess they didn’t like the frickin’ horn player or the guy who played drums on it—it was some personal issue.”
AEW’s in-house composer Mikey Rukus had to jump in and re-record the entire track in an hour, and the production team scrambled to re-edit it with just seconds to spare.
“We got it edited again and barely got it downloaded into the system with 10 seconds to spare.Tony said we’d have to do it live, but we were like, ‘We can’t do this live—we’re in the ring!’”
Despite the chaos, Jericho believes it was one of AEW’s most creatively bold decisions, comparing it to Vince McMahon’s 1987 Slammy Awards performance.
“I still say, and I say this completely serious—one of my favorite moments ever in pro wrestling was Vince McMahon singing ‘Stand Back’ at the Slammy Awards in 1987.”
“Dinner Debonair was the next-generation version of something like that… You probably won’t see something like that again, because no one would ever want to take that kind of risk now.”
“But in the pandemic, there really were no rules—so we could try stuff.”
AEW may never attempt something that theatrical again, but “Dinner Debonair” lives on as a perfect storm of musical chaos, legal threats, and last-minute miracles.
Please credit Ringside News if you use the above transcript in your publication.
What did you think of the Dinner Debonair segment—creative genius or too far outside the box? Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comment section below.
October 6, 2025 4:49 pm
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