Jerry Lawler Says He Wasn't Trying To Be Racist Using “Ramen Noodle” During RAW

On the latest episode of his podcast, Jerry “The King” Lawler explained his “Ramen Noodle” comment that had many fans on social media upset at him. The comment was from the Raw from 2 weeks ago when Akira Tozawa did a senton to the floor during a match and Lawler used “Ramen Noodle” as the words to describe the move.

“I said the word ‘Ramen Noodle’ on Raw and next thing you know, the internet blows up and I’m a big racist. Let me go back and explain what I was doing and why being racist was the furthest thing from my mind.

It all goes back to 2016 when there was a time when I was doing commentary with Mauro Ranallo,” Lawler continued. He said he had not worked with Ranallo up to that point and he loved working with him and praised him for his expert knowledge of wrestling moves that came from Japan.

That’s what was happening to me in 2016. I [was] sitting there and we’re calling a match and Mauro all of a sudden out of the blue this guy does a move. I’ve been in the business for 50 years and I don’t know the names of these crazy moves, right? I’m seeing them for the first time and all of a sudden the guy does a move and Mauro says ‘there’s the orange crush Tiger Bomb bla bla senton’ and I’m thinking in my mind [that] ‘somebody is making up these crazy names up, right?'

“I sat down back in 2016 and I wrote down some names of what I thought would be funny moves to go back at Mauro when he called one of these moves [from Japan] and I would say something like, ‘there’s the Ramen Noodle moonsault.’ … I was doing it just to play devil’s advocate with Mauro … If I were still doing commentary with Michael Cole or JR, we had the chemistry to where each one of those guys would have known that I was almost making a fool out of myself by claiming like I was acting like I knew what this unbelievable looking move was. Then either Cole or JR would have said ‘oh King, you know better than that’ … with Byron and Tom, we don’t have that chemistry yet. We have only been working together for a short time so when I said that, they didn’t even acknowledge it so it kind of went out and they just kept talking and I kept talking. I didn’t think anything about it either.”