Chris Jericho’s iconic catchphrase that led to a sparkling wine partnership originated from an iconic movie!
Speaking to Kenny McIntosh during his Jericho Chronicles tour with Inside the Ropes (released via Talk is Jericho), Chris Jericho revealed the events that led to his iconic use of the phrase “a little bit of the bubbly.” According to the Demo God, the line resulted from having to redo a segment multiple times and throwing out improv lines off the cuff.
“So bubbly was backstage and we were in Chicago. And we had to kill some time because they wanted the shot of me walking through the crowd and insulting people and getting into my room when I then pour some champagne on some unwilling tech, stagehand, just to show how much of a pompous jerk Chris Jericho is. So I remember I was walking through and I like being live, let’s just do it.
“And I did it, and it worked out good. Like, we got to do it again. Because the microphones are not working. I’m like f*ck, and we did it again, and they’re like, oh, there’s something wrong. I’m like, guys, this is great material. I’m just throwing out these improv insults, and if you have to do it, again, those improv insults aren’t improv anymore and that’s not as fun.”
“So the third time, I was already kind of angry, kind of p*ssed off, like just annoyed, I guess is a better word. So I’m walking through the back and it’s the third time and now we’ve got it and I go into the dressing room, and like, I haven’t been in there yet.”
Continuing, Chris Jericho detailed how the iconic phrase could have easily been about part of the vegetable spread backstage instead of sparkling wine, recalling how he was unimpressed with the food presented after he won the AEW World Championshp.
“But they said you’re gonna have a spread, like, like a championship spread. And if you remember, I walk in there, there’s literally like a vegetable platter and a bottle of champagne. And I remember walking in and I was like, thinking, this is the spread worthy of a champion? It’s terrible. It looks like something like at a church, you know, picnic or something. ‘I just brought the veggie plate.’
“So I go in there, and there’s two lines that I said that I really popped myself. And a lot of my stuff comes from movies, the first one was there was olives. And I said, ‘Look at this one. There’s a little guy in there and look at this one. There’s no little guy. Where’s the little guy?’ It’s from Spinal Tap, right? And that I thought was hilarious, Nigel Tuffnell’s backstage thing. He doesn’t like the fact that one olive has a pimento, the other one doesn’t have a little guy in there and it gets mad.
“Nobody cared about that. And that was that’s a Nigel Tufnell line and that’s funny. ‘There’s a little guy in there.’”
In the end, it was a line from Jim Carrey’s film Dumb and Dumber that led to Chris Jericho spouting off the iconic phrase “little bit of the bubbly” that went viral on social media.
“Then, Dumb and Dumber, if you guys remember Jim Carrey at some point, it’s like, we got a little bit of the bubbly, shoot the owl with the cork. I remember that. So, just amusing myself was the Spinal Tap line and the little bit of the bubbly line. And that’s it. I pour the champagne on the unsuspecting stagehand, and there you go. Next day, read the room, there’s memes, hundreds of them. Hundreds of them. Not of ‘There’s a little guy in there…’ like no ‘Have a little bit of a bubbly.’”
“And then they start making songs with my voice inserted into the chorus. For example, Drowning Pool, Let The Bodies Hit The Floor, right? Take out bodies and they put it in bubbly. Let the bubbly hit the floor. Let the bubbly like my voice or like that stupid. Mambo Number Five, a little bit of… and it was a little bit of the bubbly. So they just didn’t like they just kept making them and this is a thing.”
Chris Jericho also detailed how the viral phrase led to a partnership with Nocking Point Wine to sell out of wine with his name on it. He says that he wasn’t concerned with how the wine tasted, but despite that, it ended up being a tasty bottle in addition to a collector’s item.
“So always read the room, and Glen Garry, Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin, always be closing. I picked up the phone and I called my manager Barry Bloom and I said, we need to make some a little bit of the bubbly champagne and we need to do it fast. Because it’s the thing but you got a short window.
“Well then you bring in these sommeliers who care about the taste, I’m like I don’t care about the taste. All people want is the bottle. That’s what you like. Turns out of that tastes really good. It actually got a really good rating that’s I know the word sommelier. What does a sommelier mean? It is like a champagne expert. And they gave my bubbly a good review.
“So but I was just like we just we gotta get a cool bottle. Iron Maiden Trooper beer, I’ve never had a Trooper beer but I have them in my house just because of bottles, who cares about the beer? Who gives a sh*t I want the bottle. So that’s kind of how it started. Like we got them done really quickly. And it became a thing that I was just telling Kenny backstage we end up selling 50,000 bottles of the bubbly but had we waited two months we might not have, it was hot. People were excited about it.
“We used it on the show even, had the bubbly truck where The Inner Circle sprayed the bubbly on the pinnacle. So we made it into part of the AEW lexicon, part of the universe, part of the canon, as they say, only because of a throwaway line that I didn’t even think was as good as ‘There’s this little guy in there…’ Nigel Tufnell line. Had it gone the other way we could have had Chris Jericho ‘There’s a little guy in there’ olives. We sold 50,000 jars of olives.”
If you use any quotes from this transcription, please credit the Inside the Ropes Jericho Chronicles via Talk is Jericho and link back to this article with a h/t to Inside the Ropes.