March 25, 2018. Fourth from the top on the “Judgement 2018 ~DDT 21st Anniversary~” card, in front of nearly 6,000 fans in Sumo Hall: a five-way tag team match featuring Yuko Miyamoto and Soma Takao, Isami Kodaka and Fuminori Abe, Michael Nakazawa and Chinsuke Nakamura, Mike Bailey and MAO, and Ippanjin Munenori Sawa and Sanshiro Takagi. The match is a Weapons Rumble, a DDT staple wherein weapons are delivered to the ring at set intervals, each weapon (sometimes an object, sometimes a person, sometimes a concept) chosen by a participant in the match. The stakes are upped further by the stipulation that the loser of the match will suffer the harshest punishment in all of DDT: an anal explosion. It is not a metaphor.

The match ends with Mike Bailey and MAO delivering their finishing moves to Michael Nakazawa and pinning him. Nakazawa panics. He’s taken too many anal explosions before. He can’t endure another. He screams about returning to his adopted home of Thailand, and flees the ring in a shocking display of craven cowardice.

Sanshiro Takagi, not just a participant in the match but also the president of DDT, is thus faced with a dilemma. The crowd was promised an anal explosion. If not Michael Nakazawa, then who? One by one, the members of the match raise their hands and step forward, saying that they will volunteer to withstand the atomic wrath of their butthole being detonated. Takagi is a stern man with a soft core, and he is so moved by everyone’s display that he, too, lifts his hand. At that moment, every other hand in the ring drops, leaving Takagi as the lone volunteer for DDT’s ritual human sacrifice.

Takagi accepts his fate with tears in his eyes. He walks up the ramp, shedding his gear as he goes. Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” plays over the PA, and all the wrestlers in the ring salute him. They look stricken by Takagi’s willingness to potentially end his own ass. (All of them except MAO, who is grinning.) He pulls down the compression briefs he wears under his trunks and lays down on the stage. His hand hovers over the button. He is weeping now, terrified. He can’t bring himself to hit the switch.

Ippanjin Munenori Sawa sees the turmoil within his tag partner’s soul. He storms the stage, his salaryman’s clothes shredded from the wrestling match. He won’t let Takagi go through this alone. As the song reaches a crescendo, he lays down atop Takagi. Their hands laced together, they hit the button as one. A volcano-like geyser of flame bursts from the general area of their butts with a loud bang, and their bodies go limp, their asses destroyed.

The camera briefly cuts to Shinjiro Ohtani, one of the weapons brought out during the match, who looks absolutely baffled by what he’s just witnessed.

To get the most out of the many callbacks and in-jokes in the 5-Way Tag Team Weapons Rumble Anal Explosion match at DDT Judgement 2018, it’s not enough just to be familiar with the history of everyone involved. (For example, Munenori Sawa wrestled in a suit and tie as “Ippanjin Munenori Sawa” because per a previous retirement stipulation, he was forced to become an ippanjin — a common man. Even Ohtani’s presence is a callback to a previous Weapons Rumble, a joke too detailed to explain in a parenthetical like this.) DDT constantly comments on the broader strokes of pro wrestling in general. The Takagi/Sawa tag team had tearfully re-united in DDT the exact same week as the Golden☆Lovers in NJPW, capitalizing on NJPW fans being educated on the history of them as DDT’s greatest tag team, though Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi didn’t have to endure the same fate that Takagi and Sawa ended up sharing. The storyline is both a merciless piss-take of old friends who’ve moved on, and an unironic, affectionate tribute to them and their place in DDT’s history. That’s the magic of DDT, and of Sanshiro Takagi: unlike a lot of wrestling, they can do two things at once.

The style of comedy wrestling that Sanshiro Takagi has sold through DDT is one that’s often deeply stupid, but in the same breath very clever. DDT’s “variety” division is home to a rogue’s gallery of characters who defy easy description. It’s not enough to say that Kazuki Hirata is a psychopathic yet frequently incompetent Magnum TOKYO cosplayer who sometimes morphs into a one-hit-one-kill karate master. Even that’s too much for an elevator pitch, and it fails to capture the spark that Hirata brings to his truly strange character. Words completely fail the likes of Super Sasadango Machine. Danshoku Dieno’s relentless lust for sodomy is probably the easiest to summarize, and yet still doesn’t capture why the crowds connect with him.

Compare characters like these to comedy figures like Danhausen or the Hurricane, who have one note that they strike, over and over and over, regardless of who they’re up against. Hirata, Dieno, Sasadango, Toru Owashi, Antonio Honda, Makoto Oishi, et al. bounce off of one another and find new angles to take, new riffs they can pull out of wild combinations. Under Takagi’s stewardship, even DDT’s comedy wrestling rewards a knowledge and understanding of the characters and their histories. It takes the premise of the King’s Road and warps it, disguises it behind parody and provocation, replaces Misawa-killing head drops with anus-searing fire bombs. Jokes build and build, new punchlines responding to previous ones, gags pushing the meta envelope in ways that even the most irony-poisoned AEW wrestlers can’t sacrifice their own self-image to reach.

The rock of it all is the boss, Sanshiro Takagi, putting himself on the line in the most ridiculous matches, sometimes giving himself the last word and just as often ending up the punchline. He feuds with Minoru Suzuki, but in spectacles like empty arena brawls spanning the entire Tokyo Dome, or wrestling matches on moving public trains. One night, he’ll be the glowering authority figure keeping all the lunatics in line, and the next, he’ll be wearing body-paint Gundam cosplay. He looks like a gruff old man with a head that somewhat changes shape depending on his haircut, and his ring gear and move set are stolen wholesale from Stone Cold Steve Austin, but he cries at the drop of a hat. He’ll put aside his dignity and pull a full-on Juwanna Mann to infiltrate the TJPW roster, and then he’ll put aside his sense of self-preservation to get thrown through a stack of plastic storage tubs, or run over with the ring van. Everything that DDT can be, Sanshiro Takagi is.

Sanshiro Takagi is the innovator of the Holy Fool’s Road, and he deserves to be honored for it. The VP2010s await. His asshole’s burning sacrifice must not be in vain.