It's about time we talked about John Cena's weird and wonderful Instagram

John Cena’s Instagram looks like it belongs to a teen who just discovered memes. It’s pure, uncut internet. The things Cena — superstar wrestler, actor, and general Fun Dude — posts don’t usually have anything obvious to do with him, his career, or his family. They initially seem to be devoid of context and reason. They also lack rhyme, because his images don’t have captions.

He has nine million followers, follows no one, and doesn’t seem to care whether you understand what he’s doing or not.

Cena’s Instagram persona wouldn’t be as noteworthy if it weren’t in such contrast to what you see when you look at him.

He’s a huge guy with tennis balls sewn into his biceps, a chiseled jaw atop a neck that could pass for a small oak tree, and a vaguely militaristic haircut. He plays Marines and dads in movies, and he’s extremely charitable. I dare you not to tear up watching this supercut of his Make-A-Wish visits to children’s hospitals:

You’d think this would mean that Cena would be a Normal American Guy, the type of dude who posts workout pictures and photos of his grill.

But he’s actually an endearing weirdo, and his social media reflects that — his Instagram looks like the Id of the internet. It’s a series of pictures that, when put together in a grid, resembles a Google Image search you found in a trash can.

Wow.

Let me show you a few more specific examples so you can see what I mean.

Here’s a chubby baby in a sink. I don’t really have any words for this one.

Celebrities often post motivational quotes, but they usually make note of who said it.

Cena doesn’t. I didn’t know who this guy is or where this quote comes from when I first saw it. I imagined it was something that once hung on the walls of Cena’s elementary school gymnasium, but when I Googled the quote, I found out that it’s from a graduation speech Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan gave in Maharashtra, India, on May 30, 2016. The photo appears to be of Khan as well.

I don’t know if Cena knows Kahn. I don’t know if Cena knows that Kahn is the man who’s pictured here, or if he just found the photo and posted it. But I do know that at time of publication, it had garnered 199,888 likes.

Here’s a picture of a dollar bill.

Is there something funny about it that I’m missing completely? Could be. But I think it’s just a dollar.

Here are some monkeys hugging a fruit (at least I think it’s a fruit).

Here’s PBS artist Bob Ross doing a sexy smirk in his very cool glasses.

(As a Ross devotee, this is one of my personal favorites.)

Here is Ferris Bueller, of ‘s Day Off fame, with his friend Cameron and Cameron’s Gordie Howe Redwings jersey.

Here’s Ferris again.

Here’s … this?

No idea.

Here is what I’ve dubbed Cena’s Stone Cold Steve section.

He takes a picture of Stone Cold Steve Austin and puts other Steves’ faces on it.

There are more of those.

Here’s a bed with a bunch of ‘80s toys on it:

Here’s whatever this is:

None of these seem to connect to anything, right? Right. I can’t place these images at all. I have no idea what they relate to.

Cena also becomes obsessed with people for a period of time.

Here’s Cena’s Kent Tekulve Era. In May 2017, he was posting lot of pictures of the former Pirates pitcher.

And here’s Cena’s brief infatuation with Canadian swimmer-turned-World Anti-Doping Agency president Dick Pound:

This is very relatable. I’ve often found myself intensely obsessed with someone or something (photos of Pete Carroll from his year with the Patriots, the key-changes in Phil Collins’ songs, Martha Stewart’s dogs, Antoni from Queer Eye) for periods of time. It seems like Cena puts his phases out in the open.

But Cena’s posts aren’t all completely random.

When you look closer, Cena’s feed actually makes more sense. You can reverse timestamp some of his images to current events; Cena will often pay tribute to famous people who’ve passed away, such as this post he put up when Stephen Hawking died.

He also posts about sports a lot.

When the Vikings’ Stefon Diggs made that incredible catch with no time left to send Minnesota to the NFC Championship game, Cena used a more obviously timely Stone Cold ‘shop.

Cena also supported UCF, the self-proclaimed college football champions, with this image.

There’s method to his madness.

Cena’s feed is whacked-out without being incomprehensible, and he clearly knows what he’s doing. In late 2016, he appeared in an SNL skit to make fun of his account. He deadpans through the whole thing, talking in halted speech to make himself sound dumb.

It is my professional opinion that Cena’s Instagram is just his way of expressing his true, weird self. I don’t see how he’d be able to keep up this mix of sense and nonsense if it weren’t coming from a real place. If I were a betting woman, I’d put a lot of money on the fact that Cena himself, rather than someone he’s hired, is choosing the content. How else could he keep such a chaotically consistent stream going if he weren’t in charge?

You can see this specific authenticity — Cena’s mix of smarts and strangeness — come through in his interviews, too.

He recently appeared on the show Desus & Mero, wearing the blue suit that seems to be his signature these days, and riffed with the hosts in his weird way. He also got pretty real about the grind of the entertainment industry, and how you have to love being in this business.

Celebrities usually use social media to promote themselves. Hell, I use social media to promote myself. We all do! Instagram might as well be called Look At This Great Time I’m Having. Or, Please Read/Watch/Buy This Thing I made. We put our best feet and selfies forward, and make sure that these images project what we want people to see and think about us.

Cena is doing this too, but he couldn’t care less about using the platform as a vanity project.

Most people post photos of their bodies in the best light, but he’s posting scans of what’s going on inside his brain. Sure, he does the Standard Celebrity Thing to promote his work. But he does it unconventionally. For example, he was in the animated film Ferdinand, which came out Dec. 15. He posted this picture of his body with a bull head on it to announce the premiere.

There was no caption, but commenters identified what was going on. His fans are an integral part of his shtick; they figure out what he’s talking about through conversations in the comments, treating each image like a riddle to be figured out.

Most of the time there will be something to discern, but — as that string of images at the beginning of this post illustrate — occasionally Cena will be like, “Hey, have you seen this picture of a guy in a bad toupee and an oversized suit that doesn’t fit? I think you need to.” Tossing in dead-ends makes his whole mystery more fun. It keeps his followers, these Cena anthropologists, on their toes.

It’s worth noting even the promotions fit seamlessly in with the weird content around them. The middle picture is the book the movie is based on, but you wouldn’t know it was anything other than just another photo, unless you knew what Cena had been working on.

The detectives in his comments had a lot of fun with Cena’s most recent posts.

See this picture (or drawing, or illustration, or photoshop, or whatever this is)?

It’s features a long, tube-like man meant to represent Cena himself, given that he’s wearing his trademark jorts and trucker hat. He’s poking the Undertaker, the WWE Superstar who seemed to retire the year earlier at WrestleMania, with a stick.

The idea here seemed to be that Undertaker had yet to let WWE fans know if he’d accept Cena’s challenge of facing him in the ring at 2018’s WrestleMania. Cena upped the ante with another post, this time featuring a dog pooping out Taker.

Cena’s taunts have also included references to previous characters played by the man behind the Undertaker persona, leading WWE fans to think Taker might perform with a different gimmick than his most famous one:

I have to tell you, going down a rabbit hole of Cena content for this post has been an absolute delight.

It’s given me a deep appreciation of his craft. I am very into his taunting, his nonsensical posts, his tributes. Granted, I’m drawn to strange Instagram accounts belonging to famous men, but I think there’s something freeing about putting up weird photos when you have 9 million followers and could be flaunting your fame, wealth, and beauty instead. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing the latter. It’s just less interesting.

Maybe the real lesson here is we should all turn our Instagrams into Cena-style content. Perhaps it’s time to zip open our brains and pour out our strangeness onto the internet. We can’t all be rich and famous, but we can all be weirdos.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)