In 1982, Richard Pryor starred in “The Toy” — a flawed but revealing satire about a wealthy child so insulated by his own privilege that his father literally hires a Black man to entertain him. The film wasn't subtle. Pryor is the toy. And underneath the slapstick was a brutally honest metaphor: the idea that Black talent, Black labor, and Black bodies could still be bought, displayed, and consumed for someone else’s amusement. The movie was a comedy, but the transaction at its center was not.

What I’ve never understood is why Pryor — at the height of his fame, power, and cultural relevance — agreed to that role. By 1982, he was untouchable: multiplatinum albums, a string of hit films, Grammy Awards, stadiums full of fans. He didn’t need the check. So why be the toy?

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It’s the same question I ask every time Jake Paul strolls into a boxing ring to cosplay as an athlete. Like a grown-up version of the kid in “The Toy,” Paul is an extremely wealthy white man-child who uses money to lure legitimate fighters into his sandbox. The show only works because Paul plays the role of the mediocre white protagonist surrounded by Black athletes who validate his fantasy. And somehow, people keep paying to watch it.

Paul is not a boxer; he’s a very determined gym selfie, and so far, he is 12-1. He’s fought a retired basketball player (who would go on to need a kidney transplant), a handful of MMA fighters whose better days are behind them, a 59-year-old former boxer, and a once-promising boxer who struggles with drug addiction. When he fought Tommy Fury, the half-brother of former heavyweight champion Tyson Fury, the only real boxer who had about as many pro-fights as Paul, he lost. In fact, that was his only loss since doing whatever it is he’s doing because it’s not boxing. 

And now he’s set to fight Anthony Joshua, the former two-time heavyweight champion who was the unified world heavyweight champion twice between 2017 to 2019 and 2019 to 2021. Joshua boasts a professional boxing record of 28-4 with 25 of those wins coming by way of knockouts. He’s a real fighter. So was Paul’s former opponent, Gervonta “Tank” Davis, who was supposed to take on the YouTube boob before he was hit with a domestic violence lawsuit from an ex-girlfriend. Davis pulled out of the fight, and Joshua, a legitimate heavyweight and former champion, stepped up.  

And the whole thing is a joke. It has to be.

If Anthony Joshua shows up in any shape of any kind and is allowed to actually let his hands go, this “fight” shouldn’t even make it out of the first round. But this isn’t about an actual fight; it’s about power, wealth, and influence in a staged competition in which an actual fighter is willing to degrade his own sport for a pre-packaged, monetized storyline.

This is what they want you to believe: a British Olympic gold medalist stepping into the ring with a YouTube-born celebrity boxer whose résumé consists solely of curated opportunism is an actual fair fight. 

This event, this glorified IG story, asks the audience to suspend disbelief, and what’s even more bizarre is that fans willingly fork over money to participate in the farce. What’s being sold here isn’t simply a fight; it’s the comfort of irony. Audiences don’t have to grapple with seriousness because the event itself winks at absurdity. 

And perhaps that is why the matchup frustrates traditionalists so deeply: it does not merely challenge boxing’s hierarchy — it trivializes the very scaffolding upon which hierarchy exists. Rankings, training lineage, amateur pedigree, world-title eliminators — all are rendered optional when financial spectacle can leapfrog narrative order. It’s a different world when you can just pay a fee and buy your way in. Sport achievement is supposed to be earned; entertainment is simply cast.

None of this is to say Jake Paul should not box. He has every right to pursue the sport, improve, test himself, and market his persona. But why not climb his way up like those before him? Why not fight actual boxers and earn an actual spot in the sport? And, Joshua has every right to earn a late-career cash grab. Fighters are entitled to financial agency, especially in a sport where retirement outcomes are notoriously grim. But fans, analysts, and cultural observers are equally entitled to critique what such matchups say about the sport's legitimacy. 

And call it what it is: A joke. 

If the Paul-Joshua fight were promoted explicitly as a theatrical exhibition — a crossover show, a celebrity experiment, a carnival-style attraction — it might be more palatable. Transparency is honest commerce. But packaging it as a legitimate test within boxing’s hierarchy makes the whole thing laughable, not just because Jake Paul is involved. (Ok, fine. It’s because Jake Paul is involved.)

Boxing will survive this moment. It has survived worse. But it must decide, sooner than later, where it stands on the cultural fault line that balances narrowly between being a boxing event and a pugilistic parody; the racial undertones are jarring and the access to professional athletes who spent their whole lives committed to the sport, for the sake of entertaining the shadow boxer is embarrassing to both the legacy of the actual fighter and the sport.

I still don’t understand why Anthony Joshua took this fight. And I don’t know whether Jake Paul is the joke or the audience is. But either way, he’s winning.