By Rick Gardner, Torch specialist

Hornswoggle is smaller than sales of Eric Escobar action figures.

Hornswoggle is shorter than the duration of Kofi Kingston's 2009 main event push.

Hornswoggle is shorter than the running time of my homemade "Best of Vladimir Kozlov" compilation.

Hornswoggle is shorter than the collective memories of the WWE creative team.

Apologies for the jokes, but the current direction of Raw suggests that this is what wrestling fans are looking for. There was certainly far more "entertainment" than wrestling on the penultimate Raw of the decade, which was the vehicle for D-Generation X's long awaited "Little People's Court" skit. These segments required not so much the suspension of disbelief, more turning the brain off completely, as Triple H and Shawn Michaels pled their case to the diminutive judge and jury.

The balance of Raw is completely wrong, although Monday's episode took this to new extremes. When WWE was good at writing comedy about ten years ago, it was complemented by serious storylines and was never the main focus of the show.

This week not only featured the Little People's Court segment, it also featured a replay of the Little Peoples Court, Sgt. Slaughter wanting to kiss the guest host Johnny Damon, Mae Young actually kissing the guest host Johnny Damon and then nearly falling over, Santino Marella dressed as "Santino Claus," an actress pretending to be Elin Nordegren chasing a man in a tiger costume while wielding a golf club, and Chris Jericho dressing up as Santa Claus in an attempt to get back on Raw.

That the show ended with all the little people dressed in DX t-shirts attacking Jericho, and Hornswoggle being accepted as part of D-Generation X, says it all about what a wretched episode of Raw this was.

It is astonishing that Bret Hart has chosen to make his WWE comeback at this point in time, when the main storyline involving the company's top two wrestlers is based around nonsensical comedy. The Hitman was adamant that he would not tarnish his career by working for Vince McMahon again, even refusing to make a brief appearance at WrestleMania the day after he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Yet he has just signed a contract that with WWE at a time when the company is in a deep creative malaise. I would suggest that Bret checks that he has a creative control clause in his contract, but we all know how that worked out last time.

It is an indictment of WWE's booking policy that Hornswoggle has such a key role on the company's main television show. At least in the dying days of WCW, the aging stars blocking the path to the main event had drawn money in the past. It must be galling to see Hornswoggle, who rarely wrestles, involved in a program with D-Generation X.

Triple H has been in the main event for the past decade, while Shawn Michaels has had more great matches than the rest of the Raw roster combined. They are not up and coming young stars who are in no position to turn down terrible angles. With WrestleMania 26 on the horizon, Shawn Michaels will turn to promoting his re-match with The Undertaker and Triple H will surely be involved in the WWE title picture. Both will have to get serious almost overnight, after months of goofing around like two drunken dads at a wedding.

The name "creative team" sounds more ironic by the month. The move to PG programming shouldn't have caused WWE to stop taking their own product seriously, but that has been the exact result. Intelligence insulting comedy "entertainment" plague Raw, and the Little People's Court was a prime example.

The whole company looks short of ideas heading to 2010.

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