Yes, it's working. Josh Hokit filmed a friend blasting him with pepper spray in the gym, captioned it "Actually got pepper sprayed," and presented it as prep for fighting blind against Ciryl Gane at UFC 334. People watched it and decided they liked the guy. That's the whole trick, and it worked on more people than will admit it.
The clip itself is genuinely funny. Hokit reacts to the burn on camera, "It does burn... Bro, it actually f, ing burns. I thought this s, was fake," and the delivery sells it. For a fighter whose public persona has mostly landed somewhere between loud and exhausting, this is the most charming he's ever looked, and the timing couldn't be better.
The laugh is doing real work. Hokit is the No. 10 ranked heavyweight at 10-0, facing a champion ranked No. 2 at 14-2, going into November 14 at Madison Square Garden. On paper he has no case for this fight. The pepper-spray video is the reason he's there. His path to this title shot ran through being talkable, and this is him being talkable.
Gane supplied the material. He poked Tom Aspinall in both eyes at UFC 321 in October 2025, the fight was ruled a no contest, and Aspinall ended up vacating the heavyweight belt in September 2026 over the injury that followed. Gane has said over and over that it was an accident, that he was pushing off during a kick and caught the eyes by mistake. Dominick Cruz and T.J. Dillashaw have publicly pushed back on the "cheater" talk. There's an accusation but no verdict. But a champion fielding cheating accusations from part of the fanbase is exactly the kind of champion you can build a viral pepper-spray bit on. Hokit is renting Gane's problem and charging admission.
That's fine as far as it goes. What curdles it is the other half of the act. On Michael Bisping's podcast, Hokit joked he's been prepping by getting poked in the eye 100 times a day, then took a shot at Aspinall, saying he isn't "looking like Tom Aspinall" after all those eye pokes. Bisping called it a low blow on the spot, and Bisping was right. Aspinall didn't do anything funny. He got his eye wrecked and gave up a belt he never lost. Turning that into the kicker of your tight five is the cheap, shock-value instinct that has always made Hokit's persona a coin flip, and it's why the people who find him grating still find him grating.
Hokit made this work by being a sharp enough self-promoter to know chaos sells a pay-per-view better than a credible resume. Gane handed over the ammunition. And the podcasts and aggregators around the sport keep re-posting the bit because outrage-adjacent comedy prints clicks, even when the joke is standing on an injured man.
The UFC loves this trade, because a loud underdog moves tickets and a deserving one doesn't guarantee a buy. Enjoy the clip. Just don't confuse a good eight seconds of content with a man earning anything. Thirteen days out, Hokit's best weapon is a punchline, and the joke's on someone else's pain.
