Left: Chris Jericho's latest rock and wrestling memoir, "Undisputed." Right: Jericho launches himself off the top rope during a match with The Rock AKA Duane Johnson. (Images: Grand Central Publishing.)

Pro wrestler/rocker/game show host Chris Jericho ends his first wrestling memoir, "A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex" (2007, Grand Central Publishing), only moments before his 1999 debut in Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment. After spending the bulk of the 1990s toiling in ramshackle Canadian wrestling schools, Japanese hardcore matches, Mexican lucha-libre, crazed Hillbilly leagues and ineptly run cable TV operations, Jericho finally makes it to the top of sports entertainment. But if you think that getting signed by the WWE puts Y2J on easy street, his inevitable follow-up, "Undisputed: How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps," has arrived to dispel such foolish notions.

Fortunately for Chris Jericho the best selling author, he's never more endearing or hilarious than when he has a ladder to climb. "Undisputed" not only has him climbing that ladder, but this time around he's getting knocked off of it over and over again like a competitor in a Money in the Bank match at WrestleMania. Only days after his pyro-laden intro on "Monday Night RAW," sympathetic wrestlers tell Jericho that he has "a target on his back" and that he doesn't know how to work the WWE's style. When Jericho first signs with the WWE, McMahon says he'll let him know if he's doing anything wrong, but such instructions never come, leaving the wrestler to fritter away his newly signed $450,000 contract by bombing on national television. When McMahon finally gives him some feedback, the grappling impresario calls Jericho "the drizzling shits." Now that's a performance evaluation.

But verbal drubbings from McMahon and having "scorching heat" in the locker room aren't enough to keep the Lion Heart down, and Jericho uses his ups and downs with the WWE to forge a compelling page-turner. As committed as he is to living his big time wrestling dreams, he still recognizes the absurdities of working for a company where calling the boss's daughter a "filthy, dirty, disgusting, brutal, bottom-feeding, trash-bag ho" on national cable TV is a good career move. Reading "Undisputed" quickly becomes like watching an old "Naked Gun" movie with Leslie Nielsen, where if you only laugh at a third of the gags and tales of the just-plain wrong, you still won't stop chuckling. This makes Jericho the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker of wrestling memoirists, a cultural reference that I'm sure he'll appreciate—and Jericho loves cultural references.

In the prose of Jericho and collaborator Peter Thomas Fontinale, the minutiae of Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler comedies and an intimate knowledge of the track list of Dio's "Holy Diver" album are co-mingled with dense recollections of the early 2000s wrestling scene. The Godfather; the Ho-train; Chyna; X-Pac; Road Dogg; Mr. Ass; D'Lo Brown; Jindrak & O'Haire; Tajiri spewing green mist; Steveweisers; the Peoples' Elbow; Stephanie McMahon's breast implants—they all come flooding back along with an entire Ozzfest's worth of metal references. However, the frequent name-checking of just about everything that Jericho holds dear only helps to maintain his everyman vibe even after he becomes the WWE's only undisputed champ (hence the book's title) and holds his own in a very real backroom brawl with Bill Goldberg. Jericho knows his audience and he is us.

Even after his greatest triumphs in the WWE, Jericho never feels that his position is quite secure. Almost as a reaction to his uncertainty, he doubles down on the trash culture crazy train by launching his power metal band Fozzy at the same time that he's darting around the country in rental cars to make weekly installments of "Smackdown." With the concurrent careers, not only does he get chewed out by McMahon, but he's also called a "wanker" by Sharon Osbourne for playing a game of fastball with Ozzy guitarist Zakk Wylde in the parking lot during an Ozzfest show. Jericho also recounts being kissed on the lips by Sebastian Bach of Skid Row, making me ponder what beautiful children they would have had.

Aside from the kind of hair-metal gossip that could've kept the website Metal-Sludge.com going for another year, the best aspect of the Fozzy tour diary material is the contrast between wrestling in packed arenas one night and playing to nearly empty dive bars attached to homeless shelters the next. Rock and roll is a hard business, but just like his early years of working makeshift matches in Winnepeg sports bars, Jericho is undeterred. Last year, I saw him put on a rockin' set with Fozzy in a Tempe, Ariz. strip mall rock club a little more than a day before he was slammed through a table at WrestleMania. When I interviewed him over the phone last May, he was in between a record signing at an FYE in Austin, Tex. and a match with R Truth on "Monday Night Raw." Like any other musician, Jericho can't quite quit his day job.

But Jericho does walk away from the squared circle during the last third of this volume, and it's here that "Undisputed" takes a dark turn. His mother passes away, his longtime friend and former tag team partner Eddie Guerrero also dies, he's arrested for drunk driving, and then there's Chris Benoit. Benoit killed his wife and son before hanging himself in his weight room in late June 2007. He was also Jericho's friend. Jericho could have easily written Benoit out of "Undisputed," the same way that the WWE no longer references the man who once held their world title (and it's hard to blame them). But to Jericho's credit, he stands by the Benoit he once knew if not the murderer he became. "I'll always love the kind, funny, excitable, supportive, levelheaded, polite and humble man whom I've trusted more than anyone I've ever met in this business," Jericho writes, "But I'll always despise the man who murdered his family and ruined his entire legacy in the last days of his life."

"Undisputed" only covers Jericho's initial run with the WWE and the months directly after it where he goes to Hollywood to become a true multimedia star with work in improv comedy and a brief stint on a reality show. Like "A Lion's Tale" before it, "Undisputed" sets up another follow-up that will likely cover his WWE comeback, the continuing saga of Fozzy, and his short season of hurtling prizes off of a building as the host of a primetime ABC game show. If this future memoir to be written in airports and all-night diners in between band gigs and pay-per-views is anything like the first two, I can hardly wait for it.

Chris Jericho's "Undisputed: How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps" will be available where ever fine book s are sold on Wednesday, February 16th.

Bob Calhoun is the author of  the bestselling punk-wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, which is available through Amazon.com. You can follow him on Twitter @bob_calhoun.