Kayfabe: The Philosophy of Pro Wrestling

[Benjamin Frank]

CBC Ideas radio program, the usual just under 1 hour long.

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/15934636-keeping-kayfabe-the-philosophy-pro-wrestling

The article on the program: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/pro-wrestling-kayfabe-1.6571027

In April 2019, a wrestling match in New Jersey got out of hand. Several minutes in, a wrestler attempted to throw his opponent — his own brother! — from a balcony. As the referee tried to intervene, they both toppled over the bannister. The two rivals fell into the crowd below, sending spectators scattering and falling over backward in a heap.

The strange thing was both wrestlers were invisible. Only the referee could see them, fans were told, by wearing a special pair of sunglasses.

Despite the invisibility of the wrestlers, fans cheered on the good guy and taunted the bad guy throughout the match. After the wrestlers' disastrous fall, the crowd burst into a spontaneous chant: "This is wrestling! This is wrestling!"

Of course, neither wrestler actually existed, except in the mind of the spectators.

And it's this kind of suspension of disbelief that makes professional wrestling so relevant to philosophers today.

My take is that professional wrestling is performance art, and, as mentioned in the episode, it really isn't any different than the performative OUTRAGE! we see in politics especially as practiced by Republicans. Going back a bit in history, I don't think it's a surprise that one of the first, in America anyway, performance artists - Andy Kaufman - outraged audiences with one of his routines that featured him wrestling with women, as well as being friends with some of the some of the top professional wrestlers of the day.

Also, as fake as wrestling is, the harm that this art inflicts on the wrestler's bodies isn't and more needs to be done to protect the safety of professional wrestlers.

[sting in the rafters]

Ok so you're spittin facts however this jawn breaks it down way cooler in under half the time.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Vince McMahon is simply an escaped Tennessee Williams character. In this essay I will

[dead0man]

pro wrestling is an art like any other.  People that sh**t on it for being "fake" are idiots.  There are a million things to dislike about pro wrestling (especially as done in 2022), but being "not real" is by far the dumbest reason to not like it.  Everyone* knows it's fixed, some buy into the kayfabe anyway...for the fun of it.  People that watch movies don't think the actors playing the bad guys are actually bad guys and people that watch wrestling know that about their bad guys too.



*a certain type of extra dumb children and a fraction of mentally handicapped people might think it's real.  No one else (not even red necks/white trash/whatever stereotype you might have in your head) has thought it was real for a century.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Vince McMahon is simply an escaped Tennessee Williams character. In this essay I will

The similar types of theatricality between pro wrestling and the Trump administration (which sometimes rose to the level of out-and-out synergy, as with SBA administrator Linda McMahon ayy lmao) also suggest themselves. Kayfabe and Trumpism also have interesting shared roots in the aesthetics of camp, carnival, charivari, and so forth, aesthetics that can be developed in very different ideological directions depending on how and when one's initial departure took place from the sorts of spaces in which Polari used to be spoken. Nightmare Alley--the novel and the two movies based on it, the 1940s film noir and the recent Guillermo Del Toro re-adaptation--is a great literary and cinematic starting point for some of these aesthetics and social emotions in a much earlier form.

[sting in the rafters]

snip

https://twitter.com/90swwe/status/1546260170136850436?s=21&t=GLEpg0k5DHvvvl-...
if only you knew how bad things really are