Comments on: TCWNN # 14: Kayfabin’ it.

By: Anime Saito

Anime Saito — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:20:37 +0000

I still hear the same old problem that wrestling is fake but i know the real answer to this, that it isn`t. Thanks for the review.

By: Steven Gepp

Steven Gepp — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:57:16 +0000

I think you should have included a link to the press conference and the media hype (links in the forums)- Australians can be quite, I don’t know, “stupid” some times. And I am a proud Aussie. And yet when I tell people I wrestle they say it’s fake and always ask – How do you get blood capsules to break on your head like that? We even had a media commentator mention how fake the blood looked and the capsules thing after the Hogan/Flair “brawl”.

Sigh. It’s times like this when I wonder if Australians have really grown up as a nation.

By: scott m

scott m — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:10:05 +0000

Good article, Chris. The points on “suspension of disbelief” were accurate and represent what Kayfabe-era wrestling fomented and what the post-Attitude era wrestling has downplayed (to its detriment, in my opinion).

I will take issue with just a couple of points, however.

I think there’s a difference between actual “kayfabe” and what most people think of as the “kayfabe era”. Kayfabe cannot seriously be considered to have been a part of wrestling past, say, 1980 or so. Kayfabe itself died long before the “kayfabe era” ended.

Most people equate the end of the kayfabe era to either the beginning of the Attitude Era and the advent of the internet or to the results of the McMahon steroid trial — where Vince basically admitted officially that wrestling wasn’t real.

But as a matter of public record, kayfabe died off long before then. There were “exposes” of the wrestling business dating all the way back to the 1940s and most news organizations acknowledged that the spectacle was “fake” throughout the ’70s — a decade before John Stossel’s hyped report.

Even so, lots of oddball, cartoonish characters were able to thrive during the era of true kayfabe. Back when people (mostly) believed this thing had a bit of sport to it.

Just to give a short list…

Brute Bernard, Skull Murphy, Great Kabuki, Kimala, Haystacks Calhoun, The Mongols, Mongolian Stomper, The Sheik (of Araby), Abdullah the Butcher…

and that’s not even the oddest of the bunch. There was like a Tarzan Kid and Ricky Starr — the ballet dancing wrestler.

All during a period when whether or not wrestling was real was a topic of actual controversy.

If you want to see how “cartoonish” gimmicks can survive in the post-kayfabe era, look no further than Chikara. Or to stars like Delirious.

Most people don’t watch wrestling to smark about how fake it all is. Most people watch to be entertained. Suspension of disbelief is part of being entertained. So people will willing give that to the product if it just maintains a modicum of internal consistency and at least a middling respect for the audience’s intelligence.

I mark out for the Ant Colony as much as I mark out for Bryan Danielson. It’s wrestling.

If the WWE creative team just came to grips with that, I think it would be a true “first step is half-way there” moment.

Good article.

By: Matt Briner

Matt Briner — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:56:51 +0000

Wrestling in this kind of discussion can best be described as “the Santa Claus of performance art”; you think it’s real until you’re about nine or ten or so until either A) You use your big-boy thoughts and logic shoves its way in, or B) Your parents sit you down and their first sentence with “There’s something we need to tell you…”