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Performance and Professional
Wrestling

Performance and Professional Wrestling is the first edited volume to consider pro-
fessional wrestling explicitly from the vantage point of theatre and performance
studies. Moving beyond simply noting its performative qualities or reading it
via other performance genres, this collection of chapters offers a complete criti-
cal reassessment of the popular sport.
Topics such as the suspension of disbelief, simulation, silence and speech,
physical culture, and the performance of pain within the squared circle are
explored in relation to professional wrestling. Chapters by both scholars and
practitioners are grouped into seven short sections:

• Audience
• Circulation
• Lucha
• Gender
• Queerness
• Bodies
• Race

A significant re-reading of wrestling as a performing art, Performance and Pro-

fessional Wrestling makes essential reading for scholars and students intrigued by
this uniquely theatrical sport.

Broderick Chow is a Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London, per-

formance practitioner, and amateur weightlifter.

Eero Laine is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at

­Buffalo, State University of New York.

Claire Warden is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University.

This page intentionally left blank
Performance and Professional
Wrestling

Edited by Broderick Chow,

Eero Laine, and Claire Warden
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter Broderick Chow, Eero
Laine, and Claire Warden; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Chow, Broderick.
Title: Performance and professional wrestling / Broderick Chow,
Eero Laine, and Claire Warden.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge,
2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016002736 | ISBN 9781138937222 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138937239 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315676401 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Wrestling. | Wrestling—Social aspects. |
Performance art.
Classification: LCC GV1195 .C487 2016 | DDC 796.812—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016002736
ISBN: 978-1-138-93722-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-93723-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67640-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Figuresviii
Contributorsix

Introduction: Hamlet doesn’t blade: Professional

wrestling, theatre, and performance 1
BRODERICK CHOW, EERO LAINE, AND CLAIRE WARDEN

PART I
Audience7

1 The dissipation of “heat”: Changing role(s) of

audience in professional wrestling in the United States 9
JON EZELL

2 Pops and promos: Speech and silence in

professional wrestling 17
CLAIRE WARDEN

3 Playful engagements: Wrestling with the attendant masses 26

STEPHEN DI BENEDETTO

PART II
Circulation37

4 Stadium-sized theatre: WWE and the world of

professional wrestling 39
EERO LAINE
vi Contents

5 Wrestling’s not real, it’s hyperreal: Professional

wrestling video games 48
NICHOLAS WARE

PART III
Lucha57

6 Don’t leave us in the hands of criminals: The

contested cultural politics of lucha libre 59
HEATHER LEVI

7 Wrestling with burlesque, burlesquing lucha libre 70

NINA HOECHTL

PART IV
Gender83

8 The impact of women’s pro wrestling performances

on the transformation of gender 85
KEIKO AIBA (TRANSLATED BY MINATA HARA)

9 “Most women train with mostly men, so why not

wrestle them?” The performance and experience of
intergender professional wrestling in Britain 95
CARRIE DUNN

PART V
Queerness105

10 Grappling and ga(y)zing: Gender, sexuality, and

performance in the WWE debuts of Goldust
and Marlena 107
JANINE BRADBURY

11 “King of the ring, and queen of it too”: The exotic

masculinity of Adrian Street 118
STEPHEN GREER
 Contents vii

12 “Gold-dust”: Ricki Starr’s ironic performances of

the queer commodity in popular entertainment 127
LAURA KATZ RIZZO

PART VI
Bodies141

13 Muscle memory: Re-enacting the fin-de-siècle

strongman in pro wrestling 143
BRODERICK CHOW

14 The hard sell: The performance of pain in professional

wrestling 154
JAMIE LEWIS HADLEY

PART VII
Race163

15 “Tell them it’s what their grandfathers got”: Racial

violence in southern professional wrestling 165
CHARLES HUGHES

16 Grappling with the “new racism”: Race, ethnicity, and

post-colonialism in British wrestling during the 1970s
and 1980s 177
NICHOLAS PORTER

17 Some moments of flag desecration in professional

wrestling 187
MORGAN DANIELS

Epilogue: The game of life 196

SHARON MAZER

Bibliography207
Index223
Figures

6.1 “Now, the president and the PAN are entering the
fight with everything they’ve got, and we have to
support them.” 60
8.1 Komando Borishoi delivers an Avalanche Backdrop
Suplex on Kuragaki Tsubasa. 86
13.1 Cabinet card depicting Hackenschmidt posed. 147
14.1 Dolph Ziggler (@HEELZiggler). 160
14.2 Tyson Kidd (@KiddWWE). 161
Contributors

Keiko Aiba is a Professor in the Department of Global and Transcultural Stud-

ies at Meiji Gakuin University.
Janine Bradbury is a Lecturer in Literature at York St. John University and
specialises in American literature and culture.
Broderick Chow is a Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London, per-
formance practitioner, and amateur weightlifter.
Morgan Daniels teaches British history at Queen Mary, University of London,
and lectures in history and media at Arcadia University’s London Center.
Stephen Di Benedetto is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Asso-
ciate Professor of Theatre History at the University of Miami.
Carrie Dunn leads the Sports Journalism program at the University of East
London. She is the founding editor of The Only Way is Suplex, a website
about professional wrestling.
Jon Ezell is Assistant Professor of Journalism at Tennessee Technological
University.
Stephen Greer is a Lecturer in Theatre Practices at the University of Glasgow.
Jamie Lewis Hadley is a London-based performance artist and former profes-
sional wrestler. He completed his MRes in Theatre and Performance at the
University of Plymouth.
Nina Hoechtl is an independent researcher and artist. From 2014 to 2016 she
was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Aesthetic Research,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Charles Hughes is the Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College.
Eero Laine is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Department of
Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Heather Levi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the College of Lib-
eral Arts, Temple University.
x Contributors

Sharon Mazer is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at

Auckland University of Technology.
Nicholas Porter is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Saint Louis Uni-
versity, Missouri.
Laura Katz Rizzo is Assistant Professor and BFA Coordinator in the Depart-
ment of Dance at Temple University. She is also an author, performer, and
choreographer.
Claire Warden is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University.
Nicholas Ware is a PhD candidate in Texts and Technology at the University
of Central Florida.
Introduction

H amlet doesn’t blade

Professional wrestling, theatre,
and performance
Broderick Chow, Eero Laine, and Claire Warden

At one point in Kristoffer Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated play, The Elaborate

Entrance of Chad Deity, Chad Deity explains:“In wrestling, you can’t kick a guy’s
ass without the help of the guy whose ass you’re kicking.”1 Here, Diaz, through
his character, gets to the central contradiction of professional wrestling – it is a
performance form that is both intensely physical, even dangerous at times, yet
at its core it is a cooperative, theatrical effort between two performers.
By engaging professional wrestling explicitly through the fields of thea-
tre and performance studies, the chapters in this volume develop an updated
methodology for the study of professional wrestling. Much of the existing pro
wrestling scholarship has employed theatrical parlance or loosely acknowledged
the theatricality of professional wrestling. Beginning with Roland Barthes’s
semiotic analysis of the “spectacle of excess” in his 1957 Mythologies, theatre and
performance have often been employed in studies of wrestling largely as a way
to mark the form as somehow other than sport, but only rarely as a particular
performance form.
Both Sharon Mazer’s Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (1998) and
Nicholas Sammond’s collection Steel Chair to the Head (2005) act as guarantors
for this diverse study. Mazer’s ethnographic study of the form is rooted in deep
observational readings that, nearly twenty years later, stands as a model of criti-
cally engaged performance scholarship. While some of the critics of the book
observe the limits of ethnographic performance research, such critiques might
even more so reveal the trouble of studying a performance form based in and
so heavily reliant on deception as its primary mode of performance. Sammond’s
Steel Chair to the Head offers a number of perspectives on professional wrestling
that undergird this volume, including a keen eye towards the performance of
race, class, and gender. Sammond’s introduction to the volume, “A Brief (and
Unnecessary) Defense of Professional Wrestling” places wrestling among other
popular US art forms while engaging various storylines through a variety of
analytic lenses.
However, delivering a steel chair to the head is a gesture no longer practiced in
the more concussion-conscious, PG-world of World Wrestling Entertainment
2 Broderick Chow et al.

(WWE; formerly WWF, World Wrestling Federation), a sign perhaps that a

re-evaluation of professional wrestling is needed. And while this collection
engages professional wrestling from the perspective of theatre and performance,
it can also be placed in what might be called a developing interdisciplinary field
of professional wrestling scholarship – notable academic entries to this this field
include Scott M. Beekman’s Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling (2006),
Heather Levi’s The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National
Identity (2008), and R. Tyson Smith’s Fighting for Recognition: Identity, Masculinity,
and the Act of Violence in Professional Wrestling (2014).This growing interest in the
characteristics and conventions of professional wrestling is as evident in books
for general audiences as for those for overtly scholarly ones, as evidenced by
David Shoemaker, whose Inside the Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional
Wrestling (2013) has brought a more literary treatment of the subject to a wider
audience.
In all of these studies, the central figures are the wrestlers themselves. Indeed,
at the core of the professional wrestling event is a live connection between per-
former and audience. While many people experience professional wrestling on
television or through various media, the entertainment form itself would not
exist without the stadiums full of active participants. That is to say, professional
wrestling is first a live performance. While there are no printed scripts, profes-
sional wrestling does rely on ongoing storylines and conflicts among characters.
But it is a particular kind of performance in that it is both intensely physical and
relies heavily on various aspects of spectacle (costumes, pyrotechnics, acrobatics,
and unusually shaped bodies – to be emulated, admired, or mocked) that are
overlaid with an over-the-top theatricality that animates and drives the narra-
tive forward.
Professional wrestling is a live, theatrical performance, yes. Perhaps most
importantly for this volume is the attempt to show that professional wrestling
exemplifies, in its own intense little world, many of the central concerns of
theatre and performance studies. Since the establishment of the field of per-
formance studies in the mid-1960s, scholars such as Richard Schechner, Erika
Fischer-Lichte, and Marvin Carlson have established a continuum between
“theatre” and “performance” that is epitomized in Schechner’s notion of the
“entertainment-efficacy braid,” whereby performances that tend towards ritual
(marriage ceremonies, coming-of-age rites) have effects in the “real” world,
and those that tend towards representation and entertainment, namely theatre,
do not. The continuum between entertainment and efficacy, especially among
practitioners of theatre and performance, can often seem more like a chasm,
especially in the context of bodily violence.
A simple illustration of this deep divide can be found in the act of “blading,”
wherein a wrestler will discreetly make a cut in their forehead with an other-
wise concealed razor blade. The wound is self-inflicted and the actual cutting
of flesh is hidden from the audience, but the blood that flows is the wrestler’s
 Introduction 3

real blood. It is a perhaps strange act to perform, but is an act that is not isolated
to the wrestling ring. Take for instance performance artist Marina Abramović’s
2010 interview with the Guardian, where she states:

To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre [. . .] Theatre is fake . . .

The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real.
Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the
emotions are real.2

Excusing the force of Abramović’s rhetoric, most theatre people might agree
with her assertion. And many wrestlers might as well. After all, Hamlet doesn’t
blade.
But what, then, is pro wrestling, a form where the contest is “fake” but
the knife or razor, at least, is certainly real? Professional wrestling represents a
special case in that it is at once scripted, theatrical, and fake, and improvised,
performed, and real.We might even suggest that it is this blurring that positions
it as it is in some estimations. If one were to focus only on performance, wres-
tling would be a stunt show or just a simulated fight – somewhere between
circus and performance art. Alternatively, to focus solely on the theatricality
of professional wrestling might lead one to a common enough assumption
that R. Tyson Smith characterizes satirically as thinking of pro wrestling as a
“shirtless variation of the community theatre parodied in Christopher Guest’s
Waiting for Guffman” or as a “Kafkaesque blend of Jerry Springer and Jackass.”3 As
a theatrical/performance form that is widely derided, what might professional
wrestling’s elision from theatre and performance studies tell us about theatre
and performance studies?
Such considerations demonstrate the need for a theatre and performance
studies approach to professional wrestling. After all, the issue of what is false,
true, and merely playing true (or playing false) has been active in the discipline
since its inception. In many ways, professional wrestling provides a particularly
visceral illustration of the questions and seeming divide between theatre and
performance studies illustrated by objects onstage. Performance artist/activist
Guillermo Gómez-Peña cites an email exchange with Richard Schechner, who
writes:

In performance art the “distance” between the really real (socially, personally,
with the audience, with the performers) is much less than in drama theatre
where just about everything is pretend – where even the real (a coffee cup,
a chair) becomes pretend.4

In professional wrestling the chair is always a chair but it is also something

more than a chair. That is, the chair can be used to sit, but it comes imbued
with latent violence; it interrupts feuds; it enacts an in-ring power struggle; it
4 Broderick Chow et al.

is a banned weapon. To borrow from Schechner’s description, in professional

wrestling the coffee cup or the chair (or the table or the ladder) move back and
forth between the “really real” and pretend.
The problem of the fake and the real in pro wrestling is posed by the French
sociologist Christophe Lamoureux in his 1993 ethnographic study of le catch
(pro wrestling) events in the Parisian banlieues (suburbs). Lamoureux consid-
ers wrestling in terms of Émile Durkheim’s conceptualisation of ritual. As
Durkheim shows, “when it becomes recreational, ritual threatens to disappear
because it loses its symbolic charge” (“lorsqu’il devient récréatif, le rite est menacé
de disparaître parce qu’il perd de sa charge symbolique”).5 Lamoureux thus finds le
catch a perplexing case, since it continuously risks “bringing about points of
rupture in voluntarily creating confusion between what is true, false, and clearly
pretense” (“[le catch] prend délibérément le risque d’opérer à des points de rupture en
créant volontairement de la confusion entre le vrai, le faux et le faire-semblant”).6 In
other words, wrestling is not purely ritual, but nor is it “an enclosed (theatrical)
universe with its own logic” (“cet univers clos, replié sur sa propre logique”). In the
event of wrestling, the oscillation between belief and doubt is so great that it
cannot be suggested that, unlike rituals, which perform a function in the real,
the participants leave transformed. And yet, Lamoureux muses, people still find
meaning in it.
The professional wrestling audience is an active audience. Wrestling audi-
ences are particularly adept at not only parsing the theatrical aspects from per-
formance, but perhaps more interestingly, are very capable of holding them
in mind at the same time. Professional wrestling then sits simultaneously as
performance and as theatre. The performers are actually doing the things we
see them do, but their motivations for doing them are highly theatrical. To
be a wrestling spectator is to both admire the technique and determination
of the performer and to suspend one’s disbelief regarding their character and
the plot.
These audiences participate in a uniquely liminal experience; professional
wrestling’s refusal to accept easy demarcation extends and augments the ideas
of liminality so intrinsic to performance studies as a discipline. It is both theatre
and performance, with violence as both its primary method and its thematic
concern. Professional wrestling does what theatre cannot do or can only do by
means of illusion: enact violence in a live performance. But despite the fact that
pro wrestling is so clearly theatre, there is also something in it that is more than
theatre, that goes beyond the purely representational, demonstrating the impos-
sibility of a pure theatricality. Professional wrestling, then, is excessive to theatre
and to the combative, competitive sports that it emulates. Professional wrestling
is always more than theatre, more than sports (and maybe simultaneously less
than both of these more established, acceptable modes of entertainment). At
the centre of this liminal experience is the wrestling body: an excessive body, a
body built for spectacle. Unlike martial arts that strive for efficiency of move-
ment, professional wrestling embraces the overtly theatrical – telling stories
 Introduction 5

through outsized physical gestures that upon review only resemble some physi-
cal struggle due to the overt performance of agony.
This volume is organized around a number of central themes that emerge at
the intersection of wrestling and performance: audience, circulation, lucha, gender,
queerness, bodies, and race.
The experience of the audience in professional wrestling may seem entirely
different from the typical theatregoer’s experience. However, the three authors
in this section ( Jon Ezell, Claire Warden, and Stephen Di Benedetto) demon-
strate that interrogating the pro wrestling audience resonates with questions
central to theatre and performance research: mediatization, participation, and
the way in which mise-en-scène affects audience response. As a global perfor-
mance form, the circulation of professional wrestling is embedded in modern
media, economics, and artistic forms. Eero Laine and Nicholas Ware address
this important contextual issue by examining the current business of sports
entertainment and the history of wrestling video games, respectively. In the
section Lucha, Heather Levi’s and Nina Hoechtl’s chapters examine the unique
position of lucha libre in politics and performative identity in Mexico and
the United States. Wrestling has often been critiqued for its gender representa-
tions, as well as the imbalance in the ratio of male-to-female wrestlers on a
typical card. Keiko Aiba’s and Carrie Dunn’s chapters on women wrestlers in a
typically male-dominated industry (in Japan and the UK, respectively) explore
possibilities for the performance of wrestling to challenge normative represen-
tations of gender. Similarly, while wrestling to an extent relies on stereotypical
portrayals of hegemonic masculinity, its performance practice provides numer-
ous possibilities for the exploration of queerness. This section looks at three key
figures who embody pro wrestling’s queer potential. Janine Bradbury discusses
the ambiguous queer performance of Goldust (Dustin Runnels) and his valet
and “director” Marlena (Terri Runnels). Stephen Greer argues that the perfor-
mances of Welsh wrestler Adrian Street embodied the emergence of alternative
masculinities in the context of larger changes in both attitudes towards gender
and sexuality, as well as work and labour. Laura Katz Rizzo’s discusses how
Bernard Hermann (aka Ricki Starr) enacted and embodied (and possibly com-
modified) queerness in his elaborate performances of a ballet dancing wrestler.
The chapters by Broderick Chow and Jamie Lewis Hadley foreground the
bodies that are central to the wrestling event. Chow takes up the figure of the
muscular “body guy” through wrestler George Hackenschmidt, and Hadley
interrogates changing performances of pain in and out of the ring. Professional
wrestling’s ability to speak into and about current socio-political issues is cen-
tral to the race section, in which Charles Hughes negotiates racial violence in
the history of southern wrestling, Nicholas Porter uncovers the post-colonial
history of the British scene, and Morgan Daniels argues that flags become the-
atricalised national identifiers.
Sharon Mazer’s epilogue brings some sense of conclusion while opening up
new questions about the implications of this field for performance studies and
6 Broderick Chow et al.

the efficacy of using the tropes of professional wrestling as a way of understand-

ing contemporary academia. Together these provocations attempt to reshape
and reimagine the potential intersections of pro wrestling and performance,
uncover the place of pro wrestling studies in the dynamic intellectual space of
modern academia, and open up new ways of understanding this established,
popular, and globally recognised sport-art.

Notes
1 Ibid.
2 Sean O’Hagan, “Interview: Marina Abramović,” Guardian, October 2, 2010, accessed
December 1, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/interview-
marina-abramovic-performance-artist.
3 R. Tyson Smith, Fighting for Recognition: Identity, Recognition, and the Act of Violence in Pro-
fessional Wrestling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 39.
4 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 38.
5 Christophe Lamoureux, La Grand Parade du Catch (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du
Mirail, 1993), p. 49.
6 Ibid., 53.
Part I

Audience
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1

The dissipation of “heat”

Changing role(s) of audience
in professional wrestling in the
United States
Jon Ezell

On a Saturday morning in April 1981, a visibly agitated Terry Funk appeared at

the WMCT Channel 5 studios to deliver a message to announcer Lance Russell
and the people of Memphis about their hometown hero, Jerry Lawler:

I have got a date. I have got a time. And I have got a place.This is a personal
invitation – sealed right here – to Jerry Lawler to ask him to meet me by
himself with nobody else involved at an area that I know, he knows, and
you will know. And I want you to bring the camera down there, but I don’t
want a referee, I don’t want the police, I don’t want the fans, I don’t want
money for this. [. . .] I want to see if he’s got the guts to come down there!
The guts . . . like I don’t think a lot of people have around here, and I’m
talking about the fans, Lance. I’m talking about you!

In the footage that aired the following week, Russell waits outside the ring in
an empty Mid-South Coliseum chatting with an unseen film crew. He explains
to viewers that Funk demanded the 11,300-seat venue be completely emp-
tied because Memphis fans and officials gave Lawler an unfair advantage. Funk
suddenly arrives, accosts Russell, enters the ring, and curses Lawler. He con-
tinues to berate Lawler and express joy at the absence of Lawler’s fans, several
times turning away from the camera to shout and gesture toward empty stands.
Lawler appears in the distance in full ring attire – white singlet, tights, cape, and
oversized crown. “Look at that fool! Look at that idiot! Don’t you realize there’s
nobody here? You jackass!” Funk’s insults echo for seconds. Lawler, unfazed,
proceeds to the ring at a stately pace and disrobes. The wrestlers lock up and
brawl around the ring and floor, wrecking sections of seats and tables where
the members of the live audience should be. For about six minutes, they move
in and out of the foreground, behind and around objects, playing to an absent
audience while ignoring the lone video camera operator and running play-
by-play from Russell. Grasping a shard of a broken table, Funk tries to blind
Lawler, but the plan backfires. Funk shrieks and collapses. The camera changes
angle (the lone edit of the film) to focus on the shard buried in Funk’s eye as
the other participants exit and the film abruptly ends.1
10 Jon Ezell

At a time when televised wrestling was a means of selling tickets to live events,
this made for dubiously compelling advertising. There is a sense of anxiety and
absurdity in the absence of a live audience; the sounds of the men shrieking and
screaming reverberate like attempts at echolocation.That professional wrestling,
as a genre of performance, requires a live audience seems obvious.This negation
of the audience goes further in that it serves to confirm Blau’s assertion that the
audience completes the theatrical experience

through a break in memory, so that we’re not quite sure who is giving the
command. At this ontological level, there would be no theater to imagine if
the audience were not, from its inception, there in the shadow of thought –
if not its final, its initiating cause.2

When compared to contemporaneous footage of the packed Monday night

shows from the same building, this performance conveys only ambiguity regard-
ing its possible reception by presumably atomized televisual spectators, and thus
an uncertainty about the roles they should play. In isolating the wrestlers from a
physically present audience, the performance calls into question the roles of both
the live and televisual audiences in professional wrestling’s “ecologies of perfor-
mance,” a term coined by Baz Kershaw to convey the web of interdependent
relationships within performances and between performances and their environ-
ments.3 It is with an eye toward the structural changes in the industry of profes-
sional wrestling, particularly in the shift from an industry driven by ticket sales
to one built upon commodification of the televisual product, that this chapter
will outline the consequent changes in the relationship of spectator to spectacle.
Duncan and Brummett argued that television imposed its own logic upon
spectator sports, adding narrative structures and focusing on intimate details of
individuals involved. Rather than framing a football game as team competition
for its own sake, announcers focused on individual stories and histories that fit a
standard set of narrative frames; cameras would combine panoramic shots with
close-ups of individual faces of players and spectators.4 From this study of medi-
ated sports we might extrapolate two reasons for wrestling’s early success as a
televised spectacle: building a narrative about competition and emphasizing the
individual experience are fundamental to professional wrestling performance,
and it can fit the time and budget demands of television production.5 The small
television screen, better suited for the close-up than the panorama, could effec-
tively convey wresting’s athleticism, drama, and personalities in the ring. This
is exemplified by the sudden, nationwide celebrity of George Wagner, whose
Gorgeous George persona presented a pompous affront to postwar masculin-
ity and ushered in a short-lived national boom for televised wrestling.6 By the
mid-1950s, televised wrestling already began to develop several characteristics
of its televisual presentation: larger-than-life characters, interview segments for
character and storyline development, commentary from one or more announc-
ers who described both the physical logic of combat and the details of psyche
 The dissipation of “heat” 11

and spectacle, and the presence of the live audience as an authenticating back-
drop and sometime participant.
Examining the impact of televisual media on live performance, Auslander
made several observations about the relationship between live performance and
mediated reproduction beneficial to the present discussion: cultural forms based
in live performance must increasingly depend upon mediated reproduction
(and those institutions controlling it) for economic survival; live performance
and live audiences will come to resemble their mediatized representations; tech-
nologies of mediation and reproduction will begin to augment (or encroach
upon) live performance; and liveness of performance is ontologically reliant
upon mediated forms.7 After first outlining the structural transformation of
the professional wrestling industry toward mediatization and monopoly, I will
then explore how practice of performance and the roles of the audience have
become increasingly mediatized and distanced from the immediacy and spon-
taneity of traditional live performance.
From the mid-1950s until the early 1980s, professional wrestling was a
regional genre. Promoters set up rings in television studios or compiled footage
from weekly matches. These territorial promotions generated revenue almost
entirely through ticket and merchandise sales, travelling along a circuit defined
by the reach of the local stations that aired their programs.This system began to
unravel by the early 1980s, as some promotions began using cable television as
a national platform, distributing programming with production values and star
power that territorial promotions were simply unable to match. The Monday
Night Wars of the 1990s structurally transformed the business in two ways: from
an industry built around ticket sales to one built on pay-per-view buys, adver-
tising, and cable distribution agreements – in the end, to a functional monopoly
that continues to this day.8 Where the territorial system utilized mediated forms
to persuade the television audience to become the live (co-present) audience,
the WWE has monetized the television audience directly: the live, physically
present audience is now an element of production rather than its means.
To imagine past audiences, cautioned Blau, risks nostalgia for a cultural unity
that was likely never there.9 Thus any attempt to elaborate on the traditional
roles of the professional wrestling audience is immediately complicated by the
ontological elusiveness of the audience itself. Despite the diversity between
and among audiences, regions, performers, and time, some approximations and
generalizations can be made regarding the role of audiences in the context of
professional wrestling performance.
The presence of a live audience is fundamental to the performance of a dra-
matic and compelling wrestling match. Wrestlers traditionally learned to listen
to audience reactions and improvise in order to manipulate heat, build tension,
and logically work toward a satisfying conclusion. Aside from knowing how the
match would end, little else was planned.This was partially necessity – competi-
tors traveled separately and avoided associating with one another – and partially
preference for adapting to each audience and staying in the moment. Comparing
12 Jon Ezell

planned and improvised approaches, Justin Credible argued that choreographed

matches are performed identically with wildly different responses from one
night to the next, and that match length, when working a series with some-
one, can vary widely depending on the needs of the event and the crowd’s
response.10 Professional wrestler Colt Cabana, when asked about adapting to
differing live audiences, insisted on the need for the performer to remain fluid
when setting the tone and pace of the match: “It’s not the audience’s job to
enjoy my wrestling, it’s my job to listen to how they’re responding and change
what I’m doing accordingly.”11 As described by deGaris, working a match does
not mean controlling the audience, nor does it mean letting the audience dic-
tate the pace or outcome of the match. “In effect, the crowd tells the wrestlers
the story it wants to hear. It’s up to the wrestlers to listen and react.”12
This interactive spontaneity is an aspect of the craft of professional wrestling
that is disappearing for reasons emanating from the bottom and top of the
industry and rooted in the mediatization of the form. As early as the mid-1980s,
performers in WWF (the World Wrestling Federation) were choreographing
and memorizing matches, most famously in Randy Savage and Ricky Steam-
boat’s WrestleMania III match.13 A preference for coordination with produc-
tion staff and the national scale, particularly of main event matches, provided
incentive for such rigidity. This degree of control has spread from major pay-
per-view main events to weekly live television, especially for less experienced
performers or for matches with complex sequences of spots. Executives moni-
tor live broadcast feeds, dictating direction to announcers, technical personnel,
and referees, who may tell wrestlers to work a rest hold during commercials,
change the direction of the match, or to wrap it up.14 Once behind the cur-
tain, talent and producers can dissect the performance from the perspective of
the television audience rather than the audience in the building. Thus, the live
mediated production process serves for panoptic control and critique of the
performance even as it unfolds – allowing for the internalization of the medi-
atized gaze. For matches being recorded rather than broadcast live, multiple
“takes” of a botched maneuver or sequence may be filmed in front of the live
audience, whose response may be “sweetened” in post-production to compen-
sate. The emphasis on the mediated product rather than the live performance
coincides with the economic prioritization of ratings over ticket sales, to the
extent that wrestlers are, at times, advised to completely refrain from interacting
with the live audience for the sake of making good television.15
As Dell’s interviews with wrestlers and female fans of the 1950s indicate,
being ringside offered spectators the excitement of seeing and being seen, of
screaming and displaying rage in a rare public context where such expression
was socially permitted. Audience members – some of whom became regional
celebrities – conspicuously competed to be the loudest and occasionally crossed
the line to commit real physical violence.16 Wrestlers and fans attributed the
behavior both to the desire for attention from the presence of television cam-
eras and to mimicking the unruly fans seen on the screen.17 Getting heat from
 The dissipation of “heat” 13

the audience is fundamental to the performance of professional wrestling, but

its conversion to physical violence is this sort of breach of the paratheatri-
cal boundaries of spectatorial performance that I would now like to briefly
explore.18
Attacks from fans were not an uncommon risk of doing business for effec-
tive heels in the territorial era. Whether the heat came from cruelly taking
unfair advantage of a sympathetic protagonist, working slowly to maximize
tension and frustrate the crowd, or simply from insulting the town, it was often
described as a necessity for emotional involvement in a match, story, or charac-
ter. Successful heels took pride in their ability to work a crowd to the boiling
point, which was accounted for both in ticket sales and scars. As Ole Anderson
recounted in his autobiography:

The people who usually got involved in altercations were generally the
wrestlers on top who had a lot of heat. I got sliced open by a fan in Green-
ville. I was stabbed several times during my career, but it was that Green-
ville incident that made national headlines.19

Wrestler and trainer Danny Davis likened such transgressions to a positive per-
formance review:

There were times where we’d come out and we’d have bricks thrown
through our windshield and, you know, that’s how serious people took it
back in the day. And I’ll be honest with you, I miss those days, because they
were wonderful times in my life [. . .] I knew I was doing my job.20

Whether we conceptualize such forms of participation as attempts to span

the distance between the spectator and spectacle or as expressions of agency
and protest against domination, they have become so rare as to be virtually
unheard of in the modern era.21 This is partially an effect of the erosion of
kayfabe. Although the integrity of professional wrestling as a legitimate sport
was disputed throughout the twentieth century, believable performances and
the tradition of kayfabe kept the question alive. National prominence from
the 1980s onwards allowed even casual fans to infer some degree of wrestling’s
inner workings.22 Vince McMahon’s 1989 admission that wrestling was not a
“legitimate sport” was perhaps less significant than the growth of the dirtsheets,
tape trading, and Internet fan communities by the late 1990s. As Mazer’s study
of late 1990s wrestling fan culture described, insider knowledge became a form
of cultural capital, fueled an obsession with behind-the-scenes information, and
recast the promoter/owner – rather than any heel – as the ultimate antagonist.23
Former WWE executive Larry Matysik described this as a basic reversal of the
psychology of wrestling.24 Narrative scope and production values increased,
and dramatic boundaries expanded beyond the squared circle to the promotion
or the entire industry. Storylines stretched out and blurred the line between
14 Jon Ezell

fiction and reality.This creates the possibility for complex and all-encompassing
narratives (e.g., McMahon’s feud with Steve Austin in the late ’90s; Daniel
Bryan’s road to WrestleMania XXX), but it can also decrease the significance
or convolute the stories of individual wrestling matches themselves. The multi-
platform intertextuality (or hypertextuality) of the modern, post-kayfabe wres-
tling industry has complicated the process of generating heat – especially “real”
anger – in the traditional sense of match psychology, although fans will perform
emotional involvement as a way to participate.25
WWE visits major population centers in the United States once or twice
annually, meaning that when current fans watch wrestling it is usually on a
screen rather than in person. It is therefore understandable that attending a
Raw event is not altogether different from watching the show. The set, made
entirely of screens, dwarfs the ring. In addition to displaying entrance videos,
vignettes, and commercials, it visually amplifies the performers, approximat-
ing the televisual intimacy and prolonged talking segments that constitute the
home viewing experience.26 Noticeable crowd silence and disengagement dur-
ing TitanTron malfunctions suggests the dominance of mediatized representa-
tion over live presence in physical, perceptual, and economic terms.27
As live production strives to recreate the mediatized experience for the live
audience, so does the live audience endeavor to emulate audiences on televi-
sion.28 Despite some regional differences, Raw audiences generally behave like
audiences on past episodes – they pop or boo for entrances, they spout catch-
phrases, they start chants that are or are not related to the match, they pop for
big moves, they bring signs, they take photos. “Smarts” and casual fans may
cheer and boo different performers, but in the repertoire of responses there is a
continuity informed by prior televisual experience and dictated by the current
ecology of performance, where live audiences’ immediate responses have less
influence on the performance than responses from mediated audiences (e.g.,
ratings, stock price, social media).29
This diminished influence on the immediate performance does not imply
that the live audience cannot disrupt, interrupt, or influence broader creative
direction. For example, Daniel Bryan’s “Yes!” movement evolved from a cheer
to a disruption to an official storyline. The “Yes!” chant began as an ironic solo
victory celebration in January 2012 and became a meme on wrestling blogs
by the next month. “Yes!” signs and gestures began to appear in audiences by
March. After a major loss in April, the chants became impossible to ignore,
and the company capitalized, exemplified in a scene from the April 16, 2012,
episode of Raw. From the perspective of the floor seats a camera faces the
TitanTron as it displays a vignette of Daniel Bryan dressed in an official “Yes!”
shirt chanting “Yes!” in the face of Kofi Kingston. All visible audience members
are staring at the screen and chanting in unison.
The proliferation of the “Yes!” chant is an example of live emulation of the
televisual experience, and its eventual recognition, incorporation, and com-
modification proved that live audiences had some power, or at least a sense of
 The dissipation of “heat” 15

it. The image of thousands of fans thrusting their arms in the air and chanting
“Yes!” made for compelling television, sold merchandise, and planted seeds for
storylines and meta-storylines that established Bryan as a people’s wrestler held
back by WWE executives. This general narrative resulted in multiple events
being hijacked by audiences unhappy with how he was booked, most nota-
bly in the 2015 Royal Rumble.30 After Bryan was eliminated and it appeared
that Roman Reigns – being positioned as the top babyface – would win, a
remarkably loud chorus of boos droned for the remainder of the match. The
boos swelled to a crescendo as Reigns mounted his babyface comeback, and
thundered through the pyro. The Internet and social media erupted in vitriolic
rage, and #CancelWWENetwork spent a day at the top of Twitter. This was
“go away heat,” but because there was nowhere to go, the next evening’s Raw
pulled the second-highest rating for 2015, and WWE Network subscriptions
continued to increase through the next quarter.31
Whether Reigns’s performance proceeded as scripted because performers
lack the autonomy to adapt to the audience, or because the complexity of the
match prevented deviation from the plan, its tone-deaf conclusion demonstrated
that the imaginary audience is not always the one that shows up. Returning to
the empty arena where this chapter began, this incongruity between the imag-
ined and the real appears the moment Lawler emerges in king regalia and is
mocked by Funk before the match begins. At various points in the brawl, the
wrestlers gesture toward empty seats and sections, reflexively seeking connec-
tion to imaginary audiences in the room and watching at home. An imagined
fan sits on the couch, sees the familiar hero in the familiar arena surrounded
by the unfamiliar emptiness, is compelled to fill it, to commune. The emptiness
fixes the gaze, foreshadowing the coming dominance of the televisual form over
the live, when almost all professional wrestling will be experienced primarily
by watching screens in relative isolation. As a form to fill the emptiness, to push
back, to bear witness to the battle, the live audience, in its absence, asserts its
multifaceted importance to the territorial era. Bouncing through the emptiness
of the room, the voice of Terry Funk is twice diffused in the high reverberation
of the empty space. His shrieks and moans, remediated through the television
speaker, and at some point becoming ridiculous, presage the dissipation and
dispersion of heat in the mediatized, post-kayfabe era.

Notes
1 “Terry Funk,” Corey Maclin Presents Classic Memphis Wrestling: Outside Invaders, compiled
from footage of Championship Wrestling that aired across several weeks in April 1981
(Charlotte, NC: Highspots Video, 2009), DVD.
2 Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 41.
3 Baz Kershaw, “Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-
Century Theatre,” Modern Drama 42, no. 2 (2001): 133–154.
4 Margaret Carlisle Duncan and Barry Brummett, “The Mediation of Spectator Sport,”
Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 58, no. 2 (1987): 168–177.
16 Jon Ezell

5 Gerald W. Morton and George M. O’Brien, Wrestling to Rasslin’: Ancient Sport to American
Spectacle (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1985), 47.
6 David Shoemaker, The Squared Circle: Life, Death and Professional Wrestling (New York:
Gotham Books, 2013), 49–53.
7 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Rout-
ledge, 2008), 10–72.
8 Scott Beekman, Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2006).
9 Blau, The Audience, 29.
10 Justin Credible, “Pro Wrestling 101 – Calling a Match,” YouTube video, 7:39, posted by
“Justin Credible,” January 27, 2014, https://youtu.be/fg9SMHHuLf0.
11 Colt Cabana, phone interview by author, June 24, 2015.
12 Laurence deGaris, “The ‘Logic’ of Professional Wrestling,” in Steel Chair to the Head:The
Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, ed. Nicholas Sammond (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 207.
13 George Steele, interview by Sean Oliver, Kayfabe Commentaries Timeline Series: 1986
WWE as told by George “The Animal” Steele, DVD, directed by Sean Oliver (Bayonne,
NJ: Kayfabe Commentaries, 2012). Steele stated Savage relied on extensive notes, but
accepted that wrestling seemed to be heading in that direction for the WWF. Larry
Matysik, Drawing Heat the Hard Way: How Wrestling Really Works (Toronto: ECW Press,
2009), 133. Matysik claimed NWA imports, skilled in improvisation, complained about
having to memorize short, uninteresting matches in the WWE.
14 Kurt Angle, interview by Rob Feinstein, Kurt Angle Shoot Interview, DVD, directed by
Rob Feinstein (Langhorne, PA: RF Video, 2008). Angle recounts an early match where
Vince called changes via the referee.
15 Bryan Alvarez, “Todd Martin and Lance Storm,” Figure Four Daily, podcast audio,
August 22, 2013, http://www.f4wonline.com/aug-22-figure-four-daily-bryan-alvarez-
todd-martin-and-lance-storm-talk-summerslam-wwe-title-change.
16 Chad Dell, The Revenge of Hatpin Mary: Women, Professional Wrestling, and Fan Culture in
the 1950s (New York: Lang, 2006), 105–109.
17 Ibid.
18 Kershaw, “Oh for Unruly Audiences!” 133–154; Bruce Wilshire, “The Concept of the
Paratheatrical,” TDR:The Drama Review 34, no. 4 (1990): 169–178.
19 Ole Anderson and Scott Teal, Inside Out: How Corporate America Destroyed Professional
Wrestling (Gallatin, TN: Crowbar Press, 2003), 99.
20 Danny Davis, interview by Jim Ross, Ross Report, podcast audio, May 27, 2015, http://
cdn46.castfire.com/audio/522/3426/25262/2497032/2497032_2015–05–21–003132–
7770–0–8544–2.64k.mp3.
21 Blau, The Audience, 26; Kershaw, “Oh for Unruly Audiences!,” 133–154.
22 John Hitchcock, Front Row Section D (Middletown, DE: TV Party! Books, 2015), 29.
23 Sharon Mazer. “‘Real Wrestling’/‘Real’ Life,” in Steel Chair to the Head, ed. Nicholas
Sammond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 67–87.
24 Matysik, Drawing Heat the Hard Way, 24.
25 Colt Cabana, phone interview by author, June 24, 2015.
26 Auslander, Liveness, 184.
27 Dave Meltzer, “Notes from the 9/28 Raw Show in Buffalo,” Wrestling Observer Newslet-
ter, October 6, 2015.
28 Auslander, Liveness, 27.
29 Kershaw, “Oh, for Unruly Audiences!,” 133–154.
30 Dave Meltzer, “Royal Rumble 2014,” Wrestling Observer Newsletter, February 3, 2014.
31 Brandon Howard, “2015 Year-End Stats: Star Ratings, TV Ratings, Attendance & More!
(WWE, NJPW, NXT, ROH),” Voices of Wrestling, last modified January 13, 2016,
http://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2016/01/13/2015-year-end-stats-star-ratings-tv-
attendance-wwe-njpw-nxt-roh/.
Chapter 2

Pops and promos

Speech and silence in professional
wrestling
Claire Warden

Nicholas Sammond describes the “squared circle” as an innately visceral space:

it is “brutal and it is carnal. It is awash in blood, sweat and spit.”1 The history of
professional wrestling confirms the validity of Sammond’s statement; the most
iconic moments (from Stone Cold Steve Austin’s bloodied grimace to camera
at WrestleMania XIII, or Shawn Michaels leaping on to Razor Ramon from
the top of a ladder at WrestleMania X, ad infinitum) are generally the most
somatically arresting. Initially, then, it might appear that such a physicalized
space, akin to the ancient gladiatorial coliseum, offers little room for articulate
speech. Certainly Roland Barthes’s seminal description of professional wrestling
as a “spectacle of excess” partly substantiates this claim, the spectacle dependent
on dazzling visual imagery. Indeed, to the non-wrestling fan, it is the simulated
pain (engendering the wearisome “Isn’t it all fake?” question) or the seemingly
unrestrained violence (causing mothers everywhere to worry about their chil-
dren performing Tombstones in concrete playgrounds) that puts them off.
But these readily accepted images of professional wrestling obscure the vital
importance of the speech act. This is old news to the wrestling fan, of course,
captivated over the years by the storylines, the arguments, the ardent appeals for
fan support, amazed by the engrossing verbal dexterity of wrestlers, commenta-
tors, managers and announcers. However, such textual interventions are rarely
theorised and often seem disconnected from the physical excess that defines
the spectacle of professional wrestling – wrestlers speak, put the microphone
down, fight, win, pick the microphone up again. Wrestlers are often defined as
“good workers” or “good on the mic.”The best, of course, are both, but the two
are read as different (though symbiotic) sides of the pro wrestling performance
game.This chapter seeks to reattach the physical and the linguistic, claiming that
the two act in tandem. More than this, speech acts and bodily actions are inex-
tricably tied together. Indeed, I claim, both a Powerbomb and a scripted piece
to camera are physical acts. I follow Judith Butler’s lead; in Excitable Speech she
affirms “language is our name for our doing: both ‘what’ we do (the name for
the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act
and its consequences.”2 Spoken language is intricately bound up with the body,
a fact we unconsciously acknowledge every day when we open our mouths and
use our larynx, lips, tongue and diaphragm to articulate our thoughts. We can
18 Claire Warden

only speak through our bodies. Butler pushes this further, saying: “what if lan-
guage has within it its own possibilities for violence and for world-shattering?”3
Language here is a performative act, not merely a descriptor but an utterance
bringing something tangible into existence. Although Butler is using this con-
cept to examine language as an oppressively violent system, I want to rework it
in a professional wrestling context. Language in professional wrestling does not
so much describe situations, acting as an intermediary between spectator and
spectated. It is instead, following Butler, a dynamic system of action, a system
that, in some contexts, “presumes not only that language acts, but that it acts
upon its addressee in an injurious way.”4 While recognising the diverse variety
of speech acts in professional wrestling, I want to use Butler’s conclusions as a
starting point to claim that the squared circle is a space of physicalised speech,
of speech that “does” rather than “describes.”

Promos
In order to justify this claim, I am going to examine the conventions of profes-
sional wrestling’s two most regularly utilised speech interventions: wrestler’s
promos and commentator’s narratives. Promotional spots (promos) can be read
as dialogue or monologue, illustrating the personality traits of the character and
setting up storylines. They can even, as CM Punk’s now legendary 2011 “Pipe
Bomb” promo revealed, actively undermine the very institution of professional
wrestling. My example is an obvious one – Dusty Rhodes’s “hard times” promo
from 1985 – but rather than simply accept it as an extraordinary piece of story-
telling or focus on its political potency, I want to analyse the linguistic reasons
for its success, breaking it down as a theatrical vignette. The reason this promo
is so successful lies in Rhodes’s total command of linguistic patterns and struc-
tures. During the course of the promo Rhodes switches from third person
(“Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream”) to first, simultaneously establishing
his character and locating himself in the middle of the action. He speaks to
four different people or groups of people: first, the interviewer who welcomes
him back; second, the people in the crowd whose acousmatic sounds act as
an almost musical backdrop to Rhodes’s promo; third, the audience at home,
through the camera; and finally, his rival Ric Flair, whom he criticises as having
“no respect, no honour.” He uses a different cadence for each. Most noticeably,
when he is talking about Flair, his tone quietens, layering his challenge with
a real sense of menace. When he speaks through the camera, the modulation
is quite different: the tone is heightened, he explicitly associates himself with
the spectator by acknowledging not only his own “hard times” but the “hard
times” experienced by workers across the United States (this political solidarity
seemed to capture perfectly the context of the 1980s). He uses distinct gestures,
reaching towards the camera as if creating a physical bond, visually illustrating
“my hand touching your hand.”5 This is not only a verbal moment of solidarity
but also a somatic one, overcoming the detached mediation of the television
 Pops and promos 19

screen. Here, the physical and linguistic work in tandem, as in a Bertolt Brecht
play where the concept of gestus unites the non-verbal gesture and the political
comment. In a popular culture form so often disregarded as an opiate for the
masses, it is rather disconcerting to find Brechtian gestus lurking in the struc-
tures of a promo.
Rhodes’s promo is a seminal moment in professional wrestling performance
and evidences his tremendous on-mic abilities. But it also typifies an old-
school, kayfabe style. Shortly after this, professional wrestling was confirmed
as a work, and the straightforward, emotive narrative storytelling of Rhodes’s
promo began to look rather passé and dated. However, promos continue in
contemporary WWE and they are not unique to wrestlers; indeed some of the
most linguistically complex work historically comes from figures held up as
managers or promoters, figures usually employed for their ability to verbally
represent wrestlers (though, in Vince McMahon’s case at least, sometimes una-
ble to resist getting into the ring). Similar to Rhodes (but using an altogether
different style), a character like Paul Heyman – currently managing “The Beast”
Brock Lesnar but with a long, illustrious career in pro wrestling, particularly
as manager of rival promotion Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) –
uses particular linguistic trickery to further storylines. Take, as one example
among many, a segment aired as I was in the process of writing this chapter in
June 2015: Lesnar’s apology to Michael Cole and John Bradshaw Layfield, the
commentators he beat up months earlier. The visuals of this segment are vital:
Lesnar shakes hands with a terrified Michael Cole before putting him in a
“joke” headlock. At this point, the central action of the segment, Heyman is not
even on screen. However, Heyman’s promotional work turns this segment from
a potential shamefaced humbling of The Beast into a war cry for the forthcom-
ing Battleground pay-per-view. First up is his description of Lesnar’s opponent
Seth Rollins, an opponent who, Heyman repeats, has been “protected . . . pro-
tected . . . protected” on his way to the top. As so often with Heyman’s pro-
mos, there is a sense he is speaking in shoot rather than kayfabe parlance; he
is acknowledging that Rollins has enjoyed pushes throughout his career while
others have fallen by the wayside.This promo, like the jokes in the Shrek movies,
for instance, points to WWE’s dual audience – the smarks6 who get the in-jokes
and the children who don’t but laugh anyway. Heyman’s description of Rollins
shows a particular linguistic dexterity, listing a range of uncomplimentary terms
from “slinky, slimy, disgusting” to “repulsive, repugnant, dirty.” Even transcrib-
ing parts of his list it is easy to see Heyman’s speech patterns: the alliterative
couplets, the additional assonance of sli and re. He builds on this in his direct
address to Rollins, not only reminding the audience of the date and venue
of Battleground – ever the pro! – but describing Rollins’s expected future
humiliation as prompted not by McMahon’s millions, not by “J&J security who
beat you, Kane who wants to eat you, or the WWE Universe who’s dying for
someone to defeat you” but by Lesnar himself.7 The cadence of this promo,
presented by Heyman in his typical deliberate tone, is perfect, creating a sense
20 Claire Warden

of linguistic movement and dynamism that reaches climax at the end when he
presents the “future WWE World Heavyweight Champion”: Brock Lesnar.This
short description of one arbitrarily chosen Heyman promo reveals the central
importance of language in professional wrestling. It also, however, pinpoints the
inherent violence of speech acts; the “beat,” “eat,” “defeat” behaves as a rhyming
challenge – the consonants and vowels are harsh and their repetition feels as
savage as three well-timed suplexes.

Commentary
Until relatively recently the contributions of the commentary team, impor-
tantly heard by the television audience alone (with fairly regular exceptions)
could be split into narrator and colour roles, the former providing play-by-play
narration, the latter (often a heel) intervening in the in-ring storyline. These
roles are less defined in the modern product, yet most commentary includes an
element of straight descriptive explanation and more emotive remarks. Their
contributions bring a vital acoustic layering to the professional wrestling expe-
rience. Two examples to illustrate the way these interventions function: the
first is taken from a 1992 Royal Rumble match. For the uninitiated, a Royal
Rumble is a match with upwards of twenty competitors who enter the ring
at timed intervals. The winner is the one who stays until the end and the only
way to get rid of opponents is to fling them over the top rope. The announcers
in 1992 were Gorilla Monsoon, the play-by-play guy, and Bobby “The Brain”
Heenan, probably the greatest colour commentator, who had been associated
with heel Ric Flair in the months leading into this match. The start sees the
British Bulldog in the centre of the ring waiting for the first opponent. Mon-
soon carefully explains that no wrestler drawn 1–5 (that is entering the ring
first, second, third, fourth or fifth) has ever won a Royal Rumble match. With
his vested interest in the result, Heenan expresses his impatience as he waits for
the match to start, repeating “come on, come on!” His acousmatic interjec-
tions actively elevate the tension and excitement. When a bemused Flair comes
through the curtain Heenan is furious, shouting “no, damn it” as Monsoon
repeats his statistic. Heenan’s insincere apology – “I’m going to have to apolo-
gise to the people. I don’t think I can really be objective” – sets the tone for the
match. The narrator is not going to interpret the action or objectively explain
the moves; indeed, his personal connection with Flair ensures that his language
will be explicitly partisan.
Throughout, Heenan refuses the call the match and, instead, plays up his
relationship with Flair. At the end, three wrestlers are left: Hulk Hogan, Sid
Justice and Flair. Justice eliminates Hogan, much to the chagrin of the latter,
who proceeds to grab Justice’s arm over the top rope. Flair takes advantage of
the situation by attacking Justice from behind, throwing him out of the ring
and winning the match. The two styles of narration commentary turn this
three-man finale into a historic moment in professional wrestling history. First,
 Pops and promos 21

the whole match has been framed by Monsoon’s statistical claims: no one has
ever been victorious after entering the Royal Rumble so early. Here, on the
one hand, is the objective voice of reason (Monsoon). But this is coupled with
Heenan’s response; in his excitement he can only shout “yes, yes, yes” as Flair
celebrates in the ring.8 The two oppositional linguistic formats work symbi-
otically here, turning a simple move (throwing a guy over the top rope) into
a moment of historical significance. Heenan’s response perfectly reflects the
context. Flair had been signed from rival company WCW the year previously.
Heenan was charged with ensuring that the crowd realised the importance of
this match for Flair, trying to establish himself as the “Real World Champion.”
His response – “yes, yes, yes” – captured both the excitement that Flair had won
the belt (and stayed in the Royal Rumble for a record amount of time) and also
a sense of surprise that the WCW (World Championship Wrestling) champion
could arrive at the WWF (the World Wrestling Federation) and win. Heenan
expresses both these sentiments in his simple linguistic response. One of the
most prominent wrestling online forums, the Bleacher Report, claims this event
as a “work of verbal storytelling art,”9 a far cry from the image of professional
wrestling as violent excess.
The second example turns to commentating legend “JR” Jim Ross at the
King of the Ring pay-per-view in 1998. It is a Hell in a Cell match between
The Undertaker and Mankind (Mick Foley). From the off the two exchange
blows on top of the cage. As they make their way across the top, the wire mesh
weakens some sixteen feet above the ring below. This (accidental or perhaps
planned) slip creates a heart-pounding sense of danger. Suddenly The Under-
taker grabs Mankind’s hair and tights and flings him on to the Spanish announce
table below. Ross’s commentary is the stuff of legend:

[The Undertaker grabs Mankind and launches him down into the Spanish
announce table]
JR: Look out, oh no! Good God Almighty! Good God Almighty! That killed
him!
[Crowd noise]
Jerry Lawler: Oh my God!
JR: As God is my witness, he is broken in half!10

It is an iconic wrestling moment. But what makes it so powerful? Certainly the

fall itself is remarkable. The danger of the situation is already established by the
bulging mesh. Unusually, however, The Undertaker does not tease the move;
the wrestlers do not teeter on the edge of the cage for a while, selling punches
that might or might not see them fall to the ground below. Instead Mankind’s
bump comes entirely out of the blue. Coupled with this is Ross’s commentary.
Somewhat ironically, it is at this moment when language almost breaks down
entirely, that the speech act becomes most potent. To an even greater extent
than Heenan’s “yes, yes, yes” interjections at the end of Royal Rumble 1992,
22 Claire Warden

language here seems unable to really capture the significance of the physical act;
Ross can only respond with incredulous blasphemy and two predictions that
Mankind must surely be dead. It is purposely over the top, suggesting that this
is an unusually dangerous situation – which in reality it certainly was! – even
in the violent world of professional wrestling. In a sense language is here freed
from its moorings and retains a liveness that Butler describes in her analysis of
Toni Morrison’s writing. When language seeks to capture an event, Butler sug-
gests, it commits a violent act and “loses its vitality.”11 Ross’s utterances do not
shut down interpretative potential but instead create a sense of openness that
we, as audience members, can invest in. His words do not describe the action
(indeed they suggest the failure of language to communicate such an extreme
physical act) but we, watching on television, grasp the communicative poten-
tial of Ross’s words. The shock the crowd feels is perfectly articulated by Ross
who, for a moment, is transmuted into a fan rather than a commentator. He
even uses the parlance of the fan rather than the narrator. He steps out of his
communicative structures and adopts our structures instead. It is this linguistic
complexity that transforms this single act from an amazing physical feat into an
extraordinary seminal moment of professional wrestling history.

Silence
So far this chapter has established the importance of aural language standing
alongside, substantiating or subverting the physical action. Such interventions
do not simply frame the action, they are action. But professional wrestling has
always been based on oppositional powers; to borrow the tagline for Wrestle-
Mania III, “the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.” So what of
that alternative to linguistic presence, that is linguistic absence? In many ways,
especially if we follow Martin Heidegger’s line of enquiry, this is not simply
an oppositional relationship as “authentic silence is possible only in genuine
discourse.”12
Focusing on all the elements of professional wrestling performance, Henry
Jenkins confirms “wrestling makes you want to shout, and perhaps we have had
too much silence.”13 It’s a legitimate statement, as I proved at a recent Insane
Championship Wrestling event in Sheffield, when I cheered on current Scottish
favourite Grado. However, I don’t entirely agree with Jenkins’s statement. Of
course, spectators can cheer their favourite performers, boo poor sportsmanship,
interrupt promos with the grating “what?” chant, invest in Daniel Bryan’s gim-
mick with the repetition of “yes, yes, yes.” Yet silence remains a vital force in
professional wrestling. At football (soccer) matches crowds are now encouraged
to engage in a minute’s clapping rather than a minute’s silence to celebrate the
lives of recently deceased legends. This change in tradition is testimony to how
hard it is to orchestrate a minute’s silence, particularly in large groups of people.
Consequently, silence represents one way the audience can “voice” their opin-
ion without the managed interference of the promotion; as every heel knows
 Pops and promos 23

only too well, if you tell people to be quiet they will generally be as noisy as
possible. When it does come, silence, by contrast, is more likely a spontane-
ous response of a large group of like-minded people. In this noisy, physicalised
space, silence is, I suggest, an independent, democratic intervention. Indeed it
is actually due to the rowdy atmosphere Jenkins recognises as a defining factor
of professional wrestling that silence is so potent; as Mikhail Bakhtin confirms,
“quietude and silence are always relative.”14 Silence here is not a signifier of
marginalisation or a nod to the old adage that children should be seen and not
heard. Rather it is, again returning to Bakhtin, a reaffirming of subjectivity: “in
silence nobody speaks (or somebody does not speak).”15 The subjective power
(and embodied presence) of the crowd is just as potent when it does not speak
as when it does. In fact, I suggest, it is more powerful in silence.
Audience silence appears at two junctures in the professional wrestling expe-
rience: when a crowd is not fully invested in an angle or when a real accident
occurs in the ring. The latter is relatively easy to explain: shock and concern
added together breaks through the conventional kayfabe structures, leaving the
crowd unsure about the appropriate aural response. Is the wrestler simply selling
the injury or has he really snapped his spine? These silences do not tend to last
long; either the wrestler stumbles to his feet to cheers or else is whisked away
by the medical team.The former, however, is far tougher for performers to deal
with. As Sharon Mazer suggests, “it doesn’t matter if . . . [wrestlers] are loved or
hated, as long as they are not received with silence and indifference.”16
In recent years the WWE’s creative teams have harnessed the powerful reso-
nance of silence. If, as Lissa McCullough suggests, “the very explosion of ver-
bosity everywhere evident in postmodernity attests to the failure of speech
truly to speak – and signals a new triumph of silence within speech,”17 it is
no wonder that the WWE, conscious of the troublesome limitations of aural
language, have turned to silence as an alternative method of communication.
So we’ve had silent ass-kickers like Lord Tensai and, for a time, Ryback; beasts
with managers like Lesnar or Rusev; voiceless machines like the Raw general
manager who had to be given voice by commentator Cole. Silence is particu-
larly compelling in the contemporary WWE product where protracted verbose
interchanges (particularly at the start of Raw) seem to be de rigueur. Of course
this is nothing new per se, building on the classic silent wrestler The Undertaker,
whose silence (coupled with the visuals of his “dead man” persona) brought
delicious terror to a generation of wrestling fans. It is even more potent in lucha
libre, where full-face masks prevent speech entirely, compelling the crowd to
focus on the wrestlers’ high-flying manoeuvres.
One particular angle illustrates the power of silence in modern professional
wrestling. In 2010 the WWE established NXT as a training stable for future
superstars. As part of this was a competition for a permanent contract with the
WWE, a competition won by Wade Barrett. However, a week later Barrett led
the seven losers in a takeover of Raw, naming the group Nexus. The somatic
power of this angle was not accompanied by the conventional speech acts of
24 Claire Warden

pro wrestling; instead, silence was used as a powerful narrative device. The seg-
ment begins as a straightforward match (albeit the first one to define itself as
a “Viewer’s Choice” match, a stipulation that obviously “gives a voice” to the
audience, even if that voice is orchestrated by the WWE machine) between
John Cena and CM Punk. It is a particularly noisy match – Cena enters to
deafening cheers, Punk uses loud hard-core punk as his entrance music. The
commentators – Cole and the erstwhile Jerry “The King” Lawler – provide
useful background material about the forthcoming Fatal Four-Way match and
why Punk doesn’t have any hair. Cena is about to deliver his signature five-
knuckle shuffle when Wade Barrett enters the arena and makes his way to the
ring. Gradually the other members of Nexus enter from across the arena. They
immediately attack Punk and his entourage before beating up Cena. Cole and
Lawler express confusion – “What is this?” “I have no idea what’s going on” –
challenging the usual position of the narrator as all-knowing. The group turn
their attention to Cole and Lawler next, overturning the table and leaving the
commentary team in a heap under the desk. At this moment, the usual acous-
matic framing disappears and television audiences are left in unmediated (at
least in a linguistic sense) confusion. The segment continues: the members of
Nexus attack everyone at ringside and smash up the ring, before turning their
attention back to Cena.The absence of commentary is obvious and disconcert-
ing. In fact, the silence compels the television spectator to heed sounds often
masked by the narration – bodies slamming on the mat, incredulous boos from
the crowd, wrestlers talking. One silence makes other sounds clearer. The audi-
ence is simply left with the image of Cena carried from the ring by paramedics
and, in nearly the final shot of the segment,WWE workers pulling the smashed
announce table off the lifeless body of Lawler. When cameras do pan to the
audience, they focus entirely on single individuals all with their hands to their
mouths in silent shock.18 The silence not only brings a distinct feeling of realism
to the segment, but it also leaves the audience unanchored in a sea of violent,
destructive images. Silence, so often the enemy of the wrestler, is used here as
a narrative device: amid such anarchy and devastation language is also smashed
to pieces. As language shatters so do the very structures of the WWE: the ring,
wrestlers, commentators, normal configurations of Raw (where commentators
tend to sum up the final action), and even the typical conventions of television
as a medium are all destroyed. In this post-kayfabe, post-truth world, it becomes
difficult to astonish a crowd. Such an unusual event as the Nexus invasion
reveals the inherent power of silence to shock spectators so used to noise.
These three elements – the physical, the speech act and silence – exist in a
performative Gordian knot in professional wrestling, intertwining, interrupt-
ing and interweaving to create a palimpsestic aural and visual experience for
audience and performer alike. Butler suggests “speaking itself is a bodily act,”19
that verbal articulation (or indeed non-articulation) and the body coexist in a
complex amalgam of communicative potential. Nowhere in popular culture is
this clearer than in the squared circle.
 Pops and promos 25

Notes
1 Nicholas Sammond, “Introduction: A Brief and Unnecessary Defense of Professional
Wrestling,” in Steel Chair to the Head: The Pain and Pleasure of Professional Wrestling, ed.
Nicholas Sammond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7.
2 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (London: Routledge, 1997), 8.
3 Ibid., 6.
4 Ibid., 16.
5 “Dusty Rhodes Talks about ‘Hard Times,’” Mid-Atlantic Wrestling, October 29, 1985,
accessed June 30, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9py4aMK3aIU.
6 A portmanteau of “smart” and “mark.”
7 “Brock Lesnar’s Apology,” RAW, June 22, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=XnYq_kgdA_Q.
8 Royal Rumble 1992, WWE Network.
9 Justin LeBar, “Breaking Down Why Royal Rumble 1992 Was Pinnacle of Storied Event,”
December 27, 2013, accessed June 29, 2015, http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1902849-
breaking-down-why-royal-rumble-1992-was-pinnacle-of-storied-event.
10 http://www.wwe.com/videos/the-undertaker-throws-mankind-off-the-top-of-the-
hell-in-a-cell-king-of-the-ring-16346646.
11 Butler, Excitable Speech, 9.
12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of
New York Press, 1996), 154.
13 Henry Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake:WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama,” in Steel
Chair to the Head, ed. Nicholas Sammond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 64.
14 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 133.
15 Ibid., 134.
16 Sharon Mazer, Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle ( Jackson: University Press of Mis-
sissippi, 1999), 24.
17 Lissa McCullough, “Silence,” in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Postmodernism, ed.Victor
E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (London: Routledge, 2001), accessed June 29, 2015,
http://www.academia.edu/3674817/_Silence_in_Routledge_Encyclopedia_of_Postmo
dernism.
18 “The Nexus’s WWE Debut,” RAW, June 7, 2010, accessed June 30, 2015, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=vVVtqoqzgNw.
19 Butler, Excitable Speech, 10.
Chapter 3

Playful engagements
Wrestling with the attendant
masses
Stephen Di Benedetto

While the scales of production in professional wrestling differ from events at

the local gym with a couple dozen in attendance to the arena with 20,000, the
basic event is designed along the same lines – a promoter gathers a handful of
wrestlers, each with a gimmick, ensuring a number of good guys and bad guys,
a referee, an announcer, and a script dictating the winners and losers according
to serial narrative.These performers “work” the attendants to craft an entertain-
ing evening. Professional wrestling’s playful qualities are a means of engaging
the senses and intervening in the fan’s responses to scripted provocations and
athletic acrobatics. It makes use of spectacle as a means of affecting fans who
are actively attendant to the action by way of the visual stimulation of lighting,
pyrotechnics, costume, and choreography; the aural stimulation of noise, music,
scripted dialog, call and response, and the amplified thumps and knocks of the
ring; and the touches and tastes of the shared experience of the venue and its
offerings. Responses from the attendant masses, who are more than passive
audiences but rather active participants, are as important as the athletics. The
event sets the scene for active playful engagement for the purposes of gener-
ating visceral responses to the action in the ring and beyond as well as invit-
ing active participation by the attendants. An examination of the performance
design of a typical match reveals professional wrestling to be a form of play that
exercises our desire to transgress the bounds of social etiquette.
A discussion of the deliberate design of the event to engage actively the fans in
its dramaturgy necessarily relies upon the seminal explorations by Sharon Mazer
on the performative nature of professional wrestling, Nicholas Sammond’s essay
collection on wrestling considering its historical and cultural aspects, and Henry
Jenkins’s exploration of the popular cultural appeal of wrestling.These researches
establish the nature of wrestling as a performance rooted in historical tradi-
tions, which rely on a populist fan base that propels the action of the matches.
Taken together they demonstrate the performative virtuosity of the wrestler,
the dramaturgical continuity of the serial nature of wrestling plots, and the tie
of wrestling performance to the history of theatre-making. By considering the
designed elements of production it becomes clear the way in which these aspects
of performance and the fan’s experience are components that must be consid-
ered together to understand its relevance and appeal to popular culture.
 Playful engagements 27

Mazer demonstrates wrestling is a distinct form of representation that bridges

the gap between sport and performance.1 The lessons that the genre offers can
help performance design scholars describe the ways in which shared spaces can
be shaped to elicit predicable responses from those in attendance. Professional
wrestling’s dramaturgy is important in terms of how narrative propels action,
and that action is the armature for creating a relationship between wrestlers in
the ring and the fans interacting. Wrestlers work with each other beforehand
and in real time in the ring to set up the choreography according to the sce-
nario dictated by the promoter. The fictions spun by wrestlers promote “heat”
to spur on fans. Its power comes not from its veracity as athletic competition,
but rather from the crowd’s propensity to become enthralled and unable to
determine when a “work” becomes a “shoot.” This attunement between wres-
tler and attendant is the foundation of the playful nature of live performance.
We play to get caught up in an experience in a space outside of our everyday
interactions.The cultural critic Peter Stromberg’s research on play in relation to
entertainment posits that our pastimes are a form of play that we treat seriously,
and we can become caught up in it and forget that the stakes are not real. This
is a form of suspension of disbelief, allowing us to engage with the fiction as if
it is real. He explains, “When we think of entertainment, we think in the first
instance of a person acting in concert with something stimulating the action
or imagination so that the person is engaged, responding to something that
has independent form.”2 For example, he observed adults playing Dungeons
and Dragons who created sound effects and jumped up to swipe their swords in
character. Ignoring their mundane environment, they all get caught up in the
action of the imagination and respond as if they are carrying out the swordplay.
Stromberg argues serious play is a form of human development that enables
us to work through experiences in low-stakes situations. Professional wrestling
deliberately sets out to create an environment to entice fans to get caught up
in the action and respond to action despite knowing the outcome is fixed. As
Roland Barthes expresses,

The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is

rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the
spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters
is not what it thinks but what it sees.3

Mazer explains that the wrestling promoter (director/producer) is acutely

aware of the takes of crafting an effective performance. Advance publicity prep-
ping the melodramatic feuds between wrestlers on the evening’s card and the
dramaturgy of the action in the ring is created for the attendants. If they do not
get what they are promised, they let the wrestlers know in no uncertain terms:

The action slows in the ring for a moment, becomes repetitive, static. The
fans stand together and take up the chant: “Bor-ring!” In response, the
wrestlers immediately accelerate: a wrestler body-slams his opponent and
28 Stephen Di Benedetto

then catapults from the top rope, and/or they take it out of the ring and
into the front rows, and/or a couple of stars race from the locker room to
mix things up in the ring. Satisfied that they’ve been heard, the fans settle
back into their seats.4

Wrestling promoters create production design elements that invite participa-

tion. Laurence deGaris explains,

The underlying structure illustrated here is that matches must be con-

structed in a dialogue (or maybe colloquy) between or among the wres-
tlers and the crowd. Thus, the crowd has a say in constructing the story.
The wrestlers are never in total control of the crowd – though they are
frequently the manipulators or at least the facilitators. In effect, the crowd
tells the wrestlers the story it wants to hear. It is up to the wrestlers to listen
and react.5

At one local match I was more engaged with the other attendants than the
wrestlers because of the low production values and the crowd shouted jokes,
made fun of their favorite, and passionately cursed them for dirty tricks to egg
them on.
DeGaris’s experience as a professional wrestler taught him the delicate bal-
ance between executing the moves necessary to propel the narrative of the
event and the responses of those in attendance. Without the resulting swell
of emotional energy from the crowd the match will not be comprehensible.
The choreography is meant to communicate to the crowd: “In a good match,
it is made intelligible by the performers, who include it in a consciously and
carefully crafted series of signifiers. In a bad match, each movement is unintel-
ligible.”6 Immediate intelligibility is important because convoluted action can
confuse the fans and interfere with emotional responses to the moment. Bar-
thes describes,

The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects
the transient image of certain passions. Wrestling therefore demands an
immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings, so that there is no need
to connect them. . . . wrestling is the sum of spectacles, of which no single
one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion
which rises erect and alone.7

Promoters understand that the scenario must be carefully planned to ensure

the interest through the whole match – this is done through varying the tempo
and types of events (one-on-one, tag-team matches, battle royals, etc.). Other
entr’actes are introduced, such as the use of fireworks, band performances, or
wrestler rants keep the action moving and pace the attendant’s emotions to rise
 Playful engagements 29

and subside before the action is built up to a climax again in the next match.
A wrestler knows that

“Working the crowd” typically means the process of manipulating the

crowd to elicit certain reactions. “Working,” which is deceptive, is con-
trasted to “shooting,” which refers to either wrestling for real in the ring or
telling the truth in interviews and other forums.8

In effect the promotion is playing with the crowd, riling them up so as to get
them caught up in the action. The more successful they are at working the
crowd the more likely they will return to buy more merchandise and partake
in new matches. Attendants come to “mess with” the wrestlers and get “messed
with” by the wrestlers.

The wrestlers’ playground: mapping fan experience

Even though I had heard of Hulkamania growing up, professional wrestling is
not a form that I ever saw as a child; it was considered déclassé.When invited to
my first wrestling match in 2013 I was unsure of what or who to expect.What a
shock once I got to the small community college gym in Florida to see a small-
time promoter, Future of Wrestling – there were toddlers and whole families!
Even after, going to Monday Night Raw at the enormous American Airlines
Arena a year later elicited fear. Excitement grew as my friend and I approached
the venue and scrambled to get in. The crowd was lively, and once we hit the
voms masses of people filed past, going to the concession stand for beer or
looking to buy T-shirts, signs, and other memorabilia. It was apparent entering
into the arena how much time the crowd spent preparing. All across the space
were handmade signs with wrestler’s catchphrases on them or other messages
that might be caught by the cameras.The attendants cut across class barriers and
represented a large cross section of Miami. Excitement builds as we mix with
the crowd and sit down; niche communities are formed section by section, row
by row. An eight-year-old child next to us recounts past episodes to his mother
and the guys behind shout at the wrestlers commenting on their physical prow-
ess. All around conversations bubbled about past matches, wrestling gossip, and
speculation about the outcome of the night’s matches.
How are spectators activated into spect-actors? Much like the ritual call-and-
response of a Christmas pantomime we quickly learn the rules of the game.
Looking across at the other patrons instructs the ways in which we are meant to
participate in the rituals of the event. Barthes describes this process where the
“public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest.”9
The first time my wife joined me she began shouting out phrases without even
knowing whom she was shouting for. We could yell out the catch phrases of
The Rock, or we could paint signs and bring them to display to other fans and
the cameras exclaiming “Kung Pao Bitch,” a taunt The Rock levied at John
30 Stephen Di Benedetto

Cena one where he declared he should slap him with a piece of Kung Pao
chicken. Taunts and cheers are used to indicate whether something is boring
or if the heel is a really bad heel! There are individual vocal outbursts and mass
choral responses. At a WWE Smackdown in 2015 at American Airlines Arena we
sat in front a mother and her young son; the mother had quite a bit to say about
the action unfolding in front of us.
Throughout the entire card she offered a blow-by-blow analysis and education
for her young son, as well as some not so subtle correction of her child’s enthu-
siasm rooting for the wrong wrestler. He offered a feeble attempt to explain why
he was rooting for her enemy but his attempt could not outlast the vociferous
passion of his mother. Sides are taken, and it matters not if you get caught up
rooting for the heel – the other attendants will put you in your place. Sensory
engagement such as images, sound, touch, taste, and smell are part of being in
the moment of a live event, so as an attendant you are expected to engage in the
moment-by-moment stages of each match, jumping up, shouting, and vicari-
ously feeling the wrestlers’ injuries.This pushes the crowd to get involved, and by
the end of the match the boy behind me kicked and punched the chair in frustra-
tion or excitement. It is in this state that the body subverts cognitive processing
and lives in the moment – thus the attendant can become part of the crowd.
Annette Hill, a cultural historian, uses ethnographic research to argue that
audience byplay is a power relationship between performer and spectator.
However her evidence demonstrates the shared interplay between actor and
spectator within an environment. She recounts how the wrestler Dan Ahtola
uses this knowledge to work his audience:

They are responding to what we do, we are responding to what they do.
If they are quiet, you have to create a situation where they need to scream
or clap. It is not about doing a fancy move. That is cheap. I try to create a
situation that makes them react. But if they are constantly loud that is like
the perfect wave for the surfer. . . . We are totally dependent on what the
audience is doing.10

The byplay of the crowd to the wrestler builds up the emotional intensity of
the moment and encourages the spectators to get caught up. Hill goes further
to explain that one fan she spoke with explained: “I felt excited. The crowd did
it all, the energy and feeling.” Another fan describes how a live crowd intensifies
the experience and makes it a larger experience:“A body slam looks much bigger
(and sounds much louder) when you see it live. A simple suplex, live, goes from
a neat trick to ‘how does anyone survive that?’ It is so much more impressive
live.”11 Our proximity to the sounds allows our attention to be captured and held
and enhances our attunement to the tribulations of the wrestlers.This live quality
encourages us to engage with other fans, and wrestlers know that they must keep
our attention or we will become distracted and turn to watch the crowd.
Attendants are impelled through the exploitation of naturally occurring and
manufactured soundscapes to get “caught up.” Becoming aware of affect allows
 Playful engagements 31

us to explore the pre-subjective, visceral forces that influence our response to

performance. While the intensity of the crowd and the sounds of the bodies
slamming against the mat bridge the divide between ring and arena seating,
there are other tactics to bring the action into physical proximity with the
crowd; attendants need an interlude to rest passively before getting caught up
again. For example, at a Monday Night Raw Stephanie McMahon came out of
the ring to pick a fight with one of the Bella twins who was ringside among the
crowd. McMahon had manipulated the fight unfairly so that one Bella twin got
pummeled as punishment for her sister’s transgressions. Her sister stood up and
confronted McMahon, triggering a fight sprawling across the audience barriers,
ring floor, and audience seating. McMahon slapped her as she stood alongside
fans. Later the police arrived and cuffed a screaming McMahon, dragged her
out of the building along the aisles out the exit into the parking structure. After
this drama ensued in front of fans, backstage episodes were broadcast back for
them to watch, allowing their attention to shift to a more passive mode of spec-
tatorship. After a respite promoters craft an entrance or new episode to build up
the excitement and tension anew.
Ahtola describes the aim of the wrestler engaging with the audience, “Every
wrestler knows you should be careful with the audience, you don’t want to end
up with someone getting hurt or scared, but we do want them to feel alive.”12
Hill recounts how this is played out in performance:

At one event (December 2012), two guys queued outside the venue so that
they could get front row seats to their first match. Even as newcomers they
expected fights spilling over from the ring. Right on cue, two professional
wrestlers jumped from the ropes into the crowd; one wrestler actually sat
on the guy’s knee. The look on both of their faces was pure amazement.
Even knowing this might happen, the power of the moment captured them
completely. They explained the feeling – “you are getting drawn into it.”13

For a playful crowd, being part of a mass of people adds to the excitement
generated by the wrestlers’ fantastic feats. Diehard fans recommend that if you
want to attend an event, “Never go alone; always bring at least one friend who
loves wrestling.The crowd energy is good, but the experience is 2–3 times bet-
ter when shared.”14 Participation and camaraderie is central to getting the most
out of the experience.

Actuating fan response

Scenographic elements are the armature for the wrestlers’ improvisation. Stag-
ing, costuming, lighting, sound, and projection help create a tempo for the
attendant’s experience of the evening providing cues to engage or distract
fans and set up the scenarios. For example, the setting accentuates focus upon
the physical action within the ring; it is lit well and the spectator’s gaze can
be drawn quickly to the action by dimming the periphery. The surrounding
32 Stephen Di Benedetto

seating is lit in various colors according to the mood or in tune with the colors
of the wrestlers’ various gimmicks. Mats are changed to show different logos
and to set up for other types of acts, or to build alternative stages for concerts
or specialty matches. The ring for the WWE matches has a stage and backdrop
with a narrow ramp leading to the entrance of the squared ring with announc-
ers situated at the opposite end. This gives the wrestlers several playing spaces
to work from, and the production designers several surfaces to project upon.
In addition, the Jumbotron is employed up above to provide close-ups of the
action to the gallery seats, and to show off-stage action and commercials.
The projection backdrop is used when wrestlers make their entrance.Theme
images related to their gimmick are projected with other animations. For exam-
ple when the wrestler Rusev and his manager Lana make their entrance, Rus-
sian flags are shown flapping in the wind and washes of red and white bathe the
screen. Another wrestler may have a pyrotechnic display explode from the front
of the stage with an accompanying image behind; immediately upon hearing
the explosions followed by the theme song, our focus immediately shifts to the
entrance ramp and our pulse quickens to ready us for the coming confronta-
tion. Our interest between matches may have waned and the scenographic
elements work to refocus our attention.The stage is elevated at the same height
as the ring, so it can also be used as a second stage where wrestlers can spar
verbally with a wrestler in the ring. A heel may make a partial entrance to shout
threats from the stage as the face in the ring defends his honor, or if a fight gets
particularly bad a wrestler could flee to this location, separating him from the
central combat zone of the ring.Where in the space the wrestler occupies helps
convey narrative and can endow power or reinforce weakness depending on
the blocking.
The WWE ring is twenty feet by twenty feet, purportedly the largest of all
promotions, and serves as a focal point for the attendant’s gaze. Evolved from
boxing rings, wrestling rings have turnbuckles that are attached to padded steel
posts. A mat of thin foam covers a three-quarter-inch to one-inch plywood
floor with tension springs and steel beams, and skeletal sheet metal holding it
up. The ropes surrounding the ring are strengthened with wire on the inside
and an outer coating of foam. The ring/mat is elevated four feet above the
ground, making it possible to mask props or performers from underneath. Hard
foam mats run along the outside of the ring for when wrestlers are thrown out
of the ring or for the action that takes place outside of the ring. Separating the
attendants from the wrestlers are foam-covered ring barricades. Sounds are a
key factor within the production design.While there are sounds associated with
the videos, music, and dialog, the ring itself is designed to amplify the sounds of
the wrestlers’ bodies hitting the mats. The ring’s structure and materials amplify
sound to maximize the effects of impacts for attendants; we can hear the thuds
on the mat and the metallic clang of a wrestler hitting the metal stairs into
the ring. The illusion of violence is accentuated by the corresponding sounds.
When present in the space it is these bangs that draw attention away from the
physical gestures to the impact of the violent moves upon the body.
 Playful engagements 33

Costuming is eclectic since the wrestlers each have individual gimmicks (a

wrestler’s personality, behavior, attire, and/or other distinguishing traits while
performing). Costume design supports character development. The tag team
known as the Wyatt family (Erick Rowan, Bray Wyatt, and Luke Harper) is
known for its gimmicks related to backwoods cults. Rowan, reminiscent of a
moonshiner, is a bald man with long combed beard (à la Duck Dynasty) and
wears a sleeveless mechanics outfit, while Wyatt sits on a carved wooden rocker
sporting another beard, a fedora, and a short-sleeve, button-up, tropical shirt
over a T-shirt; Harper wears a sheep mask. When they enter the stadium they
move through a darkened arena carrying a lantern to light their way. Almost
instantly as their theme music comes on fans light up their cell phones and wave
them above their heads.While gimmicks on the local circuits are developed and
costumed by the individual wrestlers, promoters or national promotions also
devise gimmicks. Individual gimmicks become iconic and fans have established
participatory responses to the entrances of the wrestlers as well as standard ver-
bal responses to the rants delivered by the wrestlers during entr’actes.
The committed involvement of the attendants and their knowledge of how
props create effect can be seen in a recent wrestling forum debate about the
merits of mass participation and the effect a gimmick might have. Discussion
began with the image of a whole stadium putting on sheep masks: Truk83 asks,

I know this sounds random, but how about the WWE sell lanterns like the
one Bray Wyatt brings to the ring. All the fans holding their own lantern
would be somewhat interesting to see live on television. It would bring a
new feeling to his entrance. What do you all think?15

Respondents enthusiastically responded, “That would be pretty sweet and

hilarious, imagine, the whole arena goes dark . . . majority of the crowd hold-
ing up lanterns.”16 Props and lighting are critiqued as much as the moves and
dialog. Fans are immersed in the shared atmosphere and aware of the effect of
a promoter’s choices upon their experience. These fans are attendant to the
scenographic structure that shapes their interaction with the live performers
and the others in the arena cheering them on.Theatrical design elements are as
much of the performance as the wrestler’s provocations.

Wrestling with the attendant masses

Wrestling offers an adult form of play where the rules are clear and those that
transgress the rules are punished. Those offended stand up for themselves and
good triumphs over evil. Peter Gray, a play psychologist, describes the impor-
tance role-play serves in social development. This kind of unstructured, freely
chosen play is a testing ground that provides critical life experiences without
which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults.17
Play is a serious endeavor that has psychological benefits allowing individuals to
learn how to negotiate their physical and social environments and to gain sense
34 Stephen Di Benedetto

of mastery over the world. Seen in this light wrestling becomes a simulacrum
of the repressed desired to gain mastery over the forces in life that conspire to
depose us from our sense of mastery over the whims of life. Those who do not
have the opportunity to control their own action and to follow through on
their own decisions to solve their own problems according to the rules in the
course of play grow to feel that they are not in control of their own fate. Wres-
tling plays with attendants, helping them become a part of the drama between
good and evil and allows them to participate and have an effect upon the action
that unfolds in front of them. When the action feels monotonous, attendants
can shout and compel the wrestlers to liven it up. When new stimulation is
needed another battle is fought, another victim (face) stands up to a bully (heel).
When bullies win it is the drama of waiting to see the bully pay that draws
attendants. It is a shared space where it is safe to scream at the top of your lungs
for your foe to be beaten into submission.
Social play is a natural means of making friends and learning to treat others
fairly. Play is voluntary. Play theorists believe that “learning to get along and
cooperate with others as equals may be the most crucial evolutionary function
of human social play.”18 Choosing to attend a performance event and choosing
to take up the participatory invitations offered in the space of the performance
creates a playful interchange between performer and attendant. By sharing in
the experiences of a match the crowd enters a social contract acknowledging
their part in the surrounding community.
From a sporting perspective Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning trace the “civ-
ilizing process” of modern cultural history and the place of sports in soci-
ety.19 They see repression and sublimation as key factors in normative cultural
exchange. Contemporary societies view getting carried away by emotional
outbursts as a weakness to be avoided, and as a result we have repressed these
emotions to function well in conjunction with others. In Henry Jenkins’s esti-
mation, it is not only an intensity of feeling that is cast in the pejorative but also
our discomfort of its spectacular display. Sports developed as a means of releas-
ing suppressed emotions in a socially sanctioned public forum. Jenkins argues,
“the real-world consequences of physical combat (in short, sport’s status as
adult play) facilitate a controlled and sanctioned release from ordinary affective
restraints.”20 This echoes Stromberg’s postulation that we play to get caught up
and to get caught up with the crowd frees us from the constraints of our own
repressed exuberance, offering a controlled release of our repressed responses to
the stresses of civil interaction.
The experience of play is linked to forms of entertainment and the structure
of spectacular events affect attendant response in predictable ways. If play is a
form of human development used to train us without risk of death, then creat-
ing playful events has the potential to be used to shape human behavior and
to create shared values. A professional wrestling maneuver actuates perceptual
mechanisms; a body slam has the effect of causing wonder; and shock at the
violence in turn allows us to interpret the experience and perhaps allows us to
 Playful engagements 35

think about the nature of violence and revenge. Ultimately constructing events
that encourage meaningful interaction between attendants and performers is an
act of drawing focus to human beings in action in a space that allows the playful
crowd to get caught up.This shaping of the environment for shared experience
is a visceral social process that satisfies some social-psychological need within
us and is a vital function of how humans learn to interact and respond to others
as constrained by the rules of society.

Notes
1 Sharon Mazer, Professional Wrestling Sport and Spectacle (  Jackson: University Press of Mis-
sissippi, 1998).
2 Peter G. Stromberg, Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 7.
3 Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” in Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang,
1972), 15.
4 Mazer, “‘Real Wrestling’/‘Real’ Life,” in Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of
Professional Wrestling, ed. Nicholas Sammond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 72.
5 Laurence deGaris, “The Logic of Professional Wrestling,” in Steel Chair to the Head: The
Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, ed. Nicholas Sammond (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 206.
6 Ibid.
7 Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” 16.
8 DeGaris, “The Logic of Professional Wrestling,” 206.
9 Barthes, “The World of Wrestling.”
10 Annette Hill, “The Spectacle of Excess: The Passion Work of Professional Wrestlers,
Fans and Anti-Fans,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2014): 186.
11 Arkady English, comment on “What Is It Like to See Professional Wrestling Live?,” Quora,
August 1, 2013, http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-see-professional-wrestling-
live.
12 Hill, “The Spectacle of Excess.”
13 Ibid.
14 Anonymous, comment on “What Is It Like to See Professional Wrestling Live?,” Quora,
November 10, 2013, http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-see-professional-wres
tling-live.
15 Truk83, comment on “How about Wyatt Lanterns?,” Wrestling Forum, July 18, 2013,
http://www.wrestlingforum.com/general-­-­-wwe/885409-­-­-how­--­-about­--­-wyatt­--­-
lanterns.html.
16 Zombie Princess, comment on “How about Wyatt Lanterns?,” Wrestling Forum, July 18, 2013,
http://www.wrestlingforum.com/general-­-­-wwe/885409­--­-how­--­-about­--­-wyatt­--­-
lanterns.html.
17 Peter Gray, “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and
Adolescents,” American Journal of Play 3, no. 4 (Spring 2011), http://www.journalofplay.
org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/3–4-article-gray-decline-of-play.pdf.
18 Esther Entin, “All Work and No Play: Why Your Kids Are More Anxious, Depressed,”
Atlantic, October 12, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/all-
work-and-no-play-why-your-kids-are-more-anxious-depressed/246422.
19 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing
Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
20 Henry Jenkins, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2007).
This page intentionally left blank
Part II

Circulation
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 4

Stadium-sized theatre
WWE and the world of
professional wrestling
Eero Laine

The business of professional wrestling is the business of theatre. Even if on the

surface professional wrestling seems anathema to theatrical sensibilities, it is
hard to deny the formal similarities. After all, professional wrestling is scripted
entertainment performed live in front of an audience by actors portraying char-
acters. Indeed, professional wrestling bears many similarities to other theatri-
cal forms such as vaudeville, melodrama, commedia dell’arte, and musical theatre
(characters break into fights, not songs). Setting aside the specific content of
professional wrestling, however, it is also possible to examine the economic and
institutional formations that it shares with more distinguished forms of live per-
formance. In this sense, professional wrestling is an exemplary case study for the
ways that theatrical performance is produced, consumed, and circulated widely,
even globally. Specifically, WWE can be considered a model, yet surprisingly
under-examined, example of a publicly traded, transnational theatre company.
Of course, professional wrestling, and WWE in particular, is more than just a
live event. Performances are frequently broadcast, recorded, and otherwise dis-
tributed through various media. Treating professional wrestling as theatre does
not dismiss these methods of circulation, but rather treats them as appendages to
the necessarily live performance event at the core of professional wrestling. Fol-
lowing this tack, this chapter situates professional wrestling as a form of com-
mercial theatre. The chapter begins with a recent example of a storyline that
brought corporate interests, fan advocacy, and the connections between fiction
and finance into sharp relief. A brief historical overview follows that traces
early connections between the wrestling business and show business. Finally,
WWE is considered within the constellation of contemporary, commercial,
globalizing theatrical entertainments, opening questions regarding the relation-
ship between theatrical entertainment and the media that transmits it.

Corporate plots and active audiences

Daniel Bryan wasn’t supposed to be the champion. From the summer of 2013 to
the late spring of 2014, the bearded, nice-guy underdog battled in and out of the
ring for the chance to be the WWE World Heavyweight Champion. Multiple
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