Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage

Eero Laine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351134378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage examines professional wrestling as a century-old, theatrical form that spans from its local places of performance to circulate as a popular, global product.

Professional wrestling has all the trappings of sport, but is, at its core, a theatrical event. This book acknowledges that professional wrestling shares many theatrical elements such as plot, character, scenic design, props, and spectacle. By assessing professional wrestling as a neglected but prototypical case study in the global business of theatre, Laine argues that it is an exemplary form of globalizing, commercial theatre. He asks what theatre scholars might learn from pro wrestling and how pro wrestling might contribute to conversations beyond the ring, by considering the laboring bodies of the wrestlers, and analyzing wrestling's form and content.

Of interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, cultural studies, and sports studies, Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage delimits the edges of wrestling's theatrical frame, critiques established understandings of corporate theatre, and offers key wrestling concepts as models for future study in other fields.

Chapter 1

Productive theatre and
professional wrestling

The business of kayfabe

Professional wrestling has always functioned with a theatrical business model, wherein live events drive ticket sales and profits. More directly: “the business of professional wrestling is the business of theatre” and vice versa.¹ While pro wrestling emerged from carnivals and athletic troupes of the late 1800s, it became more theatrical (including performances on literal stages) as theatre in Europe and especially the US was becoming more “artistic,” less popular, and ostensibly moving away from commercial interests.² Journalist Marcus Griffin describes professional wrestling in his 1937 book Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce as “probably the greatest entertainment spectacle today, containing acrobatics, comedy, buffoonery, pantomime, tragedy, interlude, curtain, and afterpiece.”³ Griffin’s is the earliest book-length study of the theatricality of professional wrestling and it directly links theatre and pro wrestling through overlapping aspects of production and the work of the performers:

There are all the elements of theatre including the producer, publicity man, advance agent, stage manager, and prompter. Like Shakespeare’s famed line, wrestlers “suit the action to the word and the word to the action,” and thus create in their bouts what is known as heat, or as Pope expressed it, “they awaken the soul by tender strokes of art.”⁴

While Griffin perhaps stretches some of his more literary connections too far, his book otherwise includes dramaturgical-like analyses of the various ways matches begin, proceed, and finish; information regarding how wrestling promoters and wrestlers tour and stage their shows; journalistic accounts of individuals working behind the scenes; and other presumed (theatrical) secrets of the trade.

Wrestling as secret theatre (or not-so-secret theatre, as the case may be) is built into its very performance and, indeed, is integral to the pro wrestling business model. In a way, the performance of pro wrestling inverts the idea of theatre where cast and crew acknowledge the fictions of the show and the audience willfully suspends disbelief during the performance. In professional wrestling, wrestlers and promoters have insisted on the idea that what they do is not theatrical and the audience plays along both during the performance and the rest of the time as well. This has taken different turns throughout the history of professional wrestling and today there is an acknowledgment that wrestling is certainly theatrical, but it is also “not fake.” Even those fans who have historically challenged the claims to sport are already playing the wrestling game. If the promoter and the wrestlers present a product that is highly theatrical and claim it is not and someone decides to start an argument about it, they have already succumbed to the broader spectacle of the pro wrestling game.

This shared theatricality is often referred to as kayfabe. Kayfabe is a central idea for professional wrestling and has had different notions over time, but, in short, it is the presentation of professional wrestling as sport that is not predetermined. Kayfabe is central to professional wrestling’s theatrical and financial interests and also describes a wide range of social practices. It is often construed as simple deception or even lying, and some of the etymological evidence presented in this chapter supports such a reading. Kayfabe need not be forceful deception; rather, today, kayfabe is most frequently that which is the easiest to believe.

Wrestlers have historically gone to significant lengths and expended impressive amounts of labor to protect kayfabe; for those watching wrestling it is fairly easy to just accept it or not think too deeply about it. David Shoemaker cites a wrestling fan from 1931:

As far as I know the shows are honest. But even if they’re not I get a big kick out of them, for they are full of action and all the outward signs of hostile competition. It is either honest competition or fine acting and in either case I get a real show.⁵

Shoemaker suggests that fans have been in on kayfabe for the better part of the past century, which is to say there wasn’t nearly as much concern about the truth or theatricality of pro wrestling from fans as there might have been from pro wrestling’s critics. A reprinted article in an issue of the Literary Digest from 1932 supports such a reading, offering the notion that “maybe the chief reason wrestling is popular is that it is not wrestling.”⁶

Indeed, as early as 1930, the New York Times reported that pro wrestling had “passed into the status of theatrical classification.”⁷ The headline read: “Wrestling Placed Under New Status: Commission Rules Clubs Must List Matches as Shows or Exhibitions.”⁸ It would not be the last time the wrestling industry was “exposed” for its overt theatricality and it certainly did not greatly alter the way the events were promoted. Just one year after the reclassification, the same athletic commission official (former wrestler William Muldoon) who changed the status of professional wrestling issued his objections to a proposed wrestling event that was to be held in a less than sportive location. His statement for the New York Times:

It would be just as ridiculous for New Yorkers to stage a wrestling match at the Metropolitan Opera or to present an opera in Madison Square Garden as for the Westchester County Centre to be desecrated by a bout of professional wrestling.⁹

It seems, however, that the lack of clarity from organizing bodies on the topic of wrestling’s nature as sport or theatre did not hurt professional wrestling as a source of entertainment. By the middle of the twentieth century, professional wrestling had spread to many countries throughout Europe and would also gain especially strong followings in Japan and Mexico. Today, the business connections between theatre and wrestling described by Griffin in the 1930s—the producers, publicity people, and advance agents—are wrapped up in a finely polished, corporate package by WWE, which is based in the United States but frequently holds events throughout the world.

Throughout their varied histories, theatre and professional wrestling have shared a business model that is based in a live event that resists replication and requires workers to labor in front of and for customers. While the aesthetics of the forms and even labor pools at times appear distinct, the labor that generates profit for the promoter functions in the same way. In thinking about professional wrestling and/as theatre, I begin by asking, “What does live entertainment produce?” What is the theatrical product? This is, I think, a central question for theatre and one that has seemingly obvious and counterintuitive answers. I am interested in the ways that theatre and performance (and thus professional wrestling) make money without producing tangible goods. This is perhaps as obvious as professional wrestling itself, but frequently the very obviousness of labor in the theatre obscures such labor. Theatre produces an event, an experience, a moment in time that is purchased for the price of admission. In that same consideration, once the show is over, all that is left is the detritus of the event. Some of these materials might turn out to be collectors’ items or souvenirs or reused for future productions and a good amount is even thrown away. So, other than the labor that is expended before and during the act of theatre, the theatrical goods that remain sit perhaps awkwardly between souvenirs and garbage.

Those are broad categories, of course, and Christopher B. Balme suggests we might define theatrical goods as almost anything “that might enter economic circulation: texts, production concepts, songs, dance routines, costumes, and of course, the performers themselves.”¹⁰ And while he acknowledges the performances of a play as “invariably the beginning of the commodification process,” he notes the ways that theatrical productions circulate past the performances themselves, sometimes through media.¹¹ In theatre and professional wrestling, the live performance forms the nucleus of the form itself and the act of profit making.

Despite the common sentiment that the theatre is no place to make a living, the performing arts are quite profitable, just not necessarily for the laborers or the artists themselves. According to some measures, in 2016 the performing arts contributed 4.3 percent to the US GDP or about 800 billion dollars.¹² For comparison, in the 2015–16 season, Broadway grossed 1.373 billion dollars, and in the 2016–17 season, 1.449 billion dollars.¹³ WWE grossed about half of that: 729 million dollars in 2016 and a little over 800 million dollars in 2017.¹⁴ Both Broadway and WWE represent just a fraction of the money in the performing arts, but they are useful examples, if for no other reason than their financial transparency. Indeed, professional wrestling is, along with Broadway, exemplary of how theatre and other narrative-driven, live events make money despite the many apparent limitations that present themselves. And while the commercial stage that pro wrestling occupies is more often than not a stadium rather than a historic touring theatre or new arts complex, the logic of professional wrestling at the business level is not unlike any other commercial theatre.

This chapter considers the ways in which the theatricality of professional wrestling has made it more productive. The theatricalization of the performance form over the course of the twentieth century allowed producers and promoters to capitalize on the possibility of having narrative command over sport or otherwise unpredictable events. The chapter begins with an overview of what I call productive theatre, what is often referred to as commercial or for-profit theatre. The idea of productive theatre stems from a reading of Marx and his conception of productive labor that is in contradistinction to Adam Smith’s goods-based notion of the term. The connections between commercial theatre and professional wrestling, taking both as forms of productive theatre, follows and leads into a consideration of the theatrical logic of professional wrestling and the further explication of the term kayfabe. Kayfabe is the theatrical overlay to professional wrestling that for parts of pro wrestling history presented the fake sport as real, unfixed, and unscripted. In this chapter, I consider the etymology of the term as it stretches back to a secret carnival dialect in order to explore the ways that professional wrestling operates today. In particular, I am interested in how professional wrestling models pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Professional wrestling and the commercial stage
• 1 Productive theatre and professional wrestling: The business of kayfabe
• 2 Form and content: Professional wrestling’s troubling theatrics
• 3 Hardcore wrestling: Deregulation and theatrical danger
• 4 Trading likenesses: Wrestling labor and the branded body
• 5 A stock theatre company: WWE and theatrical value
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index