On Booking - Part 1: Comedy

As the American wrestling scene continues to be dominated by the WWE it’s hard not to see them as representatives of the scene entirely. This presents a number of problems for us as wrestling fans. The biggest problem, of course, is the booking. Who does the WWE creative team want as an audience? Do they want the longtime fans? Do they want a new, hip audience? What demographics are they shooting for? In my view, the WWE is floundering; unable to make a distinction as to which crowd they want.

In this series of articles I will be taking a look at various aspects of what makes a WWE show and the problems with each. These booking aspects are comedy, booking to the smart audience, edginess/traditional booking and pet favorites.

1. Comedy
I love comedy. Comedy is a huge reason why I watch wrestling. I readily admit it. I love the lowbrow, politically incorrect, uniquely professional wrestling oriented comedy. In professional wrestling, you can have comedy that wouldn’t necessarily translate as well into other forms of entertainment. So how can I have a problem with something I readily admit makes a large part of my viewing pleasure you might ask? Easy: I have a problem with a lot of it because it makes up a large part of my viewing pleasure.

Les Thatcher, in another excellent column recently shot from the hip about the direction of the WWE -- My thoughts on attracting new fans, or viewers, or whatever the case, has always been. Take the approach that everyone taking their first look at professional wrestling does so with the opinion that it is a good portion slapstick, or low brow comedy. Yes, both those things are part of our industry. However I think the path the industry should take is to show new fans that there is much more to our business, instead of reinforcing their opinion that we are a shallow comedy act. There is a good chance that if we expect to hook them consistently, then we will have to suspend their disbelief, and hook them with that in ring product, not weak comedy.

I don’t think I have seen any of his products but I get the sense based on his columns that his is a wrestling show that I could solidly get behind week in and week out. It’s sad for me that I can’t get behind WWE 100%. I want to. I really do. But I am not their intended audience. Judging by the stagnating audience at the last few WWE events I went to they aren’t attracting the new audience. Like the comic book crowd (of which I am a part), the long-timers (again, like myself) aren’t going anywhere for too long. We’re going to keep an eye on things whether or not we purchase tickets or buy pay per views or DVDs. When one of us stops watching you know there are major problems in there. And in the above paragraph from Les Thatcher, we have a major reason as to why some of us may be leaving.

As I stated earlier, a lot of comedy in professional wrestling is unique to professional wrestling. Its form of entertainment is rooted in the traveling carnival days appealing not to major cities but to the small towns. The places that may not be quite as hip or sophisticated as NYC or LA. It centered on middle-America with every territory offering their own unique perspective. But the one common ground is that the crowd wanted their heroes to be masculine and to overcome adversity.

It’s from this early-20th Century perspective of masculinity that we get a lot of today’s comedy in wrestling. And let’s face it, a lot of wrestling comedy is homophobic in nature. From the early days when Gorgeous George would pomp it up in the ring or Ricky Starr performing pirouettes and other ballet moves to incite the crowd, this tradition in wrestling was born.

When you see Kurt Angle trying to perform a German suplex and repeatedly failing so it looks like simulated male-on-male sex, that is where it is rooted. Every effeminate wrestler you have seen through the years from Rico to Adrian Adonis to Lenny and Lodi are direct copies of those earlier performers.

The comedy is in the representation of masculinity. To be more specific (and this is another article entirely), the comedy is in the representation of middle-America white masculinity. This also allows for gimmicks construed as racist such as Kamala, Akeem and early thuggish John Cena.

But the problem that develops is when the performers stop approaching these types of gimmicks and instances with a wink and start to portray it in a manner that it wasn’t intended. Witness a few months back when Muhammed Hassan confronted “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in the ring. Austin, trying to go for this type of comedy, stopped and did the Sixth Sense parody by stating “I see sand people.” The problem here was that the Muhammed Hassan character was presenting a case of racism as a grievance but racist humor was used to counter it. It was out of place in the scene. It may have drawn some laughs but it was an embarrassing spectacle which crossed the line from low brow humor to uncomfortable.

Compare this to the current characters the Mexicools. Here we have three Mexican wrestlers who are knowingly out of their element in the WWE. They ride lawnmowers to the ring, use rakes as weapons and generally raise havoc for the fun of it. They find themselves in positions where their race is used to advance their own stories and to launch other stories. Psicosis has used a line a few times that states “Your ass is grass and we’re gonna mow it.” The racist humor fits because it stems from the performers themselves. It is done with a wink at the American perspective of the Mexican culture.

But unfortunately most comedy in current WWE is left to be dumbed down appealing to the writers themselves. Witness the Jillian Hall character (which is what inspired Thatcher’s statement). Her gimmick is based on a joke from a movie over three years old, Austin Powers in Goldmember. Watching Smackdown we see this giant, obviously fake prosthetic tumor attached to her face. Now instead of creating sympathy for her, which is the reaction such a deformity should inspire, the writers see fit to have the performers and announcers ridicule Jillian for this. And because it is based on a joke that never was funny and is mean spirited only, the fans are left ashamed of the spectacle they see on television.

The writers saw fit to make Jillian a heel so that the fans can’t even sympathize with her. Her character gets angry when people point it out to her. The source of humor isn’t treated as humor by the performer. The writers saw fit to have Jillian angry and spiteful about the reaction but never finding herself humiliated in another way to redirect the laughs writers saw fit to attribute to her character.

This redirected humor is a cornerstone in wrestling and one the WWE writers seen to have lost a grasp on. Redirected humor is what used to draw reactions from crowds and allowed the performers to get over (especially if they had a comedy based gimmick). The formula is simple enough: 1) the heel performer is comedic but hates that people laugh about it, 2) the face laughs about it to the heel’s face, and 3) the heel tries to defend his/her honor but finds him/herself humiliated in another way.

The result of the redirected humor is that the fans will latch onto that “sore spot” in the heel and taunt him/her with it. The crowd gets loud and the heel has the crowd to play off of now for their stories. With the case of Jillian Hall, and the Stone Cold/Hassan segment earlier, fans are deprived of this.

This failure to redirect the humor results in performers not getting over and fans not caring about the shows. To see a result of when it does work, take a look at John Cena. My thoughts on him as a performer aside, there was a time when he was excellent in this comedic role. When he first turned heel with the rapper gimmick he was not serious about it. Everything he did resulted in him getting laughed at. He was a Vanilla Ice wannabe. Threatening to no one and over the top so fans knew he was joking. He used this redirected humor as well as any top performer in wrestling. The end result is fans took to him and he is now one of the most over performers in the current wrestling scene.

But once he got over as a fan favorite, WWE was forced to make Cena take himself seriously. Out was everything that got Cena over in the first place and replacing it was a warmed over tough babyface with a side of comedy. But the comedy is no longer focused on Cena but on his adversaries. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but the delivery leaves a lot to be inspired. What was once hip and edgy has been dumbed down for the masses. In place of mocking poseurs, we now have a poseur taken seriously. Where we once had contemporary mockery of current culture we now have uninspired jokes that are too out of date to inspire laughter and not yet out of date enough to get a nostalgia laugh such as the Geico joke this past week.

I think the WWE creative team has their hearts in the right places in this case but I think they don’t quite understand how it works. Whether this stems from not being knowledgeable about wrestling or just not doing their homework as to what makes it work, I can’t really say. I think the truth may lie somewhere in-between. In the television medium there is no excuse for jokes to be out of fashion such as the Goldmember or Geico jokes. The WWE records and airs their shows every week. They should have their fingers enough on the pulse of society to know what it is that we find funny. They should know their audience and how to work them into getting the appropriate reaction. But they don’t do it. And that’s one reason why ratings and attendance is down.