On Storytelling and Pro Wrestling

In college, I used to really hate improv comedy. I had a friend in my school’s troupe, but I stopped going after a sketch where one of the male actors ended up with his legs wrapped around the waist of another male actor, bouncing up and down in faux coitus, shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” to uproarious, bringing-down-the-house laughter.

That was my mental Polaroid of the troupe for a couple years, until my friend urged me to come to a show during my last semester. She said things were different, but didn’t elaborate, and I’m sure I didn’t believe her. 

But she was right. Gone were the easy, seemingly irresistible sex gags. Gone were the character-sketches-wandering-the-stage scenarios, with five hams mugging and grimacing all over the stage. Most of the show featured a long, improvised story involving a high school loser dating a Prom queen. Characters, setting, etc. were solicited from the audience beforehand and written on a chalkboard behind the stage for the troupe to work in.

Transcribed, the story wouldn’t have made great literature, but somehow, working together, the cast members created a story that kept the audience’s interest (including mine). The jokes that came up were organic, related to timing and character, and funny.

I’m thinking about this now because in just a few days I shall treat myself to the closest thing to that experience Pittsburgh has to offer. I’m talking about the Keystone State Wrestling Alliance, whose monthly event (this one is “Aftermath 2007″) will occur Saturday night.

The KSWA is a semi-pro wrestling federation that holds monthly events at the Lawrenceville Moose, a working Moose lodge. The wrestlers haven’t quit their day jobs: I spotted one, Shane Starr, in a University of Pittsburgh computer lab once. At the end of each show, “good” wrestlers (“babyfaces,” in industry parlance) like Kris Kash, Double A Anthony Alexander, the Snake Man, and Justin Sane help dismantle and pack up the ring elbow to elbow with “bad” wrestlers (“heels”) like Ali Kaida, the Bloodbeast, Biker Al, and “The Enforcer” Shawn Blanchard of the Blanchard Express (slogan: “Booze, Broads, and Belts”).

There are silly continuing story lines, like the prolonged losing streak of Joseph Q., previously the Drunken Luchador Joey Quervo, an obviously Caucasian wrestler in a Mexican wrestling mask who lost his wrestling abilities the moment he joined AA; there’s the King Del Douglas’s year-long indentured servitude to Dr. Devastation Lou Martin, who won a “Slave-For-a-Year” match in December. An essay I read over the summer likened this aspect of professional wrestling to a kind of soap opera for men, envisioning the continuing-story format as something like a rope with many knots, each length representing one installment of the series, which is, at least in theory, neverending. The essay, “‘Never Trust a Snake’: WWF Wrestling as Male Melodrama” by Henry Jenkins III (in a collection of criticism on pro wrestling called Steel Chair to the Head), name-checks Jane Feuer, a Pitt Film Studies professor who came up with this “knotted rope” metaphor to describe television melodrama. (She’s done a lot of work on “Dynasty” and “Melrose Place”)

But the connection I’m taking so awfully long to make is in the idea of people collaboratively improvising a story. That happens, pardon the expression, out the ass in the KSWA.

A friend reported hearing one wrestler, the Latin Assassin, say to another, Zero, “hit the pole,” giving his opponent a chance to brace himself for a head-first shove into the steel corner post. There are long, maddening moments where Referee Jimmie James patiently explains some minor point of wrestling law to ringside manager “Gentleman” Joe Perri while behind his back two members of the International Thugs tag team pummel another. The “yes and” principle of improv is alive and flourishing in the KSWA: if Baracus, an International Thug, throws La Lucha into the ropes, La Lucha goes with it, bouncing back and setting Baracus up for a brutal clothesline.

Perhaps most of all, the wrestlers do the same thing, essentially, those improv kids did, moving the story from point to point with a particular end in mind. I and every other spectator knows that fan-favorite the Latin Assassin will ultimately pin the newbie Zero, for instance, but in the meantime how are the wrestlers to arrive at that place, and how will they put the ending into question? That match spilled out onto the tile floor and featured Zero dashing a folding chair across the back of the Latin Assassin, who’d just returned from an injury.  I honestly wondered if Zero, scrappy underdog, might just surprise the staid old Assassin, even as I knew he wouldn’t.

That’s storytelling, and the wrestlers of the KSWA do it well, better and better each time I see them. It’s a soap opera, definitely, played out with kicks, chokeslams, elbow-drops, pile-drivers, and clotheslines. But to notice the improvisation, the graceful cooperation between the men acting out the roles of babyface and heel, is not to become cynical about the process of elaborate fakery that wrestling surely is, but to become part of the story in surprising and gratifying ways.

(If anyone is reading this locally, I cannot recommend KSWA matches highly enough. Read up on event details at www.kswa.net)