Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Kayfabe: The Secret Code That Built Professional Wrestling

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

One of my dirty secrets is that I’m a fan of pro wrestling. Whenever I tell people this the first thing I inevitably hear is, “you know it's fake right?” This idea that people think professional wrestling is real comes from the concept that wrestling insiders call kayfabe. Learn about the history of kayfabe and how this concept from professional wrestling can be used to navigate the modern world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my dirty secrets is that I'm a fan of pro wrestling. Whenever I tell people this, the first thing I inevitably hear is, you know it's fake, right? This idea that people think professional wrestling is real comes from the concept that wrestling insiders call K-Fabe. Learn about the history of K-Fabe and how this concept from professional wrestling can be used to navigate the modern world

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thulein podcast from NPR. This episode is brought to you by the Travel Photography Academy.

Have you ever been on a trip and wondered why your photos don't turn out like the images you see in travel magazines? If you're going to spend thousands of dollars on a trip and hundreds to thousands of dollars, on a camera, you owe it yourself to get the highest quality images from your trip. That's why I created the Travel Photography Academy. I set out to travel around the world in 2007 with an expensive camera, and I had no idea how to use it. As I traveled around the world, I taught myself the art of travel photography, eventually mastering it to a point where I was named Travel Photographer the Year three times in North America. The Travel Photography Academy is an online course that teaches you everything you need to know to master your camera and to take better photos

on your next trip. To improve your photography and to get better images on your next trip, visit Travel Photography Academy.com or click in the link in the show notes. The origins of modern professional wrestling began back in the early 20th century when Carnivals would put on catch wrestling exhibitions. This was real wrestling. The competitors were actually wrestling with each other, and there would be prize money awarded to the winner. The wrestlers would often compete against locals who would win a prize if they could defeat the Carnival's strong man, so they really did have to know how to wrestle and fight. Unfortunately, many of the competitive matches were really boring. The bouts were often nothing more than wrestling holds which

could last for over an hour. Watching two grown men grab each other for that long really wasn't that entertaining. The whole point of carnival wrestling wasn't to wrestle, it was to make money. Eventually, the promoters figure out they could sell more tickets if they made the matches more interesting, and that is how K-Fabe started. The word K-Fabe itself comes from Karni-Taw. which is a sort of pig Latin type of language which was spoken by carnival workers. K-Fabe just means fake. As the carnivals began predetermining the winners of fights, it was a short step to adopting the tropes which were used in all good dramas.

Good versus evil, heroic comebacks, treachery and betrayal. All of those became part of professional wrestling in order to put on a better show and sell tickets. However, at no point did they ever say that the performance was predetermined. People had to think they were watching a little bit of. legitimate competition. So a bad guy and a good guy couldn't be seen together before or after a show. They had to commit to their characters all the time. This is the primary difference that separates K-Fabe from acting. Actors perform a role and everyone knows that they're watching a performance. In K-Fabe, the performer is living the role, even when they're not performing, and they're trying

to convince the audience that it's real. For decades, keeping K-Fabe was the single biggest rule in professional wrestling. It was the wrestling equivalent to magicians not divulging their secrets. The primary K-Fag mechanism was having baby faces, which were the good guys, in heels, which were the bad guys. The bad guys had to be bad guys all the time. If they were asked for autographs by fans at an airport, they would often refuse to sign and insult the fans just to keep K-Fab. When wrestlers traveled between cities, heels and faces would often have to travel in separate cars and stay in different rooms just to keep K-Fabe. They would even have different locker rooms backstage. Occasionally, they would screw up and wrestlers would get in big trouble if they

broke KFabe. In 1987, the Iron Sheik, who was a heel, was traveling with Hacksaw Jim Duggan, who was a face. They were both pulled over and arrested for possession of marijuana and cocaine. When the arrest made the news to cause controversy, because these two guys were supposed to be enemies, yet they were traveling with each other. On rare occasions, a wrestler may go off script and try to really injure another performer. Any sort of predetermined match or storyline is called a work in wrestling circles, and something which is real or off script is called a shoot. In 2004, for example, the WWE was running a reality show where the contestants compete to become professional wrestlers. One of the contestants was Daniel Putter, who was a real-life MMA fighter.

On an episode of Monday Night Raw, wrestler Kurt Engel issued a challenge for one of the contestants to come out and fight him. According to the script, Putter was supposed to come out and quickly lose. However, he decided to actually fight for real, on live TV, when Engel wasn't expecting it. Putter tried to put Angle in a submission hold instead of losing. However, Kurt Engel is a real-life Olympic gold medalist in amateur wrestling and would have none of it. Technically, KFabe died in professional wrestling in 1989 when Vince McMahon, the owner of the then-WWF, testified before the New Jersey State Legislature that wrestling was scripted and the matches predetermined. This was done in order to avoid being taxed and regulated like a real sport.

Today in professional wrestling, Kfabe is pretty much dead. The WWE hosts our own documentaries where wrestlers talk out of character and will often break KFabe within their own shows. However, as KFabe has died in professional wrestling, it seemingly has taken off in other parts of our culture. One of the best historical examples would be Muhammad Ali. Yes, that Muhammad Ali. To be sure, all of his boxing matches were real. and he was one of the greatest boxers in history. However, the persona he created

of the arrogant, loud, rhyming fighter was total K-fabe. He recalled in a 1969 Associated Press interview about a chance encounter with professional wrestler Gorgeous George in 1961 in Las Vegas. He said, quote, I got it from seeing Gorgeous George wrestle

in Las Vegas. I saw his aides spraying deodorant in the opponent's corner to contain the smell. I also saw 13,000 full seats. I talked with Gorgeous for about five minutes after the match and started being a big mouth and a bragger. He told me people would come to see me get beat, others would come to see me win. I'd get him coming and going. End quote. Ali began creating poems about how pretty he was and how ugly his opponents were. His interviews

with sportscasters like Howard Kossel were legendary. Gorgeous George's prediction was absolutely true. Love him or hate him, you couldn't ignore Muhammad Ali. K Fabe is still alive in fighting today. Recently, MMA star Connor McGregor and boxer Floyd Maybweather held a boxing match. They flew around the country promoting their match where they would talk trash and insult each other. Secretly, however, the two were flying on the same jet between venues and had become really good friends. Both fighters were paid handsomely from their promotion. Mayweather earned $275 million, and McGregor got approximately $85 million. It was the largest single purse for either fighter.

With the rise of the internet, KFAB has gone well beyond combat sports. Reality TV has nothing to do with reality. While it isn't scripted per se, everything is designed to tell a predetermined story without letting the audience know that it's fake. In the course of my travels, I've been able to meet several people who have appeared on reality TV shows,

and they all tell a similar story. The producers edit the program to make people appear in a certain light. If someone has chosen to be the villain, then everything will be edited around making that person look that way. Survival shows with Bear Grills are K-Fabe, There are countless reports from people who live near the filming areas which report that he stays in hotels at night, not out in the woods. Storage wars will often cede valuable items in the storage lockers to make the show more interesting.

It's all K-Fabe. Author Joe Piazza in her book Celebrity Inc. noted that many celebrities who are constantly in gossip media are there on purpose. Many of the feuds, fights, and controversies which follow them are all manufactured so they can stay in the public eye. This has bled over into online influencers. They will take photos to make it appear that they live a glamorous life, when in reality the photos may take an hour to set up, and their real life is anything but. I was on a trip to Sri Lanka once and was hiking in the mountains.

One woman in our group was an influencer. While the rest of us were in hiking gear, she had on an evening gown and heels to climb a mountain. K-fabe. Even politics has adopted K-Fabe. Many politicians will support positions publicly which they don't believe in in private, just to create a public persona that people will vote for. On the old CNN show Crossfire, the format was that someone from the left and someone from the right would argue about some issue every night.

Of course, politics doesn't easily and cleanly split between two sides and every single issue, so the hosts of the show admitted after it went off the air that they would often argue for or against issues that they personally didn't support just so the show was entertaining. K-Faid. The best example is probably former professional wrestler and governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, who said that politics was a lot like professional wrestling. Politicians, quote, pretend to hate each other in public, then go out to dinner together, unquote. Finally, I'd like to end with the thoughts of mathematician and venture capitalist Eric Weinstein. When he was asked what the single scientific concept with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding,

he answered, and I quote, The sophisticated scientific concept with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academia, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling. If we were to take selection more seriously with humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist, and it now supports an intricate multi-billion-dollar business empire of pure Hocum.

It is known to wrestling insiders as KFabe. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla. Special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Please remember to leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. Even a simple review can really help the show get discovered in the sea of other podcasts that are out there.