Everything I know about WWE comes from a passing fascination with action figures around age seven. However, the WWE is broadcasting pay-per-views (PPVs) to a million households a week. The WWE’s revenue in 2014 was $542 million. Websites are hiring journalists whose sole purpose is to cover the WWE. What is happening?
Nerds. David Shoemaker pointed this out in September. Open nerd-hood has become acceptable across the board; there are proud Star Wars fans, comic book fans, and WWE fans too. The overblown masculinity of the WWE has reached such a peak that fandom can be interpreted as a cultured acknowledgment of absurdity. Wrestling lays in a curious intersection between sport and performance art which results in a product that entertains on multiple levels. Wrestlers sweat, sustain injuries,
and train. It is not real, but it is a sport nonetheless. It is also art, but it is not high-art. The trope of having writing so absurdly unbelievable that the absurdity becomes the foci has been done to death. It is not surprise that Andy Kaufman worked with wrestling organizations for years.
It is not necessarily wrong to enjoy wrestling ironically, or appreciate it as an art-form, or even to watch people pretend to hit each other with hammers, and the public seems to have realized this. “But it’s fake” isn’t a knock against the WWE anymore because the WWE has replied with “We know, but that’s not the point.”
Besides, as Shoemaker points out, wrestling-dramas are nothing new. “The ancient antecedent for professional wrestling is not Greco-Roman wrestling. It’s Greek theater with gigantic wooden masks so you can see the frown from 50 rows back.” Maybe we are just returning to our roots.