Kayfabe & Stand-Up Comedy

The Performer-Audience Agreement (Comedy Mindhacks #8)

I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, American Gladiator, and WWF wrestling. This was the pre-WWE days, what I would call the golden era of wrestling. Rowdy Roddy Piper. Hulk Hogan. Andre the Giant. Demolition. Macho Man Randy Savage. Hacksaw Jim Duggan. Sargent Slaughter. It was part circus, part soap opera, part bar fight with glitter and men in tights, knee-high boots, and makeup fighting over a belt. When wrestling came on, I was unmovable. I was glued to the screen watching what, to me, was like high art.

Once, I even got to go in person. It was a live event in Cincinnati, a double cage match. The only thing I remember from that night was Rick Flair getting his head stuck in the crevasse between two rings. I’m sure it was part of the plan. His feet were in the air as if he was doing some sort of headstand. I am not 100% sure, but I think he still won the match.

At some point, like most normal kids, I grew out of my pro wrestling phase. What has always amazed me about it, however, isn’t just the costumes or the elbow drops from the top rope, but the audience. Grown adults, men and women (or: men without women), who’ve stuck with it. They are all fully aware, I think, that everything’s scripted, yet they’re still screaming and cheering and booing like the wrestler’s pre-planned next move depends on it. They know it’s fake. They just don’t care. In fact, the wrestlers/performers and the audience members both agree to not care and to play along. I didn’t know there was a word for this until recently: kayfabe.

I had four comedy shows over the weekend and literally, mid-set, mid-joke, I realized: stand-up comedy runs on the same juice as kayfabe. In comedy, just like in wrestling, there’s a similar unspoken agreement: I’m going to tell y’all a story. It may be sorta true and sorta not. But it will be funny. And you’re going to laugh like it happened exactly that way. That’s our agreement. That’s our social contract. We all know it probably didn’t go down quite like that. But for the sake of the show, we don’t care.

I mentioned the old saying in another post: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story/joke.” That’s so on point here, too. Friday night I had 2 shows back-to-back. Same Saturday night. On Friday night, in the short window between my two shows, my wife called and said she had gotten a flat tire on the highway. I couldn’t leave to help her. She had no spare tire and so she had to call AAA and got a tow home. On Saturday night, in both of my sets, I told that story, but stretched it. And both times I told it, it worked. It got laughs. If I had just told the story as it actually happened, nobody would’ve laughed at all. But…kayfabe.

And that’s just it: in stand-up comedy you stretch a memory, embellish a story, polish the timing, exaggerate the tension, and then land the punchline like an elbow like Superfly Jimmy Snuka off the turnbuckle. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not deception but performance. It’s not lying but entertainment!

There’s another aspect to kayfabe that I find very interesting, especially in relation to stand-up: in wrestling, kayfabe means staying in character no matter what. The feud between wrestlers is fake-believe, but commitment to the performance is real. If you’re supposed to hate each other, you hate each other at the airport, in the parking lot, and at the Waffle House at 2am. Stand up’s no different. If I walk onstage with a point of view, for instance, the annoyed dad who’s just barely hanging on, I stay there. I live in that space. I don’t stop the joke halfway through and explain the nuance like a liberal politician on CNN. No, I commit.

And the best part is: when I commit, the audience commits with me. They’re in on it. They know it’s an act, but it feels real enough that they laugh anyway. They’re there to laugh and they’ll take whatever they can get. They’ve literally paid to laugh and, if they’re a good audience member, they’ll strive to get their money’s worth. That’s the beauty of it. I suppose, in a way, it’s not all that different from watching a movie. It’s “shared illusion” or “protected pretend” you might say, and it works because we all secretly need something a little made-up to help us feel something real.

I’ve had people come up after shows and ask, “Wait…did that really happen?” And, as I’ve shared before, I tend to either not answer that or just reply with, “Does it matter?” I mean, nobody goes up to a magician after a card trick and says, “Hey man, that was a great trick, but was the Queen of Hearts really in your sleeve the whole time?”

What matters is whether the bit worked. Whether the story/joke resulted in laughter. What matters is whether, for a second, you forgot the rent was due or your boss was awful or your kids were in trouble at school or your elderly dog was pissing in the house again. Stand-up comedy’s magic is its ability to throw us into a moment of relief and joy and absurdity and remind us that we need to laugh to get through all those things and more.

The older I get, the more I think all of us are doing some form of kayfabe pretty much on a daily basis. If you’ve ever been around church folk, you totally get it. Kayfabe everywhere. But it’s the case for non-church folk, too. We’re all performing. We’re all pretending. We’re all carrying pain and trying to wrap it in our personality or charm or sarcasm just to make today manageable. Stand up comedy just happens to be the place where we get to name it out loud and get paid to do it with a mic in our hand while dealing with Mr. Beer Breath in the front row.

So when I talk about my marriage, or parenting, or faith, or trauma, or small-town drama in this place or that, you better believe I’m shaping those stories. I’m editing. I’m exaggerating. I’m embellishing. I’m encouraging the Hulk Hogan who lives in my memory to body slam the boring details so we can get to the good stuff. That’s not lying. That’s kayfabe. And, as one of my old writing professors said, “God hates lying, but loves pretend.”

I would argue that sometimes the most honest and real and human thing you can do is pretend. You stay in character long enough to make people feel something real and remember their humanity. That’s what makes it cathartic. That’s also what makes it art. I believe with everything inside of me in the value of turning real pain into ridiculous bits. If it’s messed-up, it’s material! I believe in fake stories with true heart. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about whether the story happened exactly like that; it’s about whether we laughed together and left the show a little bit lighter than when we came in. So, while I grew out of wrestling long ago, I’m so glad I’ve grown in to stand-up comedy at this point in life.