This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

When I began to write this column, my editors promised that I could write one piece about pro wrestling podcasts. [Recollections may differ — Ed.] Quiet, you.

As I drift towards my mid-thirties, I’m too old to watch a lot of professional wrestling. I’m too old to watch a lot of TV in general — too old and yet too young. We have an odd relationship with television in our thirties, because we are sensitive to the passing of time yet we have not come to terms with it.

Podcasts, though? If I’m listening to a podcast, I can pretend to do something more productive as I do it — wander to the corner shop for the third time in the day, or move a cup between different random places, or look for something I don’t need to find.

Somehow, professional wrestling podcasts have become almost as popular as wrestling itself. Veteran performers and executives such as Jim Cornette, Eric Bischoff and Bruce Prithard dissect the product and tell stories of their days in the rougher and crazier years of the industry.

Like film buffs and music nerds, pro wrestling obsessives find meaningful entertainment in being aggravated. We love bad professional wrestling almost as much as we love good professional wrestling, because it gives us the chance to complain. As anyone interested in politics and media will know, complaining is a form of entertainment in itself. It’s cathartic and it makes us feel superior.

No complaints are more eloquent, florid and vindictive than those that flood out of Jim Cornette’s Drive-Thru and The Jim Cornette Experience, where the legendary Louisvillian manager and booker Jim Cornette spray bile over modern wrestlers and wrestling executives.

So pure is Cornette’s hatred for people he considers to be disrespecting “the business” that one suspects that he would have more time for Kim Jong Un than for someone who failed to “sell” a simulated injury in the ring. Say what you like about Saif al-Adel, the de facto boss of al-Qaeda, but has he ever made a joke out of the wrestling business? I rest my case.

Yet in sterile times it is good to hear someone who really, really cares about something. He is also very, very funny.

But I listen to pro wrestling podcasts for the stories. Professional wrestling has always been an eccentric industry, from its mysterious carnival origins, to the Wild West of the territory system, to the bombastic brutality of the corporate juggernaut World Wrestling Entertainment (née the World Wrestling Federation). People who have spent decades working in the business have all kinds of stories — and some of them are morally and legally permissible to tell.

I love to hear Jim Cornette talk about the back-breaking schedules and deranged characters of the territory days, or Eric Bischoff of 83 Weeks talk about the heroic incompetence of the briefly world-beating but ultimately self-destructive company World Championship Wrestling, or Bruce Prichard of Something to Wrestle talk about the antics of the former WWE boss, and alleged sex criminal, Vince McMahon, who would call him at three in the morning and bark, “What are you doing, pal?”

These men have limitless anecdotes: funny, disturbing and very human. I often think that pro wrestling — both the product and what goes into it — represents human life taken to absurd extremes.

It has a lot to teach about psychology, and business, and politics. Yet there is something odd about listening to these podcasts. Consuming entertainment can be an escape from real life. What does that make consuming entertainment about making entertainment? Something very meta.

Our love for documentaries, and commentaries, and “behind the scenes” insights is symptomatic of a desire for vicarious sensation. It is also symptomatic of a desire to be amongst insiders. We don’t want to see ourselves as passive and naive consumers of media (or what pro wrestling insiders would call “marks”). We want to be people with the inside scoop (known in the business as “smart marks”).

There is nothing essentially wrong with this. But it can make our consumption of entertainment too dry and analytical, as our self-imposed distance precludes immersion in its creative world. Recall the comic book nerd from The Simpsons who demands that heads roll over a trivial continuity mistake.

It can also make us think that we are smarter than we are, if we forget that the people offering “behind the scenes” insights have their own biases and blind spots. After years of doing his Something to Wrestle podcast, Bruce Prichard was rehired by the WWE. You can bet he wasn’t telling any tales that would have endangered that opportunity.

Still, I’ll keep listening to my wrestling podcasts. Where else can you hear about two colleagues brawling with a pair of scissors or a local businessman explaining in detail how to get a company off the ground with nothing more than a few dollars and a dream?

You need ambition to get ahead in pro wrestling. Without it, how could anybody tolerate driving for hour after hour just to get the crap kicked out of them? Perhaps I hope that just a hint of that ambition will rub off on me.