100% Agreed.

It wasn't until I watched Andy Kaufman do his thing that I turned an analytical eye to professional wrestling. It's like a fun house mirror, flipping and skewing it's already colorful audience to create something hilariously overblown and grotesque; and upside down.

Maybe, more aptly, it's a caricature of the society that created it, but instead of the caricature artist insisting on roller blades and dune buggies, he draws his medium in testosterone, sweat, and neon-clad-semi-nude men.

it's really a shame there's such a lack of serious criticism on the form, the only serious work on pro wrestling specifically that I've found worth reading is a relatively short essay by Barthes.

There's a book called "Steel Chair To The Head" that's a collection of academic essays on pro wrestling. One of the editors, Henry Jenkins, is at the Media Studies program at MIT and has written a bit on the topic, mostly in the context of fans and fandom (the guy is basically the godfather of academic research on fandom).

Lawler is far from the most professional pro wrestler of all time.

One time in science class I did a physics presentation about chair shots in pro-wresting. It was quite a crowd pleaser.

Beyond the Mat was a pretty interesting film, not perfect, but it had enough ambition to make it worth a watch.

Hooker - I didn't say he was the most professional Of All Time. I was just saying that he was on his A-game here. YEAH I HEARD HE DIED BUT I NEVER LIKED HIM ANYWAY AND Y'ALL KNOW THAT. ANYWAY ABOUT MY MATCH WITH LORD HUMONGOUS...

These days they'd have a live two-hour retrospective and Hart and Lawler would be bawling about how they really admired and respected him and etc.

fuck Roland Barthes. literary theorist week, anyone?