And I'm linking now to an interview with Rowdy Roddy Piper, the famed villain of pro wrestling. I once produced a TV show with Roddy and a couple of other wrestlers and I found him to be pretty darned smart and a very good showman. The measure of the latter is that he became a superstar in that profession without being seven feet tall and pumped up on steroids. He did it through personality and a good sense of improvisation and knowing how to work the audience.
We had one great sitcom moment together. We were having lunch at the old Hamptons Restaurant on Highland — the one I was later a partner in but this was before that. The guy at the table behind Roddy kept moving his chair around and bumping into Roddy's chair. Roddy asked him politely to stop doing that. The guy kept doing it so Roddy asked him again…still polite but a bit less so. Finally, Roddy asked the waiter to tell the man to either stop bumping into him or move to another table.
The other diner got angry at Roddy (not yet realizing who it was) and turned to him and barked, "What's your problem, fella?" Roddy turned and got up and said in a Clint Eastwood reading, "My problem is that you keep bumping my chair." The other diner for some reason was itching to make this Roddy's fault and to demand an apology. He got up too…and from the body language, it looked for about two seconds like someone was going to take a swing at someone.
But then, and I wish I had a photo of it, the other guy suddenly realized he was messing with Rowdy Roddy Piper, the guy who liked to take a folded-up metal folding chair and bash his ring opponents into unconsciousness with it. The change in facial expression was acute and hilarious. He promptly apologized to "Mr. Piper" (addressing him like that) and moved his chair around to the other side of the table so he was nowhere near Roddy.
And Roddy whispered to me, "See? The reputation does me some good."
I was never a huge fan of wrestling but I was enough of one to do that show…and I had and have enough interest in pure show business to appreciate that part of it. I have this theory that it works because deep down, people know it's rigged. That frees them up to enjoy the violent aspect because they can tell themselves that no one's really getting hurt. (Not always true, by the way.) More important is that there's almost always a payoff. In sports or politics, your side can lose. You can invest an awful lot of emotion in cheering for your team or candidate and suffer a crushing disappointment. But with wrestling, if you root for the Good Guy and hiss the Bad Guy (the role Roddy used to play), you know that eventually, you'll get satisfaction. It may not come this Wrestlemania or the next but eventually, the Bad Guy will get his ass kicked. There aren't many other places in life where that happens quite so reliably.
Roddy had many stories about physical abuse and the scars to prove them. I came to believe that anyone who can do that for a living probably deserves about ten times what he's paid. And if they do it well, they probably ought to be, like Roddy became, a movie star.