(This is the first of the mcarp essays, written more than 10 years ago by Michael Carpenter, a broadcast journalism refugee who found the light… republished with permission.)
Breaking Kayfabe
I learned an interesting word on the Internet a couple of years ago:Â kayfabe.
It’s a carney term, transplanted in later years to professional wrestling. It means to always keep up the illusion, and never allow a moment’s candor to reveal it’s all an act.
Pro wrestlers who’ve been out of the business for years will still swear it was all real: the grudges, the death cage matches, the ‘loser leaves town’ matches. Until WWF owner Vince McMahon decided to blow kayfabe all to hell, rare was the pro wrestler who would admit anything about the business was less than completely genuine.
(An aside: what the hell was John Stossel thinking when he confronted pro wrestler ‘Dr. D’ Schulz and asked him to admit he was a fake? What did Stossel think the guy would do — scuff his toe on the floor and say, “Aw, gawrsh, Mister Stossel. Ya got me red-handed”? Or maybe he would blame his producer.
Of course the guy beat the crap out of him. I would’ve probably done the same thing.)
McMahon may be willing to blow his own cover, but television news still sticks to its illusions. Sometimes, it’s forgotten they are illusions. I’ve known news directors who genuinely believed their anchors were covering a half-dozen stories a week, just because they saw promos saying they did — even though they hadn’t seen the anchors themselves set foot out of the newsroom in six or seven years.
As a friend of mine, still in the business, once said: “They lie to the viewers, they lie to us, they lie to each other, they lie to themselves. And they’ve been lying for so long, they’ve forgotten what the truth was to start with.”
These essays and anecdotes are a form of ‘breaking kayfabe.’ Those of you currently, or formerly, in the business will see little or nothing that surprises you. As for the rest of you, if it’s too tough to bear, maybe there’s a Seinfeld rerun on somewhere.
Mike Carpenter
Oklahoma City, November 2000
Ike,
So glad you are republishing these! I look forward to reading them. I hope others will discover them too! The “illusions” are the main reason I left the business… But as “Uncle Shel” would say, “We’ve got some flax-golden tales to spin… Come in! Come in!”