While both are performances of a kind, it might seem as if the storytelling and gags of stand-up comedy are a world apart from the simulated combat sport of pro wrestling. But three men who’ve worked in both worlds tell FSM the two professions have more in common than you think.
Danny Garnell is a former professional wrestler who has embarked on a stand-up career in spectacular fashion, winning the prestigious national ‘So You Think You’re Funny’ competition this year. Jim Smallman recently took an indefinite break from stand-up to concentrate full-time on running PROGRESS Wrestling, a promotion conceived during downtime at the Edinburgh Festival. And Chris Brooker straddles both fields, mixing professional comedy and compering work with running the Futureshock Wrestling promotion.
Garnell credits his wrestling experience for making his move into comedy easier. “The most useful thing is the thick skin that you develop working as a wrestler because comedy’s subjective and if you’re thin-skinned and read reviews or even the comments other comics might make to you about your material, stuff like that, the thick skin helps you deal with it and understand that these things are just opinions.
“Being in front of a crowd has also helped. I started wrestling at Hammerlock when I was 14 so I’ve been used to that for a long time. At some of the comedy gigs at the club level a crowd of 300 or 400 is considered a very good night, a very big crowd, whereas in wrestling, especially now, that’s kind of the norm. Being the centre of attention is quite easy — a lot of new comics when I was doing a lot of open mics, if there was a crowd of 20 they would get quite nervous because of it and I never really had to overcome that.”
Smallman says his comedy experience has helped both he and his roster. “I use things that I learned from comedy to help wrestlers with promos all the time. One great tip I learned early on was about controlling an audience. Everyone’s natural instinct is to go louder and shout over the top of a rowdy crowd, when in reality it actually works better to slow down and speak really quietly. That way the audience has to sit forward and actually listen to everything you say, and they’re immediately more aware of any noise they may be making.”
In both forms of entertainment, structuring a show with multiple acts is key, says Smallman. “Wrestling doesn’t work if you just throw ten matches onto a card with no rhyme or reason, and neither does comedy if you put a show together without a good MC, a well-defined and excellent headliner, an opener who can get the crowd into things and so on. Of course a main difference is comedy nights only tend to have 3 or 4 acts, while wrestling shows have a lot more matches so everyone has to work harder to keep the crowd invested in it.
Smallman also notes comedians and wrestlers both want to be the centre of attention. “The big difference is that a wrestler still has to be part of a locker room and part of a team to ensure his opponent is OK. Outside of being an MC, comedy can be a selfish profession where many people are trying to climb the ladder and aren’t too fussed about those around them.”
However, Garnell prefers that degree of individuality. “Especially towards the end of my wrestling career I felt oftentimes I was letting my opponent down when I had physical limitations on what I could do and I wasn’t so hot at remembering all the spots. With comedy, it’s literally just me and my routine and if I let anyone down, I’m only letting myself down. I find there’s a lot less pressure because I’ve only got myself to rely on and myself to worry about.”
That solitary element did mean a change in protocol, however. “With comedy if you’re on at 9pm, they might expect you to turn up at quarter to nine whereas with wrestling if you’re booked on a show, you’re pretty much there all of the day. It’s a lot less of your time taken up. When your spot’s done, you’re not expected to stay in comedy whereas in wrestling there’s often something else to do like a rumble at the end or a meet and greet, even taking the ring down at times.
“I’ve always tried to be super polite at [comedy] shows as you are in the wrestling environment: go round and shake everyone’s hand when you arrive, stay till the end. It wasn’t until I was a few months into the comedy that I realised that it’s nice to be polite but it’s not expected or frowned upon if you go [early] because most comics are doubling or trebling up on gigs in a night, so if you’re on first somewhere you may be going on in the middle somewhere else and at the end at another club so it’s a necessity that you can’t hang around till the end, which I found really weird at first.
When it comes to the performance itself, wrestling and stand-up have some surprising parallels, as Brooker explains. “The most important thing about being on stage and standup is having an audience that believes in you and has faith and wants to hear from you, and that’s much more important than the actual jokes that you tell. I see so many comedians whose writing is magnificent and they have some clever, intricate material but they don’t know how to present it. Audiences haven’t got behind them.
“It’s exactly the same with wrestling where instead of your material and your jokes, it’s your moves. You can be the greatest athletes in the world, but unless you find a way to connect with the people that are watching you, you’re never going to get them invested in you.
“If your ]stand-up] material is absolutely magnificent, then people will overlook your delivery to a point. It’s the same with wrestling: if your actual wrestling is incredible, people will overlook the delivery to a point. There’ll come a stage where you can only get so far with it and that’s why the most successful, most mainstream famous performers in both fields aren’t necessarily the best writers or the best athletes. They’re the ones who are best able to form that bond with their audience. “
In both wrestling and comedy, performances often involve a persona that can fall along a broad spectrum of reality, as Smallman explains. “I think the best comedians are those people who are, like wrestlers, just themselves on stage but turned up to 11. I’m nowhere near as confident and loud offstage as I am on it, but people presume you are. It’s the same when people meet wrestlers. It’s super easy to keep the two sides of the personality apart though; it’s hard to be onstage me unless I have a microphone in my hand and a spotlight on me. Most wrestlers are equally as chilled out offstage as they are hyped up when they’re in the ring.”
Garnell notes that in comedy, personas vary greatly. “Some of the stand-ups that I’ve met do a complete character. They’ll arrive at the venue suited and booted, ‘Hello, my name’s John Smith’, and then their character will be something completely zany and wacky, so there’s no link between the real person and the character, it’s purely a creation made for comedy. There are other acts where you speak to them afterwards and there is no real line, there’s no difference.
“A lot more so than in wrestling, comedians are relying on their own character, who they genuinely are, their own experiences, and they’re just enhancing those experiences for the jokes and the crowd. In wrestling the line is a lot more blurred, especially nowadays you often don’t know what the difference is.
Brooker points out that developing a character is a similar process in both types of performance. “With both standups and wrestlers, we’re not actors, we’re not necessarily going out there being given a script and a character that someone else has devised. We spend years grinding away in promoting our own persona, whether that’s me being me or whether it’s someone else who has a character who is very different to themselves, someone like “Al Murray, Pub Landlord”.
“We all start off sort of stealing bits from people because we don’t really know what we’re doing yet. So wrestlers steal this move or these attributes or this taunt. As a comic, you’re trying to be like the guys that inspire you. So you’ll have a bit of Billy Connolly in my case, a bit of Jasper Carrot, the other acts that make you laugh. Eventually you’re going to develop your own style; you’ll find your own voice and your own way of doing things.”
When it comes to the comedy performance itself, Brooker says the artifice can be even more effective than in wrestling. “I think kayfabe lives in comedy more [than wrestling] in 2018. The idea with comedy is that you assume that everyone knows it’s just the illusion of someone stood there going ‘These are things that occur to me off the top of my head right now,’ but not everyone does. Every comedy performer will have a story where someone will come up to them having seen them more than once and seen them use the same stuff, and just decided that we’re cheating them by not turning up and just making up every word we say in front of them straight away. So there are folks who still… it’s still real for them!
“I suppose that’s the skill: instead of creating the illusion of competition, we’re creating the illusion of this guy who’s either your mate or a bit of a weirdo or a character who just stands up and goes, ‘Here’s what happened to me on the way to the gig today.’ Whereas most folks in wrestling kind of kind of know it’s not the case, but our job is to make you go ‘I’m not going to think about that for 20 minutes.’ With a good comic, like a good wrestler, you’ll know that what they’re [doing] isn’t necessarily true, but you’re willing to forget it for the time that they’re entertaining.”
As with wrestling, comedy is as much about when you do something as what you do, a phenomenon Garnell has certainly experienced. “I’ve got a few jokes in my routine where I take the audience down so the room almost goes silent, which is what I want because people think the joke is going to go one way and I can take it in a completely different direction. The reaction because of that misdirection is much better. That’s straight out of the wrestling playbook, isn’t it?”
Brooker points out that comedy even has wrestling parallels through it’s different approaches to structuring a performance. “You’re lucky in that you’ve got more room to play with than in wrestling where everything kind of has to end up with a fight, so there’s always going to be an element of ‘this has to be believable.’ When you look at a one-liner comic like Gary Delaney, it’s a bit like a wrestler who’s very good technically and knows all the moves, so starts out just thinking ‘these are the moves I know and we’ll do them in that order.’
“Gary writes some amazing one-liners, but to look at him now compared to when he started, there is a change in his delivery. He now knows that certain jokes need to be delivered in a certain way, certain jokes going in certain place. There’s certain gags that are maybe a bit darker that you wouldn’t necessarily do straightaway, that you have to bring people on board, convince them that you’re good and then hit them with it later. It’s much like you’ll see a more athletic wrestler evolve and get better: ‘Right. I can’t necessarily start with this [move]. I can do that later once they believe in this, this and this.’”
As much as both types of performance benefit from structure, there’s also a great creative freedom in working before a live crowd, as Brooker elaborates. “Comedy is the most simple form of entertainment in the world. It’s just you and your audience and as long as you can make them laugh, it doesn’t really necessarily matter how you do it. And again with live wrestling, [there’s the tension that] things can go wrong. It’s a circus thing where you’re wobbling every so often. That gives it a bit more excitement.
“I’ve always very much enjoyed coming off script playing with what’s in the room, improvising with what’s around me because that way you can create moments that you in the audience know will only ever happened there. And especially with comedy-literate audiences, much like [smart] wrestling crowds, they kind of understand what you’re doing and they’ll come with you and they’ll have fun with you and they’ll enjoy the ride.”
One big difference between the two artforms is managing a crowd’s emotions. In wrestling the swings between anger and joy can be spread out across the evening to create an overall ride. But while some comedians enjoy provoking or even enraging an audience, Garnell points out that stand-up can’t have the equivalent of a heel victory. “If I’m on just before someone who’s brand new, being quite new myself, the last thing I want to do is make the crowd hostile, so as soon as that next act comes on they’re going to have an uphill battle. So it’s nice to try and leave on a big laugh, everyone feeling good and when the next act comes up everyone’s open and ready for more of the same.”
Whether more wrestlers could follow Garnell’s lead is a debatable point. Brooker points out that “There’s a gallows humor to pro wrestling, especially in the locker room, and if you spend any amount of time around the veterans, it can be quite near the knuckle and can occasionally be quite bleak.” Meanwhile Garnell himself notes that it could require a change of persona as “The funniest guys in wrestling play the meanest characters, so I don’t know how they would transfer over.”
Brooker points to a particular mix of wrestling traits that would make the move easier. “Wrestlers have had years of work where they’ve had to go out, get on the microphone and grab an audience’s attention straight away when they’re not necessarily listening. That’s a set of skills that’s immediately transferable.
“If you take someone like Mad Man Manson or Damon Leigh or anyone that’s noted as being a great comedy wrestler, they have a better sense of timing, that sense of physicality where they’ve spent years feeling out what a crowd wants (whether they realize it or not) and learning to time it to make the most of these moments. Those are skills and attributes that I think would transfer very well to a stage.”
And Brooker notes that when it comes to influences, it’s very much a two-way street. “Working with William Regal taught me an awful lot about performance in a way that I didn’t necessarily consider from a comedian’s point of view. The way he talks about selling a wrestling performance and selling his promos was something that I started to take on board and use when I’m doing standup. So my set has changed over the five or six years I’ve known him and I’ve been talking to him.
“I’ve started to look at pro wrestling and incorporate elements of [that] performance into what I do, in terms of using my presence on stage, how I pose, how I take my time in delivering certain bits of material, how I would interact with hecklers, for example. Which is ironic because a lot of what Mr Regal does, he took from watching comedians in Blackpool when he was a younger man working on the doors of all these different clubs. So it feels very much like it going full circle with [comedy and wrestling] recycling and borrowing heavily from another.”
And if nothing else, comedians and wrestlers will always have common ground when it comes to their travelling lifestyle according to Brooker. “I think having a favourite motorway service station is a good starting point. I think as soon as you get to the point where you realise where you’d rather stop for a brew at two in the morning, wrestlers and comedians bond over that immediately!”
