Professional wrestling is a b**tard performance art form that simulates the drama of a classic sporting contest, played out by outlandishly named men and women in skimpy spandex with superhero names and personae. Given this, one can see how it can attract some strange people, both in the crowd and in the ring. Now, a professional wrestling storyline or character often comes from taking ordinary day-to-day experience and exaggerating or amplifying it for the grand stage of the squared circle. Austin vs. Mr. McMahon is your classic blue collar underdog taking on The (Mc)Man just a little ramped up. Lesnar beating the Streak is the young lion versus the old, grizzled head of the pride its practically a nature documentary with suplexes. David Attenborough should have been on play-by-play. But when performers and audience are often starting out from a preposterous and unconventional position, and have decades of equally preposterous and unconventional novels, films and comic books to draw upon, the results can often be well, theres nothing quite so weird and out-there as a freak in pro wrestling. Kane is a gigantic, sometimes masked, pyromaniac serial killer from Rob Zombies wet dreams who, despite this persona, feels the need to act out all of his issues by beating up other sweaty men on television and on tour: Id say he needs a hug, but thats been tried and it didnt end well. Bray Wyatt is a backwoods cult leader who calls himself The Eater Of Worlds but who pursues his fearsome, incomprehensible agenda by engaging in twenty minute wrestling matches somewhere in the upper mid card. None of this makes sense and some of it makes less sense even than that. Behold: the eleven weirdest freaks in wrestling, the weirdest and freakiest show on earth.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
