As for Trump — whose campaign theatrics feel like a one-man show, and whose history as a registered Democrat can make his contorted appeals to the far right seem like put-ons — well, not for nothing is there a conspiratorial segment insisting that his candidacy is a winking performance, which will eventually end with the admission that he may have laid it on a little thick.

It’s only recently that pro wrestling itself was willing to take that sort of step, to acknowledge its own artifice. The very idea of a wrestler “breaking character” is still relatively novel. Barely 30 years ago, the ABC anchor John Stossel asked the wrestler David Schultz, known as “Dr. D,” if what he did was fake, and had his ears boxed for the suggestion. The necessity of maintaining character even extended out of the ring: Good guys and bad guys were often asked not to fraternize in public, lest a fan wonder why sworn enemies were sharing a beer. There are stories of wrestlers who hesitated to wise up their spouses and children, even if that meant faking injuries around the house.

Over time, though, the mystery wore off. In 1989, officials for the World Wrestling Federation testified before the New Jersey Senate that wrestling was only “entertainment,” in order to avoid regulations that applied to legitimate athletic contests. Wrestlers began taking roles in scripted television shows and movies and wrote autobiographies that readily disclosed the secrets of the business. Today, the WWE produces its own documentary programming explaining how a wrestling show is put together: how the characters are molded into heroes and villains, how they train to make the action look real but not too real. (In wrestling, it’s considered a cardinal sin to genuinely hurt your opponent, thereby limiting their ability to work.) The WWE clearly no longer cares about ensuring that wrestling seems literally real; anyone past puberty who forgets that they’re watching scripted entertainment is referred to as a “mark.”

What the WWE does care about is keeping control of the way people experience “wrestling” — preferably not as the disreputable carny spectacle it once was, but as a family-friendly, 21st-century entertainment. When recapping wrestling history, it can completely elide the messier incidents: the sex scandals, shady deaths, neglected injuries, drug abuse and more. The audience, meanwhile, knows what the WWE cares about, giving it enough knowledge of wrestling’s inner workings to analyze each narrative not just through its in-world logic (“this guy will win the championship because he seems more driven”) but by considering external forces (“this guy will win the championship because he is well-spoken enough to represent the company when he inevitably shows up on ‘Today’”). Parsing both those layers — the behavior and the meta-behavior, the story told and the story of why it’s being told that way — can be an entertainment in its own right, and speculating on creative decisions has long been a fascination for wrestling fans.

This is how a lot of fields work these days. The audiences and the creators labor alongside each other, building from both ends, to conceive a universe with its own logic: invented worlds that, however false they may be, nevertheless feel good and right and amusing to untangle. Consider the many ways of listening to the song “Sorry,” from Lemonade, in which Beyoncé takes shots at an unnamed woman referred to as “Becky with the good hair”: a person we’re led to believe is having a relationship with the singer’s husband. You can theorize about the real-world identity of “Becky with the good hair,” as the internet did. You can consider the context of the phrase (why “Becky”? why “good hair”?), as the internet did. You can think about why Beyoncé decided to make art suggesting that her real-life husband cheated on her. All of this will be more time-consuming, and thus be interpreted as more meaningful, than if she had said outright, “He did it.” (Or if we said, “It’s just a song.”)