Guest post by Alex Rudolph

Professional wrestling doesn’t appeal to me, but I always wanted it to. Elementary school classmates would come to me in my family’s pre-cable TV days with stories about the strongest-looking people in the world locking themselves in cages and beating each other with whatever metal junk the presumably barely-there janitor had left under the ring. It sounded enthralling.

And then eventually we got TNT and USA and all the other basic cable channels that showed Bloodsport and Die Hard with nonsense words dubbed over the swears and I’d watch pieces of WCW, TNA and what was then known as the WWF, and everything was so much normal than my friends had built it up to be. There were a couple guys in make-up, but even the most flamboyant of that crowd was barely indistinguishable from the clean-faced, greasy mullet guy in Army camo pants he was fighting against. The one person who lived up to the comic book extravagance I’d heard about was The Undertaker, an undead monster whose manager, given the pun name “Paul Bearer” my vocabulary wasn’t big enough to grapple with until years later, paced the sidelines, carrying ‘Taker’s soul in an urn. When he won a match, Undertaker carried the defeated party out in a body bag.

I’m sure there were other people who would have done for me what Undertaker did, which is to say, other people who took being a professional wrestler as a chance to be a totally different person from a totally different universe, but I didn’t watch enough to see them (there were a couple fighters, for example, who dressed up as characters from The Road Warrior who I would have been too young to ‘get’ but would have been crazy about nonetheless). When I played a game like Street Fighter, my chosen avatars were the green lightning beasts from Brazil and the disciplined Indian men who studied so much they discovered a way to stretch their limbs to triple-length. Spider-Man and Silver Surfer were my favorite comic book heroes because they had the weirdest villains. I wanted my action entertainment to look like Power Rangers. I needed wrestling to be more of a cartoon than it was willing to be.

Since moving to Philadelphia last April, my partner and I have become obsessed with Chikara, a local wrestling league that has sucked us in despite my failed attempts to find professional wrestling interesting and her complete indifference to it. Chikara’s roster includes an old-timey baseball player, a Norse warrior who gets power from onions, a collection of ants (Worker, Soldier, Fire…), a yacht rocker and South American ice cream brothers (named “Los Ice Creams,” of course) who fight for the honor of a princess. And that princess, Kimberlee, is Chikara’s reigning champion, defending her 2015 title against a league that supports and loves her. WWE’s women are known as divas, their matches little more than pillow fights, their personas little more than “that guy’s girlfriend”—Princess Kimberlee and the women of Chikara regularly wipe the floor with the male competition. Heidi Lovelace, one of the more popular fighters in the league, is a personal favorite to watch due to her agility; a big lug will pick her up with every intention of slamming her back down, and she’ll climb up his back and put him in a hold you’d need to watch frame-by-frame to follow. The events are presided over by referees who can riff but usually play the straight man and hosts like this year’s Vlad Radinov, the Party Tsar. The league was founded by Mike Quackenbush, who once wrestled in Chikara but had to bow out due to real-world injuries and now walks around with what I think is an in-character cane and limp (known in wrestling as a “work”), though nobody on the Internet seems to know if he’s actually deeply hurt or deeply committed to his work.

Chikara reminds me of the legendary Upright Citizens Brigade improv theater more than it does anything else. I was obsessed with the UCB in high school, and when our family took a vacation to New York City, I made it clear that the one thing I really wanted to do while we were in town was visit the theater for a night. My dad brought my sister and me to a little black box room where the intimacy, the lack of a physical barrier between comedian and audience member (though the intellectual barrier was vast) made me feel like I was sincerely a part of something happening live that I would spend weeks wishing I could see again but which I knew was at least half magical because what I was experiencing was live and unpredictable.

Unlike a UCB show, I can watch Chikara as many times as I want, via the company’s streaming service or through a partner site that releases Blu-Ray and DVD copies of every match. The emotions hit harder live, but that hasn’t stopped me from buying DVDs of the most interesting shows I’ve had the privilege to see in person. I like knowing I have a record of the time the crowd cheered for just one more fight, like any encore could do justice to the four-person tag team match we had just watched, full of biblical betrayal and redemption that had been building up for months, but Chikara obliged by sending out a relatively new guy named Chuck Taylor, who sang us all an R&B jam while two decked out women, whose couture costumes had been on all night, but whose significance wasn’t revealed until that moment, cheered him on and grooved from the sidelines. “Sweet Chuck T!” the audience chanted. And then a couple people yelled out that they wanted to see him fight, and Chuck T obliged, laying out a new challenger in a couple minutes.

Back to UCB for a second—in addition to being a show space, the Upright Citizens Brigade theaters host classes where sketch and improv heavyweights teach newcomers how to perform, making the whole enterprise that much more of a community staple. Chikara serves the same purpose, to the point that its home base, a slim building in an alley otherwise full of body shops, is called The Wrestling Factory. The classes are free to start and advertise that they’ll help you learn moves, sure, but, just as importantly, develop your character’s personality and signature style. And I, whose bones would turn to powder if a Chikara wrestler so much as flicked my ear and who will, at 27, wait an hour for the next bus rather than run after the one that just passed and risk melting in a puddle of sweat and a fit of wheezy coughs, am completely enamored with the idea of Chikara as a community that anybody can join, even if I am not part of the higher level of that community.

That level of inclusivity extends to everybody—kids 12 and under are allowed in free and hosts always make it clear that Chikara is a “family friendly wrestling show.” They take that tag seriously, too: one wrestler was kicked out of the league for two years for dropping explicit language on stage. I’ve been to the Mummers Parade, so yes, I know how quickly a large group of drinking Philadelphians can become a problem. Chikara is dry, its chants clean, and yet everybody involved has somehow found a way to have fun. It doesn’t feel censored or like a toned down version of what could be if only those second graders in the front row weren’t here turning our Friday night into a Tuesday morning. This is, after all, still a large gathering of people watching a small gathering of people slap each other, and both gatherings are pretty psyched about that.

When I’ve described Chikara to friends, I’ve underlined the fact that it isn’t a joke. The funny parts of Chikara are intentionally funny, and nobody in the crowd is stifling laughter as a man dressed as a cross between a frog and Marvel’s Thor swings a hammer over his head as he enters the arena to take on one of the company’s snake people. The audience isn’t looking for any irony, because you don’t need irony to find the awe in a man doing backflips into another man so that he can position himself to throw the other guy into the crowd. And Chuck Taylor singing like Al Green is as much a part of the show as Chuck Taylor body slamming somebody. Every part of Chikara is beautifully thought out, but it’s all in service of triggering the impulse that makes you look at your friends and yell “oh my god, how did that even just happen?”

You can find wrestling boring and still love Chikara. You can be annoyed at professional wrestling’s sexism, its roid rage pre-fight promos, the grittiness rooted in a time when it wouldn’t be hilarious to watch a grown man work a runway to the ring to a remix of “Bawitdaba,” the sense that the fighters think they’re fooling you when they stomp the space five inches to the right of their opponent and the announcers scream “he’s gonna feel that in the morning!” These are things inherent to companies like WWE, but not to wrestling. Chikara cuts everything insubstantial away from the sport, acknowledges that you didn’t pay just to watch athletes compete, and sends two comic book characters to beat each other up for the honor of ruling the only stage that matters.

This is my call to action: If you live in Pennsylvania you are usually, at most, thirty days away from a nearby Chikara match, and you owe it to the part of your brain that convinces the other parts to just have fun to show up and catch yourself cheering as id incarnate smashes id incarnate to the rhythms of an epic punk masterpiece only the sincere can hear.