/ˈkeɪfeɪb/
Kayfabe.
That's the name of the upcoming book, and it's a word that anyone who follows wrestling has likely encountered, but what is it, really? What does it mean, and where does it come from?
Lexico has the seemingly simple and concise definition; (in professional wrestling) the fact or convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic.
Which seems to just about cover it...while simultaneously not feeling quite right. Kayfabe is a muddled concept, that has become essential not only for understanding professional wrestling, but dishonesty and constructed realities of all kinds - breathless commentators in the United States, unable to comprehend the reality of a Donald Trump presidency that all the conventional wisdom of political punditry said would be impossible, looked to Trump's brief dalliances with professional wrestling to look for evidence that, rather than a likely inevitable consequence of decades of unfettered American capitalism and largely unchecked right-wing populism, was engaged in the kind of elaborate performance that, so the argument went, Trump had learned from professional wrestling. Suddenly, "Kayfabe" was the order of the day, a useful concept, a word that explained how Trump could seemingly construct alternative realities where he could lie with impunity and without fear of contradiction, and where every political gesture was an illusion. Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Personally, I doubt Donald Trump could so much as spell "kayfabe", let alone that he had any working knowledge of it - it's easy to recall a story recounted by retired WWE headliner-turned-executive Paul "Triple H" Levesque, that when WWE head honcho, and personal friend of Trump, Vince McMahon was involved in a dramatic show-closing limo explosion as a desperate ratings stunt on a 2007 episode of Monday Night RAW, Donald Trump picked up the phone and called McMahon's office, concerned for his safety. These do not read like the thoughts or deeds of a master manipulator with an innate grasp of the workings of Kayfabe.
Usage of "Kayfabe" may have seeped into the mainstream in the 21st Century, but where did it come from? Merriam-Webster claimed, in an online editorial as part of their "Words We're Watching" series on words not yet added to the dictionary, that wrestlers began using the term in the 1980s, and that it was "coined in the late 20th century". That isn't quite right - the word makes a smattering of appearances in print as far back as the mid-1930s, around the time of Marcus Griffin's explosive exposé Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce, though Griffin, while opening his book with an explanation of the Kayfabe-adjacent term "working", never actually used the K word himself.
What is clear from Fall Guys, though, is that much of the lexicon of professional wrestling was firmly established way back before the Second World War - Griffin speaks of "working," of "heat" and of "programmes", all terminology cut from the same cloth as Kayfabe. That is to say, the American carnival. There are lurid and nonsensical tales, told by old wrestlers and carnies both, that suggest the word is derived from a real individual named Kaye Fabe, or Kaye Fabin, which don't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. More likely is that the word was derived from one of two etymologies - the most popular theory seems to be of a derivation of "Be Fake", twisted by a Pig Latin-style obfuscation into "Kayfabe", though it's never rung true with me. If, as seems likely, "Kayfabe" was, like much of wrestling's lingua franca, born on the carnival midway, as a means of keeping up the pretence that fixed games were completely above board, "fake" seems an unlikely choice of wording - it has all the callings of a fairly tortured bit of etymological reverse engineering.
A somewhat more far-fetched, but to my mind more convincing, theory sees "Kayfabe" as the linguistic descendent of a bit of English public schoolboy slang. "Keep cave", or "Keep cavey", derived from the Latin for "beware", was used by Eton schoolboys playing lookout as a shouted warning that a teacher was rounding the corner, to encourage their chums to stop whatever immoral or unruly activity they may have been engaged in. The phrase slipped, for a time, into fairly common parlance, but found particular homes in the theatre, and in the East End's criminal underworld.
From there, through the immense movements of humanity that saw tens of thousands of Europeans flock to the New World, it found its way to the carnivals and circus backlots of America where, shorn from its Latin roots, it was interpreted as "KV", a backronym coined to mean "keep vigilant", while the longer form of "keep cavey" became, through repetition, oral tradition, and the mangled pronunciation of carnies of myriad nationalities, would ultimately be reimagined as "Kayfabe".
Today, we talk of breaking kayfabe or of keeping kayfabe, but in its earliest days it was a shouted warning, and in some wrestling locker rooms it still clings to that same role, a shadow of a memory of its origins in the misbehaviour of English schoolboys. Just as Billy Bunter would shout "keep cave" to his schoolmates, a wrestler in the middle of discussing the business end of putting a match together might, when an outsider pokes their head into the room, announce "kayfabe!" as a means to tell his compatriots to keep schtum.
I could explore kayfabe a little more - to discuss what it means to keep or to break kayfabe, whether kayfabe is as dead today as has often been claimed, or whether its a useful tool for discussing performances outside of the wrestling sphere...but I just spent more than two years buried deep in those very questions. So, while Kayfabe will be a recurring topic on this blog, you'll have to buy the book to get the full picture.
