Professional wrestling may still be scoffed at by sports purists, but as two shows on at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe prove, its pop cultural roots run deep. An Audience With Gorgeous George harks back to a pre WWE era through the eyes of a character who arguably kick-started the ongoing pantomimic cartoonification of such white trash Greek tragedy. For one night only, The Wrestling puts some twenty comedians in the ring for a battle royal that marries sports entertainment and stand-up for a glorious hybrid of low-rent light entertainment.

“If you drew a Venn diagram, you'd see that wrestlers and comedians pretty much occupy the same worlds,” says Ivan Gonzalez, who with Max Olesker form Ivan and Max, who first brought The Wrestling to Edinburgh in 2011. “They're both extroverts who travel all over the country, and will analyse what they've done after every show. For someone from a non-wrestling background like me it's fascinating to watch, and with no experience of wrestling at all I was a bit scared to begin with, but you realise the better the comedians are at wrestling then the better the show. It also taps into the psychopathic competitive nature of comedians.”

The Wrestling dates back to Olesker's background as the youngest pro wrestler in the UK, who, aged fourteen, became Max Voltage.

“When Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock came up in the late nineties, wrestling had a big cultural moment” says Olesker, “and for most people it was a passing phase, but a wrestling school opened up close to where I lived, I signed up and that was that.”

Alex Brockie, the writer and performer behind An Audience With Gorgeous George, also trained as a wrestler, going under the name of Mr Charisma. Brockie had been a wrestling fan since an early age, also during the Austin/Hogan era, and brought another wrestling-based play, El Britanico!, to Edinburgh in 2014. That play was loosely based on the life of the Dynamite Kid, aka Wigan-born wrestler Tommy Billington, who became a star in America before becoming confined to a wheelchair. Gorgeous George similarly looks back at the life and times of the artist formerly known as George Wagner, who became a sensation in the 1940s and 1950s after dyeing his hair blonde and adopting an effeminate image.

“It's set during the last year of his life after he's retired from wrestling and opened a bar in L.A.,” Brockie explains. “Like a lot of sports stars George took a one-man show to Las Vegas, but now his bar is going out of business and he's telling his life story.”

A 1978 film, The One and Only, saw Happy Days star Henry Winkler play a wannabe actor loosely based on Gorgeous George in a feelgood feature directed by Carl Reiner, the New York born comedy writer and contemporary of Mel Brooks and Neil Simon. It was John Capouya's 2008 book, Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture, that Brockie drew material from.

“The title of the book is a big claim to make,” says Brockie, “but Gorgeous George influenced Muhammed Ali and James Brown and even Bob Dylan in the way they presented themselves so theatrically.”

Fusing pro wrestling with comedy and theatre isn't a new idea. In it's UK heyday, characters such as Bradford hardman Les Kellett would have audiences in stitches with his prat-falling antics, with at least one televised match against Leon Arras, aka actor and playwright Brian Glover, boosting TV ratings.

Glover went on to appear at the National Theatre in Bill Bryden's production of The Mysteries, and knew enough about drama in the ring to put wrestling at the centre of his 1977 television play, The Wild Bunch, which featured real life wrestlers Kendo Nagasaki and Giant Haystacks in a gritty tale of difference and diversity in a reactionary environment.

On the Fringe, while ex WWE superstar Mick Foley's stand-up act sold out the Assembly Rooms, back in 1998 actor Alex Lowe presented a one-man adaptation of Simon Garfield's verbatim social history of the rise and fall of the UK scene. In the bar of the Traverse Theatre, meanwhile, a framed poster can be found for the new writing theatre's 1981 production of Claire Luckham's play, Trafford Tanzi.

Originally produced by Liverpool's Everyman Theatre as Tuebrook Tanzi, Luckham's play was Educating Rita for the squared circle. With the cast trained by real life ladies champion Mitzi Mueller, Tuebrook Tanzi toured pubs and clubs before being filmed in front of Liverpool Stadium's regular wrestling crowd.

In London Tanzi was played by Toyah Wilcox, while on Broadway Blondie front-woman Debbie Harry stepped into Tanzi's leotard. Also in that production playing the referee was comedy legend and star of TV sit-com, Taxi, Andy Kaufman, who had begun to wrestle women as part of his act.

More recently, Turner Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller made So Many Ways To Hurt You, a filmic study of British wrestler Adrian Street, whose camp image was based in part on Gorgeous George. Singer Luke Haines had already put a picture of Street posing in costume alongside his Welsh miner father in front of a mine-shaft on the cover of the debut album by his band, Black Box Recorder. In 2011, Haines released the self-explanatory concept album, 9 and a Half Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and early 80s. It isn't all about nostalgia, however.

“The simple fact is that wrestlers now are better than they've ever been,” according to Olesker. “The great thing about professional wrestling is it's a live event that's very physical with a lot of audience inter-action, with the audience registering their displeasure and so on. Comedians and a comedy crowd get that, because it's the same in their world. That's why it works. It's infectious. It's unique.”

Audience with Gorgeous George has its final performance at Clouds & Soil this afternoon (3.30pm). The Wrestling is tonight at Pleasance Grand from 11pm-1am.

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