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I've been selected to speak at the Comparative Drama Conference in Los Angeles in March on a panel about Professional Wrestling and Drama/Theatre. I'm currently writing the paper I intend to present.

So here's where I need your help.

This is a survey to find out what a viewer's response is to certain wrestling moves. You don't have to be a wrestling fan. In fact, hopefully, I'll have as many people who hate wrestling as who love it, thus making the data more diverse. The video to the right is just over five minutes long and the survey shouldn't take more than ten minutes to complete tops. Please watch it and answer the survey below. Fair warning, there is some blood in it, so it might not be completely worksafe depending on where you are. I need a wide variety of responses here to get accurate data, so I'd love it if you'd help me out whether you're a wrestling fan or even if you hate it. Just copy the survey below and post your answers as a comment on this blog (you can log in with a Facebook account, or create an account on this website by clicking the sign-in link, or comment anonymously. Anonymous comments won't show up until I approve them later) or email them to me at mav+cdcpaper@elseworld.com, whichever is easier, or depending on whether you want your answers published here or not.

If you wouldn't mind, please repost and get your friends to fill out the survey as well. Thank you very much for your help on this and let me know if you have any questions. 

Gender:

Age:

How much of a professional wrestling fan are you? (1 - I hate wrestling, 2 - I don't care about wrestling, 3 - I used to like wrestling, 4 - I like professional wrestling, 5 - I am/was a professional wrestler)

Roughly how many years have you been a wrestling fan? (list 0 if you're not a wrestling fan)

For each move in the video, rate on a scale of 1-5 (1 being least and 5 being most) whether you find the move to be believable/realistic, difficult to perform, dangerous to perform safely, harmful to the victim, exciting to watch:

Believability (1 - unrealistic, 5 - very believable):

Difficulty (1 - easy to do, 5 - hard to do):

Danger (1 - not dangerous, 5 - very dangerous):

Harmful (1 - harmless, 5 - potentially deadly):

Excitement (1 - boring, 5 - amazing):

Well, that was true. 

But I was happy to see that the cross-section in attendance was somewhat more diverse than I expected. While the majority of the attendees were quite liberal (like myself) I was happy to see a fair number of republicans, tea-partiers, anti-abortionists, anti-homosexuals and religious types represented. 

It was quite humbling to see so much support for such a realistic cause, essentially "be reasonable people, we're all in this together."

In particular, I was quite happy with Jon's ending keynote where he echo'd many of my own opinions. While it's easy, as a liberal (or in my case a pragmatic anarchist) to simply vilify the right-wing and blame them for every problem, Stewart made a case that I think most people tend to miss. Simply painting the right as racist, homophobic, capitalist swine is ultimately as damaging as assuming every Muslim is a terrorist. And in each case, our country becomes weaker.

At the end of the day, Stewart and Colbert are simply comedians, albeit ridiculously popular ones. But they accomplished something grand here. Under the auspices of farce and parody, they caused some 200,000 Americans of all ages, races, sexualities, colors and creeds to travel across this country and sit in a field simply to be entertained. Hopefully in the course of that entertainment, some of the message sunk in.

I certainly enjoyed myself. And I left DC this weekend a little more hopeful than I went in.

Only a few of the shots I took are in this post. See my entire gallery of 100 photos from the rally here.