Why Fear Drives Us to Pogo-Stick Stripping

I was the least cool person in the room. The rest of them were all young and hot and tattooed and missing key articles of clothing. One of them wanted me to stop obstructing her view, so she walked over, ran her hand through my hair and whispered in my ear. I think it was about getting out of her way. In retrospect, I think I may have messed that one up.

My friends had been telling me about how cool “Lucha VaVoom” is for months, making it sound like Mecca for hipsters. The show, which is put on several times a year, is an odd tribute to our friends in Mexico. It features burlesque dancers and Mexican wrestling. Men wear masks and claw at each other until they eventually gang up on the unmasked guy, who dons gold spandex pants and pins guys in order to simulate lewd acts. Mexico clearly has some issues.

In addition to stripteases by a woman named Ming Dynatease and a guy who disrobed while riding a giant pogo stick, there was a midget, a guy in a chicken suit and three comedians doing play-by-play with pun-filled, purposefully cheesy double entendres. The main commentator was, distressingly, Tom Kenney, the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants. That guy must have to drop acid every day just to make things seem normal.

Though they’d occasionally whoop, the beautifully pierced people spent less time watching the action than people at a Dodger game. Enjoying wrestlers in chicken costumes was secondary to being witnessed by others as someone enjoying wrestlers in chicken costumes. The people in the audience were all far too cool to go see real professional wrestlers or real strippers. Nobody, however, is too cool to see real midgets.

But whenever they did look at the ring, people became bored pretty quickly. I suspected this when I was driving downtown to the show at the Mayan Theater a few weeks ago and considered turning around. And not just because being downtown at night always make me feel like I’m bragging about having a home.

What I intuitively feared was that “Lucha VaVoom” is designed as camp: a watered-down, self-conscious version of something that could be fun, like strippers and wrestlers and midgets.

In her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag wrote: “Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different -- a supplementary -- set of standards.”

Sontag, who died in December, used camp to give herself a shield to enjoy the kind of garbage that Susan Sontag shouldn’t have been enjoying. It’s a patronizing way for the elite to enjoy the entertainment of the masses without equating themselves with them. (I like to get into intellectual arguments with the dead. It ups my chances.)

Camp appreciation is just a cover. People who listen to Def Leppard to laugh at them are just people who actually like Def Leppard but are afraid to admit it. Many of these people are in Def Leppard.

L.A. is more full of camp than any city in the world: swing dancing, Marty & Elayne at the Dresden, midnight showings of “Showgirls,” dinner at the Magic Castle, the Robert Evans book on tape.

That’s because it’s a city full of attention-needy people who constantly face rejection. It’s too dangerous to put yourself out there for real as a performer or a writer when you’re going to get shot down 99% of the time. It’s safer to pretend that you weren’t really trying.

So instead of stripping at a genuinely sleazy club and exposing your sexuality for judgment, you do retro burlesque with Carmen Electra’s Pussycat Dolls. Instead of mounting a real play, you stage the ‘80s movie “St. Elmo’s Fire.”

But the rest of the country sees through this. They want to see people -- talented or not -- who really try on “American Idol.” Because if beauty really is truth, then trying to create art while pretending you don’t mean it is inherently flawed.

Maybe I’m just mad because they stopped at the pasties.