“The first time I remember hearing the question ‘is it real?’ was…”

Pop quiz: who wrote that line?

• Anthony Weiner

• Bill Clinton

• Larry Flynt

• Al Gore

Okay, you can probably eliminate Clinton. His question would have been: are they real. They. Not it.

The correct answer (or, at least, the answer I’m looking for): Al Gore, who writes in Rolling Stone:

The first time I remember hearing the question “is it real?” was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by “professional wrestlers” one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.

The evidence that it was real was palpable: “They’re really hurting each other! That’s real blood! Look a’there! They can’t fake that!” On the other hand, there was clearly a script (or in today’s language, a “narrative”), with good guys to cheer and bad guys to boo.

But the most unusual and in some ways most interesting character in these dramas was the referee.

A few insights:

• Al Gore thinks pro wrestling is real;

• Al Gore realizes that, just because someone says something’s real doesn’t mean there isn’t still a script somewhere, telling people what to say whether they mean it or not;

• Al Gore thinks the referees are the most interesting part of a pro wrestling show.

I think the rest of his article is about global warming, but I’m not sure. Hey, it’s really long, and it says Al Gore wrote it. Life is short.

What’s Al’s carbon footprint looking like these days, by the way?

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