Grappling Primitives
Signal / Noise
overdoing jokes and badassery
short essay on the 'grappling horseshoe zeitgeist'
Every gym has some of it. The guy who treats every roll a bit too seriously and the one who cannot get through a single drill without a quip about some version of self-deprecating aggressive cuddling. Both can be tolerable at small doses, and a bit exhausting at high doses. Both, somehow producing the same outcome of distracting from learning.
So here is the horseshoe model (extremes are closer than they initially appear) applied to grappling culture.
The shape of it
In political theory, the horseshoe describes a counterintuitive idea that the far left and the far right, despite approaching from opposite directions, end up as neighbors. Their extremes resemble each other more in their disruption than either resembles the center.
The same structure applies here.
At the top of the arch: craft-orientation. High signal. The thing being studied is the point of being here. Technique, pressure, timing, weight distribution, etc. whatever the session is actually for.
Along the left arm, descending: the alpha register. Tough-talk and real-politik framing, the language of predator and prey. At low dose, this can be helpful as it checks complacency, it does name the aliveness that makes grappling different from choreography. Too far though and it becomes a boring performance. Ego r/iambaddass instead of actually striving to get better.
Along the right side, descending: the buffoonery register. Self-deprecating humor, the conscious absurdity of two people voluntarily trying to choke each other. At low dose, this can ease tensions and make the room easier to be in, it defuses ego, it acknowledges the genuine strangeness of what we do. Humor is fun and welcome. Yet ‘everything in moderation’, including moderation itself. Too much and it’s another kind of performance detracting from the goal.
So the extremes are adjacent. Neither maybe really aware of the resemblance.
Dose is the only problem.
The problem is neither the occasional tough-talk or self-deprecating jokes. Just the dosage.
At low frequency, either is fine, to each their own.
Like TARS in Interstellar with his humor setting: it can be orthogonal to competence and mission. At 75%, it humanizes without corrupting. At 100%, tone it down.
A well-placed “offer some real-resistance or he won’t learn anything” can be exactly the thing someone needs to hear. Sustained across an entire training session, across every roll, with invectives and admonitions to toughen up. That becomes a bit much.
Same for the joke tropes. One well-timed moment of absurd self-awareness can crack some tension create some laughter-bonding. A gym where every interaction is filtered through the same bit, day-in and day-out, where the sexual innuendo are the primary mode… that gets old fast. ymmv.
Humorlessness this is not
Just an argument against constant edginess. Not asking anyone to censor their personality in service of some imagined neutrality.
You can be dry and terse and still be craft-centered. You can crack jokes mid-roll and still be craft-centered. The jokes are not the issue. The ratio and tones are.
Just descriptive, not prescriptive. Just mapping some reflections. I hear about how gay BJJ is from so many friends who don’t train. Maybe they’re trying to connect with something they don’t know. I even find it amusing at small doses.
Tolkien and the timing of Jest
“It is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.”
— The Return of the King
Scarcity creates value. A single well-placed jokes lands because of contrast, because it isn’t the default mode.
Part of the Grappling Primitives series, working through the underlying logic and zeitgeist of what actually happens on the mat.