Source : the age
An adage I’ve long tried to live by, with varying degrees of success, is that it’s better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Certain situations – being asleep, being underwater, intubated – are easy. Being awake, in a conversation, or watching Jeopardy! – less so.
The long-running US game show, which airs in Australia weeknights on SBS and SBS2, has clues arranged into categories, presented in the form of answers. Contestants must phrase their response in the form of a question.
Were the category “Opening Lines”, for example, this is what it might sound like on the couch at our place:
Clue: “Before we proceed any further, hear me speak”.
Me: “Hamlet! No. Sorry. What is Hamlet? No. Macbeth! What is …”
Wife: “What is Coriolanus?”
Me: “D’oh!”
Most winners enjoy one or two victories, pocket a few thousand dollars and bow out. Recently there was a new winner every night for 11 nights. Five wins in a row earns an invitation to the Tournament of Champions.
Host Ken Jennings, himself a former contestant, won 74 games in a row, a record that still stands. He is also a Mormon, something I thought remarkable until I learnt that Johnny Gilbert, who introduces Ken and the three contestants, is 98 years old.
Until 2025, Jennings also held the US record for being the highest-earning game show contestant ever – more than $US4.5 million ($6.8 million) from Jeopardy! alone. Slate magazine called him “the Michael Jordan of trivia” and “the Seabiscuit of geekdom”. The title of his 2006 memoir was Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia.
“I was aware, from a young age, about being a know-it-all,” Jennings once told The New Yorker. “You immediately realise that America doesn’t like that, that it’s not a hit with girls in your class to know Captain Kirk’s middle name … It is kind of silly to know this weird stuff but we can have a good time with it. It’s better than not knowing it, right?”
As a contestant, Jennings knew enough weird stuff and more to provide thousands of correct responses. But it is a single incorrect answer that still haunts him. The year was 2004, the category was “Tool Time” and the clue was: “This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker”. Jennings, who looked then, as he does now, like the Mormon missionary to Madrid he once was, answered: “What is a hoe?”
“No,” responded Alex Trebek, the show’s then-host. Pause. “Ooooh … they teach you that in school in Utah?” he quipped.
“What is a rake?” another contestant replied correctly.
In the US, where the show attracts 20 million viewers a week, fans online endlessly dissect and relive such moments (as well as debate whether Jennings will ever match the still-beloved Trebek, who appeared in 37 seasons before he died of pancreatic cancer in 2020).
Recent chatter concerned Bevin Blaber, a writer originally from Schenectady, New York, whose tendency to sway when answering made viewers at home dizzy. Klay Frappier, an accountant from McHenry, North Dakota, also drew attention for solving clues one category at a time, a strategy known as the “Forrest Bounce” for reasons nobody will remember, were they to read them here.
It will surprise absolutely no one to learn that the median age of the audience in the US is 70. But the show is also a beacon of inclusiveness, insight and intelligence at a time when America appears light on all three.
From 40-game winner Amy Schneider (the first openly transgender contestant and first woman to win more than $1 million in a regular season), to a guy the other night who was more excited about the Beyonce concert he was going to after the taping than being on the show itself, to stay-at-home dad Andrew He and stay-at-home son Brendan Liaw (who attends 12-hour gin rummy marathons with his three retired aunts), what often makes these people interesting is not their cleverness – some are just as clueless as me – but their ordinariness.
Nor are the show’s writers afraid to get (slightly) political. Recently, the correct response to a “Bodies of Water” clue was “What is the Gulf of Mexico?” – despite coming after President Trump’s executive order to start calling it the Gulf of America. One hopes a similar act of subversion will take place in a future episode, when the correct response will be “What is Lake Ontario?”
At a time when America has abandoned soft power for psychodrama; when fewer Australians are choosing to holiday in the US and flocking instead to that bastion of political, cultural and religious freedom, China; a time when even North Korea looks, well, not exactly sane by comparison but America is – to quote The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy (who was referring to the Middle East at the time) – looking “a little iffy”, Jeopardy! is one of the few US exports that allows us to forget tariffs, Tehran and Trump, and to concentrate on what really matters: trivia.
Jeopardy! airs weekdays from 6.40pm on SBS2, two episodes a night. Celebrity Jeopardy! airs Fridays at 7.30pm on SBS2 and SBS On Demand.
