Interview: That Guy Off Jeopardy!

Gizmo's impersonation of Ken losing to Nancy Zerg*

* Okay, so he didn't scream in terror. But it is Gizmo's own interpretation. Leave him be.

Me Intro Blurb
Here in the UK, million-pound quiz show jackpots will forever be associated in the public's mind with such winners as Judith Keppel. Over in the States, when asked who's the biggest game show winner of all time and therefore has mountains of gold coins spilling out of their platinum-coated mansion and a rocket car idling in the driveway, just about everyone on the street will undoubtedly utter the name Ken Jennings.

In 2004, Jennings's stalwart turn on US game show Jeopardy! saw him win 74 games and record the longest ever winning streak on the programme, notching up a winnings total of $3,022,700 in the process. He became so famous in fact that he racked up countless newspaper column inches and unfathomable media coverage and was interviewed by such ultra-famous chat show hosts as David Letterman, as Jeopardy's growing army of viewers tuned in to see whether he could win yet another game.

Since then the 32-year-old has taken time out from his glamorous life as a jobbing software engineer to set up his own trivia-themed website and blog and write a non-fiction book which weaves his experiences into a fascinating history of the American trivia scene.

Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive of Trivia Buffs has, of course, been reviewed below, but I should reiterate that it is a must-read for anyone who happens to be an, er, trivia buff and is still available to buy from any online bookstores with the ability to import their wares from America, for instance, Amazon.co.uk

I emailed him a few questions (okay, 31) related to his life as a resplendent trivia emperor and he lobbed some answers back at me. Which was very nice of him.

First, the most important question of them all: what is your favourite colour?

My favorite color is orange, so I guess my favorite colour is ourange.

Please tell my predominantly British audience of quiz fans why you have written a book about your experiences and why they should buy it.

Put simply, this is the book I would have liked to read as a trivia-obsessed ten-year-old in 1984, at the height of Trivial Pursuit-mania.  Not a book about how I was going to earn millions of dollars on TV twenty years down the road (though I would have liked that book too, I imagine) but a book about the history of trivia and the culture of quizzing, an attempt to explain what there is about our brains that makes it fun for us to Know Weird Stuff.

Brainiac is a vastly different book for a British audience that it is for Americans.  The average American reader, I expect, would want backstage dirt on the popular US quiz show Jeopardy!, and would be surprised that there even *is* such a thing as American "trivia culture"--that is, hardcore fans of quiz games.  For audiences in the UK, on the other hand, where quizzing is a respectable and venerable pastime, Brainiac is exotic anthropology: a look at a culture where quizzing is often marginalized under the rubric "trivia" and is seen as the province, mainly, of fringe weirdos and annoying know-it-alls.

Also, there's lots of cool stuff about the early history of trivia, all the way back to Jacobean London, and a list of airports named for people who died in plane crashes.

What do you put your longevity on Jeopardy! down to? Study? Sheer luck? Buzzer technique?

I don't know what the equivalent expression in British sport is, but American sportscasters often speak of "home field advantage" winning ball games.  There's a powerful "home field advantage" to the champion's lectern on Jeopardy!  You've figured out the buzzer timing by that point.  You're not as nervous anymore about the lights and the camera and the realization that every person you've ever met, every girl who ever turned you down back in school, will be watching you make a fool of yourself on national TV.  And there's also this:

Did your champion-status intimidate your opponents as your winning streak grew longer and longer?

Very often, yes.  You could feel the air go out of the folks in the greenroom when the contestant handlers revealed that there was a 20- (or 30-, or 40-) game champ in their midst.  Remember that the rules limiting the streaks of long-time champions had just been changed on Jeopardy!, and the idea of anyone winning more than five games was like science-fiction.  Many of my games were won right there, in that moment.

Describe the sound of your own voice, as heard on TV.

If you've ever disliked hearing your own voice on, say, an answering machine tape, try listening to yourself for six months on TV.  Oh, and you have to watch all your suddenly-annoying facial expressions and mannerisms at the same time.  And it's all on videotape so it's too late to change anything.  It's hell.   

What was the most surreal moment you experienced during the time of the Jeopardy! madness?

There were plenty of odd moments, but nothing was weirder than the phone calls I got from prominent, front-page American politicians encouraging me to run for "Congress" (like your Parliament, except that they like to IM underage boys).  The consensus, at the highest levels, appeared to be that, having appeared on a quiz show, I was now a viable Senate candidate.  If this doesn't tell you what's wrong with American democracy, nothing will. 

What are the most common things strangers say on recognising you?

Jeopardy is a senior-citizen phenomenon--sorry, a "pensioner" phenomenon--in the US, so typically it's "My aunt loves you!"  "My grandfather never missed you!"  "My mom called every night to tell me that you won again!"  That kind of thing.  Often prefaced with, "I'd never heard of you...but!"  I figure my fan base will all be dead in ten years and I can go back to the anonymity I so richly deserve. 

How do you feel about being called stuff like "trivia's undisputed king"?

It's all marketing hype.  I also often see a quote from a magazine that called me "the Seabiscuit of geekdom," which is a little more problematic.  America really has no organized high-level quiz contests--a show like Jeopardy! is pretty much all we have.  So if my crown is "undisputed," it's mostly because there's no venue in which to dispute it.  If anyone would care to.

And did you really weep like a baby when the New York Times called you "the most annoying man in game show history"?

Er, no.  Winning a couple million dollars at something tends to make you immune to "But he's a nerd!"-style name-calling.  That article was by their TV-kibitzer-in-resident, Alessandra Stanley, who, I was amused to see, got into a media snafu herself a few months later when she made similarly snarky distortions about Geraldo Rivera's reportage from Iraq, and got called on it. 

Reversing the traditional question and answer format, as happens on Jeopardy!, must seem as easy as pie to yourself, but seems annoying and pointless to everyone who doesn't live in the US. Do you think this has been an obstacle to the successful transplantation of the format overseas?

The syntactic reversal *is* pretty goofy, especially since the "answer" rarely works as a response to the "question."  "What is Frankenstein?"  "The X-Files episode entitled 'Post-Modern Prometheus' was an update of this classic 1818 tale."  Nope, doesn't make sense.  But the gimmick becomes second-nature very quickly to US audiences, even ones initially unfamiliar with the show, so I don't think it's necessarily a deal-killer.

You often use the term "Opie-looking" to describe yourself. What does this mean? And who's Gavin McLeod? (Don't worry I know who Pauly Shore is. Unfortunately. Budddd-ee.)

I apologize to Commonwealth readers for all the US-specific references in the book, but I felt a book about trivia should be littered with pop-cultural detritus.  Gavin McLeod captained the Love Boat.  Suggested British replacement: anybody bald.  Neil Kinnock.  Duncan Goodhew.  Opie is the baby-faced, red-headed son of widowed Sheriff Andy Taylor on 1960s TV's The Andy Griffith Show.  (Played by a young Ron Howard, by the way.)  Suggested British replacement: no idea.  Rupert Grint?  Someone with more experience in 60s British sitcoms would have to advise me here.

Ever been a victim of Gingerism, i.e. ginger racism? There is a lot of that over here, especially from Charlotte Church.

I just had to Google "ginger racism."  The idea is that redheads have it hard?  This is possibly true, but, despite the Opie comparison above, I'm actually an ash-blond.  Or at least I can "pass."  So I wouldn't really know.

Are you aware of horribly jealous trivia aficionados out there who want to knife you in the guts for winning so much money and acclaim?

America is full of great living-room Jeopardy players who will never try out for the show, so I do hear things like this sometimes.  "You're living my dream!" and the like.  They don't usually mention the knife, though. 

Have you always wanted to be a writer and believed you had a book in you? I just got the impression you've always wanted to write, i.e. lowly software engineer dreams of writing the Great American Novel, or at least the trivia equivalent of Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak.

Well-spotted.  (I'm dropping in non-Americanisms like "well-spotted" just for you.)  Yes, I was a frustrated English major in college, and only switched to computer science in hopes of actually paying the bills from time to time.  I knew I didn't have it in me to write The Great American Novel, but I was perfectly willing to settle for writing The Great American Quirky Nonfiction Book Of The Moment.

There is this line: "And yet there's no prestigious World Trivia Championship". Say it ain't so Ken! Please explain this outrageous sentence.

I agree, it's an outrage!  Why IS there no prestigious World Trivia Championship?   Oh, wait.  You're outraged that I didn't even mention the (not necessarily presitigious, but at least existent) World Quizzing Championship here.  Well, Brainiac focuses almost solely on the American trivia scene, mostly because of my appalling ignorance on international quizzing.  But I think my general point stands: that excerpt compares quizzing to other brain games like chess (headline-making international faceoffs with million-dollar purses) or Scrabble (whose national tournaments are now broadcast on one of America's leading sports networks) or even spelling bees (the largest American one was on network prime-time this past year).  I'm guessing more people enjoy quiz games than Scrabble or spelling, and yet all we have to show for it are little-known niche events like, in Europe, the WQC, or in America, like...well, nothing at all, really.

Do you think the US will properly integrate into the quiz world and compete in such competitions as the World Quizzing Championship?

I think the US academic quiz bowl community would love WQC-style quizzing: the format and question style seem right up their alley.  So I am optimistic that, with the right bridges built, American quiz fans will become more familiar with that style of quiz. 

The concept of the all-prestige, no-cash prize or shiny new car, academic quiz has thrived on national TV in the UK and survives to this day in the form of University Challenge and Mastermind. Why hasn't it caught on in the US?

I'm not sure: the last successful knowledge-for-its-own-sake quiz show in the US was the GE College Bowl show that went off the air in 1970.  Maybe there's more of a high- culture/low-culture divide in the US.  Game show viewers want the excitement of big-money payouts and "play-along", not cultural erudition, while the better-read and -educated segment of the population might pooh-pooh TV quiz shows as frivolous and seek their solace only on the printed page.

How would legendary Quiz Bowl player Andrew Yaphe do on Jeopardy!?

Hard to say.  I've seen college quiz bowl all-stars like Eric Hillemann and Raj Dhuwalia get bounced from Jeopardy after just a day or two.  The deep and specialized academic knowledge needed to excel at quiz bowl is sometimes at odds with the broader, shallower, and more pop-cultural emphasis of a TV quiz show.  (Keep in mind that stodgy British academic-quizzers like University Challenge or Mastermind are emphatically NOT the norm in the US game show arena.) 

Did you read Marcus Berkmann's quiz culture book Brain Men? And if so, what did you think? And what do you make of the incredible similarity in cover illustration?

I liked Brain Men quite a bit, since I knew little about UK quiz culture before tracking it down.  It also demonstrated to me that the mere asking and answering of quiz questions can be well-dramatized in book form, at least for readers who are aficionados, which was encouraging for Brainiac.  I would have to chalk up the cover resemblance to the similar titles: "Brainiac" was my publisher's idea, and once you have two books on trivia culture with "brain" in the title, the illustration sort of takes care of itself, I guess.  I doubt anyone at Random House was familiar with Brain Men; it's never been in print in the US.

In the book, why do you keep on calling pub quizzes, "pub trivia"? This will annoy practically every British reader who calls it a pub quiz.

I also use the offensive word "truck," which will annoy practically every British reader who calls it a lorry.  Brainiac was written primarily for American audiences (mostly since Jeopardy! airs nowhere else but the US and Canada) and "pub trivia" is simply the most commonly used name for the pastime in US bars.  Anyway, I decided very early to stick with the "trivia" nomenclature throughout the book and not to vacillate back and forth between "trivia" and "quiz."  It helps unify the book, which, structurally, is pretty scattershot in a lot of ways. 

More on the word "trivia": it seems that the word is used far more in the US than here in the UK (in fact the word "triva" is never used to describe a quiz contest or book unless there is some alliteration needed). You lament that the word "trivia" being used and is somewhat inappropriate while interviewees says the term shortchanges it,. However, you bandy it about without abandon. Why didn't you just use the terms "quiz", "facts" and "general knowledge" more, like us Brits?

This was a huge problem in writing the book: the nomenclature.  In America, there's only one word for question-and-answer games as a hobby: "trivia."  It's immediately understood.  You do run into the semantic problem of questions of more serious subjects (history, literature, etc.) being clearly "nontrivial," but that doesn't seem to bother anyone.

So I don't like the term or think it's particularly appropriate, but at this point, in American English, we're sort of stuck with it.  "Quiz," to paraphrase Monty Python, is right out.  Its American usage is pretty much limited to grammar schools or relationship surveys in Cosmo.  It's easy to say that "facts" or "general knowledge" would work just as well, until you see the sentences that result.  "GENERAL KNOWLEDGEal Pursuit stole almost a third of its GENERAL KNOWLEDGE from Fred Worth's popular series of GENERAL KNOWLEDGE encyclopedias." Or use it as an adjective.  "Trivia fans" sounds fine, at least to US ears.  But "facts fans" or "general knowledge fans"?  Doesn't really convey the spirit of the hobby at all. 

There was also the problem that "trivia" means both "odd but fun general-knowledge facts" and "quiz games about said facts."  So when Brainiac digs into the history and culture of "trivia," I often equivocate on which of the two definitions I'm using, and even shamefully lump them together.  So far, no one's called me on this though.  Shhh.

How many times do you use the word "trivia" in the book? It seems an awful lot.

Feel free to count.  I'll offer a prize.  In other news, Dickens' A Christmas Carol also uses the word "Christmas" a shameful amount, and I can't believe how many times the word "Beatles" appears in Bob Spitz's recent Beatles biography.  If you act now, maybe you can blow the lid off this thing.

What do you think of the term "useless information"?

Not always an oxymoron, but often.  After all, any time we're discussing some piece of "useless information," it's because it JUST CAME UP: in conversation, in a quiz game, on TV, et cetera.  Wasn't so useless after all, then, was it?  "Useless information" serves us as cultural glue, as conversational fodder, or as an excuse to ponder the infinite weirdness of the universe.  Nothing "trivial" at all about that.

You honeymooned in London. So what do you think of British food?

Best lamb vindaloo I've ever eaten.  Great job with that whole cruel-subjugation-of-India-for-centuries thing. 

I got the feeling that there is a large group of trivia/quiz lovers in the US, but it is spread out or concentrated in clumps such as Quiz Bowl. Kind of nebulous, in fact. Or diffuse, if you know what I mean. This is in stark contrast to Britain where the quiz community is identifiable and all know each other and is seen to compete in many forms of quiz, e.g. pub quiz, quiz leagues, championships, TV and radio quizzes, on a regular basis. It seems over here that you can immerse yourself in the quiz culture. Do you think that is something you can't do in the US? Is it something to envy?

Absolutely.  The reason why "trivia culture" is an interesting subject for a book in the US is because no one has the idea there is any such thing.  It's a little-known demimonde, not a well-lit, well-structured organization.  And at most levels, it's discrete pockets: the pub trivia (sorry) players aren't the Jeopardy! champs and the quiz bowl players aren't the NTN (computer-networked restaurant quiz) teams and so on.  But get to the highest levels and everything converges.  The best NTN teams are anchored by the quiz show millionaires, and the quiz show millionaires were the college quiz bowl MVPs, and so on.

It must be nice to live somewhere where a mention of organized quiz games is met with a simple nod instead of a confused look.

What's your favourite trivia-related movie or TV show scene?

I always think back to Kevin Bacon in Diner, watching the GE College Bowl TV show on TV and beating the nerdy contestants to all the answers.  That kind of smart-but-directionless heckler persona sums up a lot of trivia people I know.    

Practising Mormon and lead singer of The Killers, Brandon Flowers, i.e that guy with the stupid moustache, recently claimed that you "can't be a Mormon and be cool!". Do you agree? Are you a living embodiment of such an axiom? And if you disagree, please name some really cool, hep-cat Mormons.

Most LDS celebrities do seem to fall into the square/nerdy quadrant of the pop-cultural map, not that there's anything wrong with that these days.  Mormon athletes like the NFL's Steve Young or baseball's Dale Murphy are as squeaky-clean as they come.  Ditto for the Osmonds.  Jon "Napoleon Dynamite" Heder is a nerd.  I'm a nerd.   I assume this is an inevitable consequence of the no sex/no booze/no dope lifestyle that Mormons lead.  Note for British rock fans: Mick Ronson was from a Mormon family, though (shocker!) I don't think he practised.

What is your favourite Low album? I reckon they haven't topped Things We Lost in the Fire.

Did you know I liked Low?  Or is the assumption that all Mormons must listen to the one slo-core band with LDS members? (No! ... Er, yes, partly. Or at least the ones who like indie-rock)  Things We Lost in the Fire is my favorite album as well (I hope they see some money off the upcoming movie of the same title) except during the holidays, when I listen more to their Christmas album. (I knew it ... you indie-rock Mormons,you) I've seen them perform as well and they're great live.  Most bands don't have to take five when their baby starts crying offstage, but it happened twice at this Low show.  Even Sonic Youth got a nanny.

Do you have any remaining trivia ambitions? Do you still retain a love of trivia and want to keep on learning?

For me--and this is partially a result of the lack of US quizzing I mentioned--trivia is less a hobby and more a frame of mind.  It's not something I chose; it's just the way my brain is wired.  I can hardly read a two-paragraph magazine article without noticing something "trivial": either "This would make a great question," or "Wow, didn't know that."  In that sense, I'm in for life.  Besides, there's a niche.  In America, thanks mostly to the Internet and the rise of nerd culture in general, there's less knowledge stigma  than ever nowadays.  When you get right down to it, everyone is a "trivia" expert on something, in that they have reams of pop-culture knowledge at their disposal on their own pet subjects: favorite TV shows, sports teams, bands, playwrights, whatever.  We're all trivial now.  But--apart from Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy!, and maybe NTN, there isn't any successful branding in American trivia. And I'd be happy to be the go-to guy for that.  I have the curse of finding myself interested in--or at least curious about--almost everything, and trivia is a good way to indulge every interest at once.  

Do you have any nascent plans for a follow-up book?

Probably a book OF trivia questions, now that I've written the book ABOUT trivia.  A chance to get out of my system all the trivia factoids I accumulated for Brainiac that I'm now using solely to annoy my wife and friends.  After that, I'd like to write about something different.  I've been tossing around some ideas for a book on human memory.  Memory's a total mystery to me.  People ask me how my memory works, as if I'd be the expert, and I'm like, "I have no idea."  It fascinates me, how complex, nuanced glances at our past can be stored somehow in crackling neurons and squirting synapses.

Finally, how many of his plays did William Shakespeare set in Britain?

Wow.  Okay, Lear, Macbeth, As You Like It, Merry Wives.  Most of the histories: Henry IV (2 parts), Henry V, Henry VI (3 parts), Richard II, Richard III, Henry VIII, King John.  Aha, Cymbeline.  That's fifteen, and I've sat here for ten minutes trying to think what I might be missing.  Am I close?

Close, but no cigar. I believe the answer is fourteen. As You Like It was set in France.

Many thanks to Ken for giving such fulsome answers. Fulsome as in the new meaning of the word, not the slightly pejorative old. Just thought I'd clarify.

*A version of this interview has appeared on the Quizzing.co.uk website along with news of some Transatlantic bridge-building (not the literal kind). Go and have a look at plans for an Anglo-American quiz Grand Prix. G'won, g'won, g'won.