Sb! That’s it!
That’s the chemical symbol for antimony! I didn’t know I knew that until it was excavated from the deepest recesses of my cranium during trivia night at the High Park Club. You know how despairing it can be to forget an obvious fact you just assumed you’d know forever? I posit that these moments of obscure revelation have the equal and opposite effect.
“The difference between what it feels like to know something that you didn’t know you knew and just thinking that you know it is something that you need to know, whether you know it or not.”
— Alan Connor
This is The Joy of Quiz, which is also the title of a zippy 2016 book by certified boffin Alan Connor, though as titles we also would have accepted The Unbearable Lightness of Quiz, All You Need Is Quiz, or Quiz That All There Is? Is “quiz” just a British way to say “trivia”? That’s a good example of a poorly framed trivia question, and no. As Drew Basile wrote in The Baffler earlier this year, “quiz is a species of especially rigorous trivia, with regimented online competitions and questions that tilt toward the obscure.” He concluded that elite quizzards are sad people. It’s lonely when you reach for the top and get too close; better not to know almost everything.
“Trivia must be noteworthy, novel or clever... ‘Comedian Albert Brooks attended Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh’ is a fact. But ‘Comedian Albert Brooks had to change his name because he was born Albert Einstein’? That’s trivia.”
— Ken Jennings
Connor’s book kicks off with an entertaining account of the creation of Trivial Pursuit by Montreal journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, truly a part of our Canadian heritage. My favourite piece of meta-trivia: The board game languished in obscurity until Glenn Close brought a copy to the set of The Big Chill, where her co-stars in that boomer epic enjoyed the game so much they gave boxes away on the press tour.
“Trivia is a game which is played by countless young adults who, on the one hand, realize that they have misspent their youth and yet, on the other hand, do not want to let go of it.”
— Edwin Goodgold
There are two key types of Trivial Pursuit questions: The snapper and the stopper. The snapper is a question with a clever kick, like “Who is the only US President to have worn a Nazi uniform?” The stopper is a question, that in the words of Abbott, “nobody in his right mind will know — but somebody will.” His example was the number of the hospital room that Ed Norton stayed in The Honeymooners after being injured in a sewer explosion, and the answer is not worth knowing. The snapper is of course The Gipper: Ronald Reagan played a U.S. airman behind enemy lines and thus in need of a disguise in the 1942 war movie Desperate Journey.
“I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.”
— William Safire
There are no mountweazels in trivia. A mountweazel, as all trivialists know, is a made-up word inserted into a dictionary to catch copycats. When Fred L. Worth compiled The Trivia Encyclopedia in 1974, he included a fake fact, just in case: The apocryphal first name of Detective Columbo in the eponymous detective series. That name was (not) Philip; when it showed up in Trivial Pursuit, Worth figured he had a lucrative lawsuit on his hands. And though he estimated that 32% of Trivial Pursuit was based on his book, the courts sided with Haney and Abbott’s guileless response: Isn’t the wholesale borrowing of facts exactly why encyclopedias exist?
“The grain of real knowledge is concealed in a vast deal of esoteric chaff.”
— Alfred Rupert Hall
If trivia is having a resurgence at the moment — and you can find plenty of anecdotal evidence that it is — why might that be the case? Adrienne Raphel wrote a great little taxonomy of all the Jeopardy! variations out there, which I most admire for how she backed into this excellent nerd joke: “The growth is exponential, as though that trademarked exclamation point had taken on the mathematical property of a factorial, multiplying the game into so many more versions than seemed possible.”
“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”
— Sherlock Holmes (as written by Arthur Conan Doyle)
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits that crossword puzzles became a sensation in the Victorian age just as “the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact.” People no longer had an actual use for all these knowledge knuggets, so using them to fill out grids in the newspaper scratched an itch. Extending that theory, the popularity of Trivial Pursuit coincided with the beginning of cable news. Now we have a universe of information, misinformation, and disinformation at our fingertips; there has to be a reason, right? It’s the Chekhov’s Gun theory of trivia: Why would I learn in the first act that the animal on the Japan Airlines logo is a stork if not to use that fact in the third act’s quiz?
“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
To conclude, a quiz on trivia as provided by Craig Courtice, the top quiz host in all the Emirates and my source for much of the above:
Alex Trebek hosted this American TV game show for 37 seasons until his death. Warning: your answer must be in the form of a question.
In the board game Trivial Pursuit, what color represents the “history” category?
The Guinness Book of World Records began as a way to settle disputes in the pub after the managing director of the brewery got into an argument about what the fastest game bird is. But what was it: a golden pheasant, a grey partridge, or a red-breasted merganser?
The song “Jai Ho” was from what 2009 movie about a teenager from the slums of Mumbai who ends up on an Indian quiz show?
What man, probably the first well-known trivia creator, authored “Champs and Chumps,” which was later renamed “Believe It or Not!” in 1932?
When it was first used in the 1780s, this word meant “an odd or eccentric person; or a person whose appearance is peculiar or ridiculous.”
The creator of what British quiz show was inspired by his experiences being interrogated by the Gestapo in World War Two?
In a 2016 poll, what percentage of British adults said they watch, listen to, or take part in quizzes at least once a week: 22 percent, 44 percent or 66 percent?
In the movie Quiz Show, what actor plays Charles Van Doren, a TV game show contestant who receives the answers in advance? Hint: he has been nominated for Oscars for Schindler’s List, English Patient and Conclave.
Sharon Burns and Tom Porter founded a weekly quiz league in southern England that grew from 30 teams to over 10,000. In what decade?
“Who are three people who’ve never been in my kitchen?”
— Cliff Clavin
When John Ratzenberger’s mailman character appeared on Jeopardy! in a 1990 episode of Cheers, he bet it all on his question to this answer “Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz and Lucille LeSueur.” Though these are the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and Joan Crawford, Clavin wasn’t wrong. Which is a reminder that the setter of the question, not the host or the contestant, is the true master of quiz. And for next week?
Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, the (Neil) Postman Always Rings Twice!
In Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the title of Chapter 7 is “Now…This.” It’s a phrase…
“...commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly — for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening — that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now . . . this.’”
All of which added a new layer of context to “And Now This,” the superedits of local news that are a regular segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver:
Oh, and here are the quiz answers:
1. What is Jeopardy!?
2. Yellow
3. The mer-GAN-ser can reach speeds of 130 km/h vs. pheasant: up to 70 km/h and partridge: 60 km/h
4. Slumdog Millionaire
5. Robert Ripley
6. Quiz
7. Mastermind
8. 44%
9. Ralph Fiennes
10. 1970s
Get Wit Quick No. 383 falls under the category of “grab bag.” I just checked last week’s Quote Vote and though Trivia was in the lead, I must sheepishly The Odyssey ended up the actual winner. Remember that when filling out your Oscar pool ballots! To recover from that blunder, let’s hope the Trickster wins next week. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Please exchange quiz books with the subscriber sitting to your left and tap the ❤️ below.
I recently learned that on my mother's side we're descended from the Mountweazels who came over on the Mayflower.
I’ve gathered a smattering of trivia about cartoon caption contests on HumorOramaLOL at https://humororama.lol.
Other than the ego-driven Leaderboards, I’d say The Almanac and Hut 8 sections are the most popular. They offer a fair dose of trivia and let you discover things like this: there is only one city from which all three New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest finalists hailed in a single contest—San Francisco.