Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

If there’s one lesson here, I think it’s this: never underestimate the power of playfulness combined with hard work.

  If there’s another: always write your own damn theme music.

  We are lucky indeed for Merv and Julann and their vision of a game in which “questions” and “answers” are switched. The English language, unfortunately, has not quite caught up.

  How much confusion can the reversal of two words possibly cause? I actually typed the following, I swear, the first time I tried to e-mail an overseas friend an explanation of the game:

  In each question, by which I mean each clue, there is in fact a clue to the answer, by which I mean the question, which is the answer to the clue.

  Even I can’t quite tell what that means. It’s like one of those optical-illusion forks with two and a half prongs. And I know what I meant. So for the sake of clarity, this book follows the show’s own convention of scrupulously referring to all question-like objects coming out of Alex’s mouth as “clues,” and all answer-like objects coming out of the contestants’ mouths as “responses.”

  Keep in mind, however, that within each clue there is often a key piece of information that can lead to an educated guess. This will not be called a “clue,” since this might cause you to notice the faint sizzle of burning neurons, followed by the distant voice of a loved one calling 911, and then a nice quiet darkness. For your safety, any such clue-like object will be called a “hint.”

  Later on, if you become confused at the meaning of the word “clue,” lose consciousness, and eventually awaken to three paramedics extracting you from the book with the Jaws of Life, I renounce all responsibility.

  You have been warned.

  Another thing that happened in 1963, right about the time Merv was taking the game through its first run-through at Radio City Music Hall: I was born, in a snowy small Midwestern town much like Ironwood. We didn’t have a five-story Indian built to withstand atomic-blast winds. But we had quilt shows, lots of ducks and frogs, and mosquitoes the size of lawn darts. Somehow we managed.

  Granted, a lot of other stuff happened in 1963, too. Placing these two events side by side is completely arbitrary. There’s no reason to imagine they might be connected.

  But eventually, as you know, they were. My own life would cross paths with Merv’s quiz show juggernaut, and I would be in over my head from the start. My only salvation would be the same playful stick-to-itude Merv had once had, back at his dining room table.

  Merv, however, probably wasn’t so freaked out by the stress that he accidentally got something painful shoved way up his nose, an event that became the source for my first great insight into how to play Jeopardy!

  Like I said: you take pride in whatever you’ve got.

  CHAPTER

  4

  CLOSE YOUR EYES, BREATHE DEEPLY, AND SCREAM

  Also, I Discover More in My Head Than Just Knowledge

  Game day.

  Before each five-match afternoon begins, long before the audience enters, Jeopardy! trots the contestants onstage for a morning rehearsal game. This gives the players a brief chance to warm up and become familiar with the set, so we’re less likely to lose gross motor skills once the tape starts rolling. I presume it also gives the show’s own director and crew a chance to prepare as well, a pre-game ritual as much a part of their day as infield drills are to a baseball team.

  One practice game is split among all fifteen contestants, who are rapidly rotated. You play just a handful of clues. My own first rehearsal was a flood-lit bright-colored blur: I stand here and look there? And push this? Hey, neat pen! Who was Lincoln? and it was over.

  I had a buzzer strategy in mind, prepared long in advance, but I was rotated out before I could really try it. As I stepped off the stage, the podiums felt almost as distant as ever. I was worried I’d never ring in.

  Speaking of which, let’s clarify “ringing in,” the act of moving your thumb or index finger against a small white button on a black plastic cylinder, hoping that Alex will call your name and useful noises will spill out of your mouth.

  The term “ringing in” is a vestige of a long-ago period when hitting your button made an electronic noise—boong, to be exact. It’s not called “buzzing in” because nothing in the game goes “buzz.”

  If you’ve already noticed that nothing goes ring or boong anymore either, then you are a troublemaker, and I will have to keep my eye on you. Unfortunately, there’s no verb that fits much better. Clicking, tapping, punching, zapping—nothing quite works. There’s just no common verb that sufficiently describes competitive red-hot thumb-on-button action. Clearly, the English language is a wuss.

  There isn’t even a thrilling name for the cylinder-button-whackity-thingy itself. Most players call it a buzzer, although the preferred, official term seems to be (anticlimax alert!) the “Signaling Device.”

  But “Signaling Device” isn’t a name. It’s a placeholder for where a name should go. Anything can be a “Signaling Device”: road flares, pheromones, a discharge of ignited fuel from a shuttlecraft, even the body of a dead guy. (This was in a Die Hard movie.) “Signaling Device” is so ambiguous you could rewrite a 1930s melodrama around the phrase, with complete accuracy:

  Woman:

  Say…This (signaling device) on your collar isn’t my shade…

  Man:

  Um, sure it is, honey. Stand where the (signaling device) is better—

  Woman:

  Liar! You’ve taken up with that cheap (signaling device) again!

  Man:

  Wait! What are you doing with that (signaling device)?

  —BANG—

  You might have noticed your own active—perhaps even lurid—imagination just now. We’ll soon put it to use. Harnessed properly, it’s the single fastest way to hot-rivet new info into your skull, not to mention a lot of fun. Just realize that I had little to do with whatever your filthy little mind came up with just now. You sick (signaling device).

  Hoping to improve on “Signaling Device,” I once sought the opinion of an expert in product-naming. We spent a whole afternoon kidding about it, in fact, while drinking champagne in bed and watching tapes of the show.

  Jane, who will become a major character later, and in whose apartment all of my personal belongings now sit silently in boxes and bags (and have sat long enough that they are now covered in dust), received an M.A. in linguistics from Berkeley and once made her living inventing evocative trade names.

  Many of the products Jane helped name are now quite famous, although there were confidentiality agreements involved, so I am forbidden to divulge details. Even now. So let’s just say this: if you’ve ever heard of a lightly carbonated alcoholic beverage whose name rhymes with “Squeema”…wink wink, nudge nudge.

  This was our list of alternative names for the Signaling Device:

  ClueZapper

  Palm Hoopty

  Thumbilical Cord

  Thought Bopper

  ThunderFist, now with realistic Kung Fu Grip

  QuizBang

  Mr. Smartyhands

  Blurt-O-Matic Jr.

  The Mervulator

  Toyota Corolla

  And the one we decided on, since it’s closest to the actual user experience:

  The Jeopardy Weapon

  Jane and I laughed a lot making that list. Sometimes even in the instant you’re doing something, you’re aware it’s a moment you’ll want to hang on to forever.

  Moving on. I’m calling it a buzzer. Everybody does anyway.

  Back in the green room, hours after rehearsal and shortly before my first game, I was having trouble breathing.

  I was sitting in a makeup chair, near a live set, on a soundstage inside the Sony lot, about to go on national TV. I was just trying to control my nerves and stay focused. I had spent much of the day secretly expecting to do something idiotic, possibly dishonoring my family before millions of people.

  And now, only moments before I would play, my head was on fire. For
an instant, I wondered if I would stop breathing completely.

  That was almost ten years ago now. I’m sitting here writing this in the same exact coffee shop you have in your neighborhood, drinking the same oversweet brownish goo, listening to the same music drowned out by high-speed blenders, and breathing the same aerosol fog of mocha, cleaning products, and sweat. (I do almost all of my writing here, so I don’t have to look at the boxes and garbage bags in the apartment.) Close your eyes, and you can imagine precisely the sensory input I’m experiencing right this second. But even here in this coffee shop, if I close my eyes, I can still feel one particular dab of makeup going up my left nostril almost a decade ago.

  A few feet to my left stood the returning champion. His name was Matt, although with his glasses, perfect hair, and square jaw, he looked a great deal like Clark Kent. Matt appeared smart and confident, as people from high-gravity planets often do. At that moment he was memorizing a set of tiny laser discs that had been placed in his crib when he was jettisoned from a dying world.

  It was late afternoon. I had already spent almost an entire day in the green room. As mentioned, Jeopardy! shoots five games at each taping, and you don’t know when you’ll play until your name is read aloud. I had already felt my adrenaline spike four times, as the players for the first four games were called out. Four times I had leaned forward in my chair, full-body clenching with nerves. Four times I had slumped down with both disappointment and relief, sinking back to watch another hour tick by.

  By the time Susanne Thurber began to call the last names for the day, I was already exhausted. And I still didn’t know if I’d play. An alternate player is kept on hand, usually a local like myself, just in case someone passes out, takes ill, or (this is not hard to imagine now) simply runs away. So my blood pressure surged once again.

  “…Bob Harris!” she said.

  Now there was no turning back. In seconds I was thrust into the makeup chair for a last-minute touch-up to freshen my flesh tone. I paid no attention. I was too busy trying hard not to do anything stupid.

  So, while a trained professional braved the sheen of my Irish skin (my entire family bears a strong resemblance to polished chrome), I silently recited a half-memorized list of 19th Century U.S. Presidents. I was trying to sort out, again, whether Pierce came before Buchanan.

  I have this habit of overthinking during stress, and I had convinced myself that I couldn’t possibly survive the upcoming game without getting this key point resolved: They always ask about presidents. I know the first and last bunches, but there’s this big hole in the middle with just Lincoln’s head sticking up. Buchanan had to be early, but not very early, and Pierce was, too. But who went when? And what about Millard goddam Fillmore…

  To my left, meanwhile, Matt had quietly moved on to reciting the entire K section of the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition) while crushing a lump of coal into a diamond with one fist. I tried not to notice. Jeopardy! requires every neuron you can spare, and I only had one shot at this. The nineteenth century needed my urgent attention.

  Gradually, however, I became aware that my skin stylist had gotten a teeny blob of flesh-colored goo on the inside of my nose. This was itchy, and I didn’t need the distraction. Especially since the issue was not yet sorted out: Was it Buchanan, then Pierce? Or Pierce, then Buchanan?

  That’s when the makeup lady accidentally gooped my nozzle a second time. This dab clung to the edge of my nostril, dangling precariously, attracting a large crowd of curious nerve endings. Three U.S. presidents were being upstaged. This had to stop.

  Being a Midwestern boy of squarish head, the only makeup I’d ever had on my face had rubbed off someone else’s. I wasn’t sure quite what to do. I didn’t notice any Kleenex for a quick wipe, so I did the next logical thing.

  I sniffed.

  This, it turned out, was the idiotic mistake I’d been expecting.

  I had now snorted the entire glob up into my nose, deep into my sinuses, and possibly six inches along my spinal column. Since I assume you’ve never passed around a bottle of Jergen’s and a straw at an all-night cosmetology rave, imagine brain-freeze from a too-fast cold milk-shake, spritzed across the linings of your nasal passages.

  Ow.

  A rubbing-alcohol tingle rolled through my skull, obliterating 19th Century Presidents and everyone they held dear. Civil War Generals started to fade, and Europe began losing its capitals. Asia and Africa would soon fall away. My entire earthly awareness was focusing on the spreading twinge of Maybelline Shiny Man #7.

  Ow ow ow ow owwww.

  Past and future collapsed. Continents drifted. Nine civilizations flourished at Troy. In five minutes, I was about to be quizzed on national TV, and the only fact I could recall: My brain is filling with painful goo.

  This was bad. While Jeopardy! has several recurring categories, Alex rarely trots out Things Rammed Up Your Nose.

  So this was the end of my Jeopardy! career.

  Fortunately, after some interval of between three seconds and six weeks, I realized there was a massive box of facial tissue—identifiable by the words “facial tissue,” in fact, near the brand name—directly in front of my face. Always had been. Possibly since the founding of Los Angeles.

  I spent the next few minutes making funhouse faces and honking. Gwoooonngggk! Six passing geese were greeted in dialect. Glorngk, glorrrrngk! A tow truck thought it heard “Hello, sailor.”

  Finally, ahhhhh. And just in time.

  But now I would never figure out whether Buchanan or Pierce came first. And don’t even talk to me about Millard goddam Fillmore.

  Clearly, I was going to lose.

  Few great philosophical insights have come from things crammed into someone’s nose. It’s not clear that many philosophers even looked thoroughly.

  But let’s take a moment and notice that this whole tingly episode wouldn’t have happened if I’d simply managed to notice the giant Kleenex box directly in front of my face when I first sat down. Thus, before the first game even begins, we embark on what I humbly call the Eightfold Path to Enlightened Jeopardy:

  1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

  Most things aren’t nearly as difficult as we make them. This is true of Jeopardy!, which gives you hints in almost every clue, as much as anything I’ve ever been around.

  Before long, we’ll hit a bunch of other simple ideas that seem handy, in pretty much the order I learned them myself. Many are exceedingly obvious; all are much easier said than done.

  Buddhists, of course, follow an Eightfold Path in their own tradition. Enlightened Jeopardy is similar, except instead of a release from suffering and ego, you get lots and lots of money. Sometimes even cars and stuff.

  Granted, these objectives may be mutually exclusive.

  I never said I had every detail worked out.

  Our second step on the Eightfold Path is even more important than the first. In fact, it’s essential to everything that follows, including amassing your own series of Jeopardy! wins.

  To begin, close the book for a while. Seriously. Don’t make trouble. I have my eye on you, remember. In just a few pages, we’ll march into the studio, meet Alex, and start stumbling through an actual Jeopardy! game. But for right now, go away for five full minutes.

  And while the book is closed, see how thoroughly you remember your own private mental image of me bouncing around the Jeopardy! green room with a half-gallon of Cover Girl horked up my blowhole.

  Go ahead. Close the book, enjoy the mental movie, and come back in a few. You’ll have fun at my expense, and eventually it’ll help lead to a better memory.

  Come back when you’ve got a big dopey grin on your face. I’ll wait.

  Welcome back from the river of Avon.

  Fun? Easy? I bet you have a terrific imagination. You can probably remember complex mental pictures in remarkable detail, almost effortlessly. Yes? Good.

  Now, forget all that. And without looking, see if you can reel off all three of
the presidents I mentioned, the ones I was trying to put in correct order.

  Take a minute. They’re in your skull somewhere. For extra credit, recite all three in the order they were first mentioned.

  For most people, it’s suddenly not quite so simple. But shouldn’t the presidents be the easy part? These are, after all, just simple names, not physical sensations and events you’ve never even experienced. If your brain were a disk drive, three little names would occupy a teeny fraction as much space as your mental video of me caroming around the Sony lot with Estée Lauder’s legs dangling from my nose.

  Even now, there’s a decent chance you still may not remember all three names, even though right this second you now have yet another cartoon image of me in your head.

  This is not a flaw of memory. You almost certainly do have a remarkable memory, not to mention a playful imagination, as we’ve just demonstrated. However, your brain’s structure has a different set of priorities than you do.

  To the chagrin of anyone trying to memorize anything, our heads are much less interested in what we particularly want, which tends to be momentary, than in keeping us from becoming dead, which is rather more permanent. And given that many of our natural predators are big foul-smelling things that roar and leap, the rapid creation of memory—one of the keys to our species’ survival, in fact—is necessarily a profoundly physical, emotional, and sensory task.

  In contrast, the forty-three U.S. presidents (counting Grover Cleveland twice), the forty-six vice presidents (counting twice-serving George Clinton and John C. Calhoun only once each), and the forty British monarchs (excluding the Saxons and Danes, the Cromwells, and Lady Jane Grey) seldom attack you in the night with claws flashing, teeth digging for your throat, and their venomous drool overwhelming your senses. Hardly ever, in fact.