Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  Books themselves are less memorable still. Square little things. Slow on their feet. Trade paperbacks barely so much as spit. Even hardbacks, which at least have an exoskeleton, rarely attack. (Although I’d be leery around chapter 15 of this book if I were you. Nasty little page. John Quincy Adams is involved, so be alert. He’ll creep up on you.) So, like it or not, you’ll always have a hard time simply transferring book data to brain with a minimum of blood loss. Instead, it’s the physical, emotional, or intensely sensory stuff that stays.

  In short, human beings are wired to sweat the big stuff: sex, food, combat, sex, birth, death, and sex. Like it or not, your own hippocampus (the brain chunk that decides how much priority to assign to a given memory) has roughly the same tastes and interests as Homer Simpson, drunk, at a bullfight.

  Viewed through this lens, my backstage attempt to snort up a majority control of Revlon is loaded with a gazillion little memory grabbers: it’s set in a high-pressure situation, there’s physical pain causing goofy commotion, and the resolution of the problem is made more urgent by the presence of a ticking clock. Throw in tasty music and Uma Thurman, and Quentin Tarantino could probably make it look kinda cool.

  Compare the last time you were in a traffic accident (or similar moment of sudden terror), even if it was months or years ago, to a recent, routine drive to the store (or other mundane experience similar to the sudden terror).

  Which do you remember better? If you’re human, it’s probably the distant car wreck.

  Here’s how that’s possible: Right this second, your brain is quietly, continuously associating the experience of running your eyes across this very page with where you are, the time of day, what you’re wearing, what you’ve eaten, the mood you’re in, the sounds and smells around you, how much sleep you’ve gotten, the brightness of the light, and how your butt feels right this second in that chair. (Did you just suddenly notice your butt just now? Good. You’re paying close attention.)

  Most of this usually vanishes quickly, replaced by an endless stream of other mundane detail. However, during life-threatening, sexy, or otherwise visceral experiences, the constant flood of information is suddenly considered significant by the little Homer-Simpson-yelling-olé part of your brain. Sex? Violence? Survival issue!?!? Record everything! NOW! And since your brain is all about self-preservation and has no time to sort the data, a large chunk of everything going on will be retained.

  Two months from now, you probably won’t remember exactly what you’re wearing right this minute. But if, in the next five seconds, eight naked space aliens on an interstellar roller coaster suddenly careen out of the sky and crash ten feet to your left, boom, you will.

  In fact, every time you put on those same clothes again, they’ll be the Naked-Aliens-on-a-Roller-Coaster-Almost-Hit-Me clothes. You’ll be flooded with memories, just by glimpsing a shirt, and for the most gratuitous reasons imaginable.

  This is only human. And it’s an incredibly powerful memory tool.

  Thus, another step on the Eightfold Path:

  1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

  2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

  The trick, then, will be simple: just make any new information brain-sticky by creating connections with visceral images and sensations. I prefer big, silly ideas, but even then my mental images are usually rooted in sex, death, food, or (if a big tournament is coming up) all of the above.

  Later on, we’ll use a famous singer’s sex habits to study Native American history, examine the novels of E. M. Forster through the lens of a thirty-foot set of buttocks, and visualize a hail of burning arrows to help finally sort out those three 19th Century Presidents.

  If only our textbooks would treat learning this seriously.

  If you did come up with all three presidents, good for you. Not everyone does.

  I bet “Millard goddam Fillmore” popped into your head first, even though the others were mentioned more than twice as often. This is partly because MillFill (as his friends called him), mentioned last, is more likely to be in your short-term memory, but mostly because he was used as a teeny punchline with a mild curse inserted, creating—yes—the slightest emotional response.

  See how this works? Your brain tends to assign space to information not according to usefulness or importance or even, sad to say, truth (this loophole is responsible for much of modern advertising and politics), but in response to big emotions and sexy drunken bullfight sensations.

  Granted, this isn’t a pleasant thought for some folks. Good thing they’ll forget it soon enough.

  And so, to this day, my strongest first memory of the Jeopardy! green room consists mostly of wanting to hose out my skull.

  It would not be the last time I felt this way.

  And so there I was, Dead Man Walking, about to march onto the Jeopardy! stage, hopelessly unable to differentiate between Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Millard goddam Fillmore. At the time, contestants walked one by one to the podiums. I can still replay every step of that endless fifteen-foot march in my head.

  As I write this, sitting here in a coffee shop, I’m also still standing in darkness, ten feet from the stage. I still hear the surprising loud whirr of electronical doojobbies. I feel the cool dry blast of recirculated air fighting klieg-light heat on my face.

  I can hear the studio audience, a dark and faceless but thrumming fourth wall, still hubbubbing about the previous game.

  The floor director, John Lauderdale, has the imposing calm of a Marine colonel. His job requires him to control hundreds of total strangers, five times a day, creating the lush empty stillness necessary for the players and Alex to concentrate.

  John silences the room without even raising his voice.

  “Quiet please,” he says, in a soft, commanding tone that would settle a house fire.

  “Quiet…please.”

  The crowd becomes still. The electric doojobbies all lower their voices.

  There is a lurch in the timeline here. A brain under stress goes into hyper-record.

  I turn to face the stage, seeing only the back of the champion in front of me. We are preparing to march on command.

  As his name is called, Matt strides toward his podium, entering the fantasy world of brilliant color and flooded light into which I have never stepped.

  He turns to face the camera. I notice a small bright spot just above his collar. Something is reflecting and dispersing the overhead glare.

  That exact moment is flash-fried into my brain pan. Every time I’m reminded of Jeopardy!, part of me is still and forever standing on that spot and in that moment. Always beginning, always terrified, frozen on the edge of light, a Hiroshima shadow of fabulous cash and prizes.

  My eyes focus. On the champion’s neck, a tiny bead of sweat has formed.

  For the very first time, I imagine I might have a chance.

  CHAPTER

  5

  HALLOWEEN COMES SUDDENLY

  Also, Scandalous Thoughts About Ned Flanders’s Wife

  “…HARRIS!”

  Johnny Gilbert, the voice of God in a satin jacket, suddenly booms my name. Like the subject of a stage hypnotist, I wobble involuntarily into the light and take my place at the center podium.

  Thousands of miles away, and several weeks later but felt in this moment, in a small white house not far from a wintry marsh on the shore of Lake Erie, my mother and late father are watching.

  Alex Trebek strides to his mark on the floor in the center of the river-blue stage.

  Just like on TV, I notice. Duh.

  Alex is taller than I’d imagined. That is interesting.

  Also, he is wearing what looks like a toga. This is unexpected.

  It takes a second to realize he is dressed as the Statue of Liberty. It’s a slapped-together costume, an impromptu bit of backstage whimsy to surprise us all live on camera, its cheery half-assedness much of its charm. Alex has draped his finely honed suit with a dusty green quilted pad, the
kind used by stagehands when moving heavy equipment, and there is a spiky foam souvenir crown on his head. In his right hand is a miniature flashlight, the size you might find attached to a gas station men’s room key.

  Alex holds this aloft like the torch of freedom.

  And so I salute.

  We players have been instructed to applaud, of course. It’s traditional, it’s courteous, it’s good TV. Newborn babies instinctively applaud the host of a game show.

  But that’s not why I’m saluting and applauding. Alex was once a highly respected newsman in Canada, with a degree in philosophy. He is now wildly well-paid and a national icon. It would be very easy for Alex to take himself too seriously. And yet here he is, goofing around like a kindly uncle chosen to baby-sit, eager to be silly if it might amuse the kids at the end of another long five-show day.

  I like him immediately. And so I play along, giving Alex and his quilted-pad costume and his men’s-room-key-flashlight a full and proper salute.

  Alex seems glad to have someone join the charade. We even joke a bit back and forth before the game begins. I don’t remember now what we said. It’s on a videotape somewhere, but this is the important part: I don’t remember.

  The laughter has inadvertently gotten my body to start calming down. I am coming out of auto-record brainlock, simply because I have embraced a strange moment.

  This will be a good habit from now on.

  We were taping in mid-September. The game was scheduled for broadcast, however, on October 31. Halloween. That’s why Alex was Liberty. Aha. And sure enough, the categories for our first round were all linked to Halloween as well:

  I made a mental note: Always learn the broadcast date as soon as possible, the better to anticipate seasonal clues. For a game played on the Fourth of July, for example, you might want to brush up on FORT MCHENRY, BETSY ROSS, and THINGS THAT LOOK COOL BLOWING UP.

  Then I noticed: This game hadn’t even started, and already I was looking forward to others.

  How odd. This was a bizarre shift in attitude, certainly not the behavior of someone expecting to lose. Reel it in, I thought to myself. This isn’t quite Cleveland of you. But for reasons we’ll soon explore, I was becoming comfortable before the game even started.

  This is the very first clue I ever saw on Jeopardy!, for $100 in the category FICTIONAL GHOSTS:

  HE PIONEERED THE NOVEL WITH “ROBINSON CRUSOE” AND THE GHOST STORY WITH “THE APPARITION OF ONE MRS. VEAL”

  The word “novel” jumped off the screen. Literature, I thought. Oh, crap.

  But as soon as I got to the word “Crusoe,” I started to feel better. Not because I’d ever read the novel—remember, in college I was a Pong Studies major—but because when I was in third grade, the grocery store where Mom shopped started giving away hardcover versions of classic books.

  Our untouched-by-human-hands-since collection of these sat on a shelf near the TV, and thus near my eyeline throughout childhood for at least twenty-eight hours a day. One of these books had these words on its spine:

  Robinson Crusoe—Daniel Defoe

  So I would know at least one response. Yes! Just in case I might forget in the next three seconds, I repeated the response in my head, over and over, waiting for the moment to ring in:

  Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe…

  To this day, I’ve still never read Robinson Crusoe. Or anything by Defoe.

  I should, I know. Eventually. Someday I will also read Moby Dick, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and possibly the rest of Speed Reading Made Easy, although at this point I should probably just wait for the movie version.

  Meanwhile, here’s absolutely everything else I knew about Robinson Crusoe:

  A shipwreck was involved

  Some guy named Friday

  Oh, yeah: an island

  Defoe also wrote something called Moll Flanders

  Moll Flanders had stuck in my head because when I first stumbled across that fact (I have no idea where), I made a little joke to myself, imagining Ned Flanders’s prudish wife from The Simpsons stranded with Crusoe on a desert island, gradually embracing a shameless life of wanton abandon. One taw-diddly-awdry mental image later, Moll Flanders was instantly fastened to Robinson Crusoe, and thus Daniel Defoe, for good.

  I had inadvertently stumbled across several steps of the Eightfold Path at once, although it would take years before I understood how.

  Later, I realized that those four facts are also almost half of everything Jeopardy! can probably ask about Defoe’s entire novel.

  The writers can ask about virtually any topic, of course, but they’re limited by the brevity of the clues and responses. Using the typeface Jeopardy! prefers on its monitors, in fact, a clue can only contain just over 100 characters. Into that, they have to squeeze enough data to limit all possible responses to one, usually include a clear hint of some kind, and if possible even cram in a small dollop of humor.

  So far, they have done this almost a third of a million times. I, for one, am impressed.

  Robinson Crusoe is a classic of English literature, spawning a whole subgenre of castaway works. But little of that fits into a twelve-second rhythm. In fact, here’s all of the remaining Crusoe-related material that (in my opinion) is concise enough to prove useful even in one of Jeopardy!’s advanced tournaments:

  Crusoe was from York

  The book was published around 1720

  It was partly based on a real guy named Alexander Selkirk

  He was on a Portuguese slave ship headed for Brazil

  The only book he had was the Bible

  Defoe wrote a sequel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

  That’s it. The end of the map. Beyond, there be dragons.

  Of course, they can ask about anything else Defoe wrote, dig into his biography, combine titles in Before & Afters (as “Jackie Robinson Crusoe” perhaps), and riff on the endless derivative works ranging from Lost to Lost in Space to Robinson Crusoe on Mars, a cheesy old sci-fi movie featuring Adam West from Batman. (Think of it: I’ve never read the actual book. But the Batman-crash-lands-on-Mars version, oh, that I know really well.)

  But now we’re no longer talking about Crusoe. Just related stuff.

  You can study for Jeopardy! You just need to think like one of their writers.

  You also have to be unhinged enough to try to boil down the entire canon of human knowledge into these convenient bite-size bits, gluing them in with (as you’ll see) a headful of explosions and nakedness.

  Obviously.

  Time slowed down at the podium.

  Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe…

  As described earlier, you can’t simply ring in at will. You have to wait until Alex has finished the entire clue, at which point someone offstage flips a switch, activating all three buzzers at once.

  At the same instant the buzzers become active, a series of tiny, nameless lights near the game board flash, telling the players it’s safe to ring in. Jump the gun, and your buzzer is disabled for what I’d guess is about a half a second. This is an eternity in Jeopardy! time. Someone else will probably ring in before your buzzer works again.

  Incidentally, these lights seem to have no official name. They are simply spoken of as “The Lights,” sometimes in the same hushed, mystified fashion used by UFO abductees. For clarity’s sake, I’ll invent the simple term “Go Lights” and use it from here on. (I also forfeit all right to poke gentle fun at “Signaling Device” ever again.)

  The basic routine, then, usually becomes:

  Read the question,

  Figure out the answer,

  Wait for the Go Lights,

  Then thumb-thump like crazy.

  But I knew going in that my knowledge would be no better than anyone else’s, and probably worse than most, since I just barely squeaked through the test. My reflexes are good, but not great. And given that the returning champ would already be more experienced, I would begin at a clear disadvantage
.

  I would have to try something else entirely to have any chance of winning.

  HE PIONEERED THE NOVEL WITH “ROBINSON CRUSOE” AND THE GHOST STORY WITH “THE APPARITION OF ONE MRS. VEAL”

  My eyes focus on the final “L.”

  Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe…

  “…Veal,” Alex says.

  A half-beat of total silence. Instants pass. I fight myself slightly, keeping my eyes off the Go Lights.

  I am hoping my finger will simply move on its own.

  Back in Ohio, watching Jeopardy! in a small white house with Mom and Dad during a period when my adult life didn’t quite, um, take, I had gotten into the habit of tapping my index finger in synch with the contestants hitting their buzzers.

  It was just something to do, part of playing along. Even if I was completely lost in a category—which was often—I could still flatter myself by hoping I might have gotten the timing right.

  I left before long, stumbling out into the world in search of my own actual life, and I didn’t see the show much for a long time. Usually I was working nights as a B-minus-list comedian, making a decent living by roving constantly between cheesy nightclubs and small Midwestern colleges. My day for most of the early 1990s consisted of a six-hour drive to a motel in some small Midwestern college town, followed by a performance, food from a gas station, and a little sleep before repeating the process the next day.