Ken Jennings

When my little sister was born, I was super-excited...not to hold or take care of the baby, but because we were now a five-person family. The perfect size for Family Feud!

We never made it on White Family Feud but I still hope that Black Family Feud will welcome us with open arms someday.

I have a little laminated card that gets me onto any game show set. If I wanted to, I could just show up right before a taping and replace any contestant I wanted to. There are only five cards like this in America and they're signed by the first President Bush.

Blinking-in-disbelief Peter Krause-lookin white guy gif. I have no idea what this meme is called.

This is a crazy Yanni/Laurel moment if some people think that gif guy looks like Michael C. Hall and some people think he looks like Peter Krause.

Does anyone think he looks like Frances Conroy?

I probably live not far from you! I am baffled by this new new kowtowing-to-evil-business vibe in "progressive" Seattle.

I have friends who work in homeless policy here who tell me that the city's programs, despite what you hear, are not particularly mismanaged or non-evidence-based...they just can't keep up with the influx.

Trees in general are pretty big, but boy oh boy! Those redwoods are big even by the standards of trees (which again, are quite big).

I have seen Nancy twice since she beat me fair and square on Jeopardy! She lives in Ventura and came to a reading I did there a few books back. Then once when she was in Seattle I took her to brunch.

Wait a minute! Thinking back, maybe Nancy should have picked up the tab for brunch. She was the reigning Jeopardy champion in the room, after all.

I'm from Seattle. Nancy "Zerg Rush" Zerg is from Ventura.

Watson turns 13 in five years and I would like to come to its bar mitzvah.

No. Being friends is not a super-Seattle thing to do.

My book actually has a section about how the joke-riffing in Reddit comments sections is often surprisingly funny.

But this joke made me change my mind.

Coffee, leather, and sensitive guitar licks.

Twitter, as you might imagine, is a big player in my book about the incredible snark density of modern life. The short answer is that comedy is an arms race. Once one player breaks the glass (a Twitter account, an advertiser, a political candidate) everyone else eventually has to follow suit, or look stodgy and old-fashioned.

I think the rush to comedy was not necessarily organic and inevitable. Powerful organizations realized that humor was a persuasive, valuable commodity, and they co-opted it. The CIA has an ironic Twitter account now where they do memes about drones or whatever.

Yup. Until the early 60s, all ad gurus agreed that ads should never be funny. The clever punch line might distract from the product.

The Volkswagen "Lemon" campaign and then later the work of Stan Freberg changed everyone's mind, and now every ad break is a duel of wacky non sequitur comedy sketches that agencies are desperately hoping will go viral.

The very first tweet was something like "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet!" Lol, I get it! Because you guys are so secretive and depose South American governments and shit.

No but both are still alive! It's not too late!

I really want to meet Van Doren but what would I say to him? I'm a pint-sized version of him who didn't cheat, I doubt he would want to hang out at Denny's with me.

Yes! The urge to put every mildly funny thought that passes through your head in front of hundreds of thousands of people is so seductive, but it's also weird and narcissistic! It lends itself to bad decisions.

For the most part, when Breitbart people or Star Wars fans have come after me for tweaking the thing they love, I have stood by the tweets. But there have been a few times when a joke that totally made sense in my head looked awful on the screen, and that's on me.

I like to think I'm a little better about it now. I no longer have any illusions that Twitter is good for me in any way.

Doug and I were both on the bill at Bumbershoot, a Seattle music festival, one year. He asked me to guest on his movie podcast, which I had never heard at that point. I had a great time as the only non-comedian.

Doug might come off as laid-back and meandering on the show sometimes, but the funny thing is he cares deeply about the movie games and wants them to run right. So he likes guests that are pretty good at the games and take them seriously (except for Samm Levine).

I have seen Doug be extremely tightly-wound and detail-oriented backstage...and then saunter out and do Amiable Stoner Guy perfectly.

Comedy is hard; you rarely see the people who are actually casual and laid-back about it, because they don't get good.

Playing the show is so different from watching it at home. At home Jeopardy is so chill. You can just spit out occasional answers from the couch and watch three nerds do the same.

But when you are one of the nerds, it's a real crucible. 61 clues in just over 20 minutes means the game moves incredibly fast, almost too fast for the brain to keep up. You're trying to think about so many things at once as you race to read the clue ahead of Trebek and prepare to click.

Like Jeff Bridges says in Tron: "On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy."

I don't but I just looked it up on the "J-Archive" and now I do! (There is a near-complete archive of Jeopardy clues on the Internet, because this is the best era in human history.*) Hi Tom! Sorry about everything.

*In terms of Jeopardy clue availability only.

I still have survivor's guilt over the 149 people whose Jeopardy dreams I shattered.

Many people wind up relying on those lights in that they wait for them, and that's usually a pretty good way to get beat.

What you're trying to do is sync your buzz to the lights, so that they happen simultaneously. It's difficult to pick up quickly, which is part of why there's a substantial home-court advantage for the returning champion each night.

Correct, IBM has said they would have been happy to OCR it, but it wasn't really relevant to the question-answering and gameplay skills that Watson was designed to explore.

I remember once there was a category where you had to match Marvel Comics adjectives with super-heroes. Amazing = Spider-Man. Invincible = Iron Man. This was in the Before Times when most comic book heroes weren't big-budget movie properties and nobody knew who Iron Man was.

I was delighted. It's the one time I remember thinking, "Lol, I'm going to sweep this category." (I did not say that out loud, though in hindsight that would have been pretty funny.)

There are no lovely parting gifts on Jeopardy! Not even in 2004. I was out of touch and thought there would be a avalanche of Rice-a-Roni, Jules Jurgensen watches, 1000 Flushes Blue, and Service Merchandise gift certificates.

You get a ballpoint pen when you try out and a picture with Trebek (and maybe a tote bag?) when you're on the show. Alex is a good sport.

Even the live studio audience gets better Jeopardy swag than the contestants do. My grandpa won the raffle one day and got a Simpsons Jeopardy board game! It was a pretty exciting day all around for the Jennings family.

Trebek is a joy. He's getting quirkier in his old age, so you never know exactly what he's going to say or do, but that's just part of the Tao of Trebek.

People who watch the show sometimes think he comes off as smug when people get the answers wrong, but this has always bothered me. His whole job is to correct people who get answers wrong! The show doesn't work if he doesn't!

To be fair this is mostly what it's like when I talk to my parents too.

He drives a pickup now. We all start out as Pimp 1960s Trebek and eventually turn into Grandpa 2010s Trebek.

The same as everyone else's: help register millions of people to vote for someone else.

I'm not particularly centrist, but I am probably the world's most prominent Trotskyite Mormon. All wealth should be stripped from the hands of the capital class--except game show winners, who got theirs fair and square.

Maybe I shouldn't out them here, but my mom is pretty apolitical, while my dad is getting more conservative with age. Although the Trump era has at least given him some second thoughts about his political viewpoint...or at least some self-awareness of what a bad look it can be.

The "prosperity gospel" is an abomination. My own faith tradition is not immune from it, though we're probably not the worst offenders. Mormons have that whole "thrifty pioneer stock" thing going on.

Jesus was pretty clear about the soul-destroying power of money. I was not someone who ever thought he'd be particularly well-off, but I've had to think about it a lot post-Jeopardy. I make sure I only use my game show money to fly around the world having adventures, like Scrooge McDuck in DuckTales.

Sure, that's all I meant. TV evangelists and megachurch personality cults are the low-hanging fruit. But anybody of any denomination who's ever told a Sunday school class that God will bless them with success just for being good Christians is shilling for the "prosperity gospel."

Trick question, there is no good place to eat on BYU campus. Provo, Utah actually has good restaurants now though! I was there again earlier this year and that Navajo cafe downtown is legit.

John and I were introduced at a party one year at Bumbershoot, a Seattle music festival. John Hodgman and author Maria Semple were the intermediaries, so it was a star-studded meeting!

I remembered John's academic air and asked him to play a scientist in a promotional video we were shooting for my book Because I Said So! and we really hit it off. We talked about doing a podcast for a while, because John is so good at it, but we never had the right idea. It wasn't until the Stuff You Should Know guys from Atlanta asked us to put together a show last year that we got serious.

We were flying to Atlanta in December to pitch them a show called The Worst (always about the worst ____ in history..."I'm Ken," "And I'm John...and this show is The Worst!") and realized on the plane that neither of us liked the idea at all. So we started over from scratch and figured out Omnibus somewhere over Tennessee.

The two most bang-for-your-buck lists to memorize are: 1. Presidents in order (and with their years) 2. World capitals (and their capitals)

I also did cocktails, current Cabinet and Senators, and university towns. Those all came up eventually, but you might have to be there for 74 games.

Brush up on your strong categories; resist the temptation to try to learn 500 things about ballet or college basketball or whatever from scratch.

They've been making the show for almost 35 years, it's a well-oiled machine. Generally it's "to time," so 30 minutes exactly with realistically timed ad breaks (during which Alex answers audience questions).

The only tape stoppage is before Final Jeopardy, so contestants have longer than the length of an Aleve ad to do their math. (And then in case of emergency, if they need to research an alternate answer or fix a technical glitch.)

Nope, pen and paper. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to use their phone.

Everyone has probably seen this by now, but I still feel like I was jobbed. Does it hinge on the spelling difference between "ho'" and "hoe"?

The guy on the end who eventually says "rake" came over to me during the break. He was a Lutheran pastor somewhere in the Midwest and was relieved that I had beaten him to the buzzer at first. He was ready to buzz in and say "ho" and his congregation never would have let him forget it. Imagine poor defrocked Al wandering the lakes of Minnesota, muttering "What is a rake?...What is a rake?" over and over.

I like the Adam Scott/Scott Aukerman REM podcast, both as an REM super-fan and as someone who can kind of tolerate an hour of good-natured improv.

In medieval times, this was exactly the theory. The church and nobles would let the peasants have their yearly "feast of fools" or whatever, because they knew they would work more happily afterward. "Wine barrels burst from time to time if we do not open them and let in some air," the Paris School of Theology wrote. Let's let the workers have their little satire, so they don't actually revolt.

It's easier, of course, to fire off a snarky tweet or share an EPIC JOHN OLIVER TAKEDOWN than it is to actually donate or march or call your Congressperson. And there's a 2006 study of Daily Show viewers that found that when Jon Stewart made fun of media and government, he wasn't making his viewers outraged... he was actually making them more cynical and less likely to take part in the democratic process.

tl/dr: Satire is great but it has some down sides when it's our only mode of engaging with current events.

There's an even more interesting Colbert Report study by the same authors. They found that Colbert actually made his audience more open to the conservative viewpoints he was pretending to espouse, even when savvy college audiences were tested.

I don't know if anyone understands the mechanism there, but it seems clear that making a point through satirical or ironic means does not have the same effect as making one straightforwardly and unironically.

Sature is mostly interested in tweaking the things it doesn't like. In PLANET FUNNY, I spend some time profiling comedy that argues constructively for the things it likes, verging on activism or advocacy. You see this on John Oliver's show, where he'll do a long segment on some pretty wonky topic by glamming it up with jokes. Or comedians of woke stand-up (Hari Kondabolu, Michelle Wolf) grappling seriously with issues of race and representation and feminism. Not just snarky takes on these issues, but earnest viewpoints.

This vein of comedy might not be a great fit for the Very Young White Men of Reddit, many of whom seem convinced that the great enemy of comedy is "political correctness" and "SJWs," but I think it's a really interesting development.

It...doesn't sound like you ever saw the Colbert Report, if you think it was in the business of making Republicans seem good.

Nowadays, of course, there's nothing short of a lobotomy that would make Republicans seem good.

First Reformed is fantastic. It's Bergman's Winter Light if you drop in the third act from Taxi Driver. American religious culture is fascinating and I love movies and books that take it seriously. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead books are in the same vein. (But without the barbed wire and suicide vests.)

I'm the original game show bad boy.

I think Jeopardy will switch to Bitcoin by the end of the summer.

Yeah the delay is like three months, so it was unprecedented to have people show up and recognize the sitting champion.

People were...not usually too happy. I started joining the group in the Sony parking garage at the last possible second to avoid the awkward silence and angry stares.

Tazatziki. Taramasalata reminds me too much of this weird Scandinavian fish roe that my Norwegian friend used to put on sandwiches when we were kids. It came out of a toothpaste tube! (Unless I dreamed this. What a weird and specific dream that would be though.)

John and I pride ourselves on not just summarizing the Wikipedia entry, we like to go back to original sources or at least book chapters and/or longform journalism. I usually study up for an hour or two the night before. John is much better at jotting down a few notes between shows and then just diving right in.

Brandon is great! He ran a Greek mythology-themed murder mystery party for us once. I think I was Mercury because I remember making a winged hat out of a foil pie tin.

I think I'd heard that he got a book deal, but I was already knee-deep in my first book when Elantris came out in 2005. His books sell way more than mine do, but mine don't have to have, like, gnomes and magic systems, so it's kind of a tie.

Hi Brandon! I’m glad you could all be here for this impromptu college reunion.

Stop Googling yourself, you have heavy books to write!

(I do a fun little trivia puzzle called "Kennections" twice a week for Mental Floss.)

I think getting the final Kennection should be the goal. In a way, it's almost more impressive if you can guess it without answering all five of the trivia questions.

Expert level: go back after you have the Kennection and try to use it to "back-solve" the questions you didn't know. It's fun!

It's a fair point, but it's innate to Jeopardy: there are always three contestants splitting the material, and they're usually pretty equally matched.

I do like the idea of going back and replacing Brad with someone at the third lectern who's just an idiot. Eric Trump, maybe? Rematch!

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy is your best one-stop shopping source for Jeopardy knowledge. See you on the show!

Reference humor is a fairly modern invention! I mean, there were topical jokes in comedy back to Aristophanes, but the idea that you could punch up a joke by naming a specific brand or obscure former celeb...that's not a common trick pre-Lenny Bruce or Woody Allen.

It's funny that reference humor is increasing in density and esoteric-ness even while our culture is fragmenting so that there are fewer references we all understand. That's the Dennis Miller thing where the joke reference is purposefully narrow, so that you get a laugh of self-congratulation from the "smart" audience member that can actually follow it.

("The Dennis Miller thing" is also where you get so messed up by 9/11 that you become a terrified, unfunny conservative pundit overnight.)

Brandon was years from being published but he still had a stack of thick fantasy manuscripts in the apartment...I assume he was in the middle of several 13-part series. He would follow our roommates around the kitchen reading them the latest chapters from The Chronicles of Kallivianesse (or whatever) while they were making ramen or whatever. I loved everything about this.

The funny thing is, the books were actually good! (Or got good, I guess, once he got all the bad ones out of his system.) Follow your dreams, kids. Annoy your roommates.

Wait I remember this! I think a friend sold his air mattress, which I had slept on one night before a Jeopardy audition or taping or whatever.

Did the air mattress actually have a hole?

Jokes aren't funny. I'm more into people falling down. Be honest: so are you.

The online audition is very hard, don't get down on yourself. I know people who had to try out many, many times before they got on the show (and did very well!)

If you're serious about getting on the show, there are things you can do to up your game. A guy named Michael Dupee wrote a (now out-of-print) study and training guide for Jeopardy that's very good.

Or you can just take the drugs that Bradley Cooper takes in Limitless. Either one.

No one knows, because in 35 years of Jeopardy no one has ever told a funny or appealing story to Alex Trebek after the first commercial break.

The Jeopardy rule is: contestant pronunciation doesn't have to be correct, but it has to be a plausible pronunciation of the correct spelling. So I guess the ruling was: "gangster" is not a plausible pronunciation of "gangsta," which seems right to me.

It can seem nit-picky, but Jeopardy has to be consistent about following their rules. Not just for PR reasons but for legal ones: it's still a felony in America to rig a game show, due to the 1950s scandals. Getting a ruling wrong might not just be a lawsuit, it could conceivably get the FBI involved. (Especially in the Trump era, where the government is likely to be pro-Wheel but anti-Jeopardy.)

I wondered this for years, and finally cornered one of them at a wrap party to ask. (In general, contestants don't get to talk to the writers, for obvious security reasons.) As he remembered it, nobody thought of the "ho" problem until after it happened.

As I opened my mouth, I realized "Waaaait a second there is no way the Jeopardy answer here is 'What's a hoe.'" But it was too late.

At some point, I think my Jeopardy run will be entirely forgotten except for this one answer. I will run for president in 2032 as the "What's a hoe?" guy and it will be my "Where's the beef?"

Watch again. Alex does a perfunctory, auto-pilot "No" and doesn't even register that something funny has happened until the audience starts to laugh. If it was a writers' in-joke, Trebek was not ready.

I actually did not discover it, though Atlas Obscura claims that I did. The Victoria Island lake was mentioned on some rando Geocities page or Usenet board or something, debunking some claim about a better known sub-sub-sub-island. I wish I knew who the originator was, so I could credit them now that I've publicized their discovery.

I did spend quite a bit of time trying to find a bigger sub-sub-sub-island and failing. So has Randall Munroe of xkcd fame, another map geek, though he told me he thinks there might be one out there in the tundra still...somewhere...

Is that the Kevin Smith show about fake "reality" goings-on at a comic book store? I saw it on an airplane once and was mystified.

I did this for my son's ninth-grade bar trivia team last month. (This bar does trivia in the all-ages area, apparently.) They were tired of perpetually losing and brought me in as a ringer.

I tried to warn my son that we might not win just because I was there...but then we ended up winning by a huge margin, so I think he probably learned several terrible life lessons.

I spent six long months wondering if Alex liked me or not, because he was doing that severe, implacable thing he does. All business. But I am a people-pleaser and wanted Alex to like me, dammit.

After that final show, he came back onstage (which never happens) in his shirtsleeves (!!!) and he was a little choked up (!!!!!!!!) "We're going to miss you around here, Ken." I couldn't believe it: he had liked me all along. Now we go fishing together and he is teaching me to whittle. (He is not teaching me to whittle.)

The federal laws governing game show security are pretty strict, so Jeopardy contestants aren't allowed to fraternize with anyone who might know the answers...and that includes Alex. It's always fun to see him and catch up, but we are LEGALLY ENJOINED FROM HANGING OUT!!!

1. Yes! The idea of a supercomputer having a prison bitch is extremely problematic in 2018.

2. Sure, what a great job! Work 4-5 days a month, all the Perry Ellis suits you can stuff in the back of your car. But the show is unlikely to offer the job to a former contestant when there are actually experienced hosts and broadcasters out there. Jeopardy isn't Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, to be given to the nice boy who follows all the rules and makes it to the end.

Yes. I'm at your front door right now and I'd like to share a short message about families.

They play Big Boggle instead of regular Boggle.

It is Kat Dennings.

I suspect that your caricature of religion as "the opposite" of all things sensitive, empathetic, non-judgmental, and intelligent might be inaccurate, or at least incomplete.

SPOILERS: the world will be full of good and bad religious people and good and bad areligious people for your entire life, better get your head around it.

I wrote about this in my first book, Brainiac. There is something about quiz culture that tends to attract a certain sort of aimless Mensa type who always has a lot of ideas and projects, but never an actual job.

Off the top of my head, I wonder if a lot of these very gifted people grew accustomed, from a very young age, to knowing every answer and acing every task with very little effort. At some point, they discover that careers requires decision and intiative and focus. People are going to stop handing you lists of puzzles to solve at some point.

There's also the fact that trivia people tend to be information-omnivorous generalists in a world where careers increasingly require specialization. How do you choose your passion when you're passionate about everything?

FleetWit is a fantastic trivia app. I play a couple times a day...and don't always finish in first place. It all comes down to the questions! Yesterday I didn't know Pensacola was in the Central Time Zone, but I randomly guessed something about the Vancouver Canucks that I didn't know.

I do. I feel like our culture of "riffing," where everybody has learned to master the rhythms of light-hearted jokes, has made me so good at quippy banter that I rarely have to use other conversational muscles.

Last month, for example, my daughter fell and broke her wrist. A lifetime of goofing around had prepared me perfectly to jolly her along through the pain with a series of dad jokes. But when a friend had a kid get in a serious car crash, I was much less comfortable with what to say and how to act. Irony culture had left me less able to cope with the thinner atmosphere.

I study the numerical density increase in sitcom jokes over the decades, and talk about genre-pushing comedies like The Big Short. But I do wish I had dug more into your point, the idea that all action-adventure movies are essentially comedies now. You're absolutely right. If the funny Thor makes more money than the two less funny Thors, you get "What are thoooose" memes in Black Panther.

One interesting factor that might start to push back against this at some point: global markets. A fast-paced comic sensibility doesn't translate as well for China as the punching and the big VFX setpieces.

I think I first saw this idea in an interview with Penn & Teller, so I would probably call it a Penn Jillette Moment.

We are probably just coming off a peak, actually, mostly HQ-driven. And if you live in an American city, bar trivia is unprecedentedly popular.

Brandon throwing some shade! Sounds like he holds the Shard of Extreme Jealousy.

My son got me playing HQ...I think I've won six or seven times? Total winnings like $43, lol.

I do some consulting for a trivia app called Fleetwit, which I enjoy more. It's more of a fantasy sports model where you have to "buy in" to the races, with cash prizes to the winners and a small hoe rake.

Faster paced. No host. A "challenge mode" where you can do take on other players one-on-one. Bigger prizes if you're good.

I imagine he is a generous and sensitive lover and doesn't need tips.

All of my AMAs are love AMAs. We are in love now.

Watching the show a lot is your best bet. You'll start to get your head around the "canon" of Jeopardy clues without even meaning to.

Michael Dupee's book How To Get on Jeopardy and Win is out-of-print, but it's a pretty good tutorial. The full text might be online somewhere? Not sure.

The other option is not to worry about improving, just kneecap your competitors Tonya Harding style. That's what I did.

He grew up and was in the original cast of Urinetown too!

Chunky all the way. Creamy is for sociopaths.

I think the Jumbotron applause-meters in sports stadiums are fake. Pre-recorded nonsense. Crisis actors.

The numbering system we use does, in fact, work according to secretly encoded principles of our own devising. There are three levels of craziness to it, because we thought it would be solved too easily.

Six months in, nobody seems particularly close to cracking it.

} // PEACE OUT BITCHEZ I GOT THAT TREBEK $$$ NOW!!!

You'll be back Rev.

Get better soon, DarthLysergis's Grandma!

I wrote the book because I'm deeply critical of the phenomenon, but it might be triggering for you to read about so many examples of it.

Yes! I am giving Barron Trump a devastating "purple nurple" right now as I type these answers.

Exactly, the tweet is arguing that it's ridiculous and cynical to deploy the president's children for political effect, not that it's funny when children are traumatized.

I don't want to name them, but there are conservative websites devoted to collecting the outrageous things that the celebs are saying on Twitter today, and mobilizing angry responses from aggrieved red-state moms and Russian bots. Snowflakes!

Easy! All you have to do is be interesting, stay well-liked by millions of people, and continue to produce insightful, successful work in your chosen field for well over a decade.

I feel like even with those tips, you're going to have a hard time, but I'm here for you.