Ken Jennings: Not-So-Trivial Pursuits

You’re listening to a minicast edition of A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

Today we’ve got a few minutes with Ken Jennings, the quiz master and the all-time Jeopardy champion. Ken can be found at his website at ken-jennings.com. Welcome to the program, Ken.

Thanks for having me.

I did read your website. I read the FAQs so that I wouldn’t ask the same old questions, but I kind of have an inverse to some of the questions that you tend to get asked over and over again. What is it like when you fail? Are there special circumstances that come up to that? Is there a thing that you didn’t do or a thing that you didn’t do properly that leads you to know that you’re like, oh, I’m not going to get this. Today is not my day.

You know, I fail all the time because people see you on a game show and they think, well, this guy’s done very well. Clearly he’s some kind of omniscient trivia computer. No matter what I ask him, he will know. So when people try to stump me with trivia questions, it’s always something like, you know, where did my mom used to buy shoes in the 40s? Or, you know, I remember one guy, I was giving a talk in elementary school, and a teacher wanted to know what was the name of Clark Kent’s apartment building on the old Superman TV show. And I, you know, I try to play along, and I was like, oh, I don’t know, that’s a great question. I don’t know, you tell me. And he’s like, of course you don’t know. It’s only in one episode. You know, he was very happy about that.

Right, right, right. I think in person I tend to disappoint people a lot with my trivia fallibility. And that’s okay. I think it’s a lot more fun for them if I get it wrong. That’s my theory.

Sure. They have a story to tell about how they stumped Ken Jennings, right?

Exactly. They have a story, and I don’t have to think as hard, and everybody wins.

Right, right. So you’re in the middle of a series of questions. Let’s say that you’re on any one of the shows that you’ve done or are currently doing. You’re in the middle of a series of questions, and suddenly you don’t feel so well. You feel sick. Do you have any mind games or any kind of way you trick yourself into staying in the zone to do this stuff correctly? To come up with the right answer?

The weird thing about TV quiz shows that you don’t really see at home is just how fast it is. Maybe even watching at home, something like Jeopardy feels pretty brisk. But when you’re in the studio, it is like a freight train bearing down on you. You know, you don’t have time to breathe. I mean, you are just barely trying to stay afloat, you know, as you’re drowning in all this Canadian-accented trivia from Alex Trebek’s lips.

Right, when in doubt, say hockey. When in doubt, say, what is hockey, right? It’s just like the trivial pursuit thing. But, yeah, there really is almost no chance to adjust to any kind of, you know, psychic weakness. It’s brutal. People don’t understand that it’s like playing rugby or something. That was the revelation to me.

When you did the big run on Jeopardy!, which was fantastic, you recorded multiple episodes in a single day, right? You didn’t go down there week after week to record them one at a time.

Right. I was making multiple trips down to L.A., but they do five in a day. They do a full week’s worth of shows in an afternoon. So if you win, you’ve got to put on a new tie and get right back out there and pretend it’s a whole new day. And I just remember at the end of the day, my feet would hurt because it’s not like millionaire. They don’t let you sit down in a nice cushy seat. And my brain would hurt.

And it’s well-paid work, I guess, but it’s a long day.

There’s a little bit of inside baseball that I love about the quiz business.

And it’s the guys and gals who write the questions.

And you do a bit of that, don’t you?

Over the years, you’ve written some of the questions that are asked of other contestants.

Yeah?

I do.

I’ve worked for an organization that puts together questions for high school and college quiz tournaments, including some local TV shows.

I have a weekly email quiz on my website at ken-jennings.com.

I have seen it from the other side of the room.

People just don’t realize.

People think trivia questions must come automatically from a book or a computer or something.

They come out of fortune cookies, don’t they?

I think that might be it.

It’s actually a very tight-controlled art form.

Yeah, Bazooka Joe, right?

It’s like writing a haiku or a villanelle or something.

It’s this very tight, constrained format that really requires a lot more work than people suspect to get the trivia to work right.

So these are unsung American heroes, I think, the people who write our trivia.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

But there’s probably a little bit of recycling in there, right?

You can rephrase a question or invert the question so it sounds different, but it’s basically the same fact.

It’s true.

Even just being on Jeopardy for a matter of six months, I would start to get questions right because I had remembered getting them wrong the last time I heard them on the show.

It was like, oh, three weeks ago I said Johnny Cash there, but it’s actually Merle Haggard.

And that happened three or four times.

So it does show you there is just a finite universe out there of what people actually know.

There is a canon.

Ken, you’ve had some great success as a quiz player and a quiz master yourself, but have you reached that pinnacle yet?

What is the thing that a quiz lover aspires to?

What is the lifelong dream?

I mean, if you were to say the best of all possible worlds where the quiz guys ruled, what would that world look like?

It is sort of funny how, you know, I think various kinds of quiz games are, you know, they’re a pastime for probably millions of Americans, probably sort of nerdy, pasty-skinned.

Americans, but nevertheless, you know.

But despite the fact that it’s so popular, there really is no sort of national trophy.

Your big money championship.

I mean, you can watch the spelling bee on TV, but there’s no equivalent for trivia nerds.

And for me, that’s why Jeopardy was always so meaningful.

That was the thing I raced home from school every day to watch, and it’s just a huge part of my childhood.

And I actually idolized these people.

I started answering the questions.

Now that I’ve grown up and I’ve become one of those people, I see they’re mere mortals.

They’re just soccer moms humoring their kids or professors who haven’t earned tenure yet and need a little extra money.

But at the time, I thought, these people are geniuses.

These people are trivia gods.

And that’s why it was so fun to actually go on the show.

You know, it’s the closest thing we have to a World Series of Trivia in America, I guess, would be this 25-year institution, Jeopardy.

But we could have one of those, right?

We could have a worldwide quiz bowl or something.

You know, in Europe, where pub quiz is very popular in countries like the U.K. and Belgium and Estonia, oddly, you know, there are some of these international tournaments where these people get together to play off on very, very, very esoteric trivia.

And I went to one of them, and the questions were all about, like, South Korean folk songs and Austrian beekeepers and Slovenian Olympic fencers.

And I was blown away by the difficulty of it all.

It makes Jeopardy look like, you know, like a—are you smarter than a fifth grader, I guess.

Right, right, right.

That’s it.

Wow, I didn’t realize that.

There is a little bit of pub gaming in the U.S. in New York City and in Boston, but it’s not very widespread.

You’re right there.

Well, Ken, that’s all the questions I’ve got for you.

I want to thank you for taking a few extra minutes to talk to us today.

It was a pleasure.

You can find lots of past shows that you might have missed on our website at waywordradio.org, as well as information on subscribing to our newsletter or participating in our discussion forums.

And if you’d like to hear A Way with Words on terrestrial radio, why not write or call your public radio station and tell them about our program? They’d love to hear from you.

For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett. Thank you for listening to the program today.

I want to tell you, though, before we go, that A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed. That means we depend on you to help us pay for the cost of producing the show.

Consider making a contribution to help keep this program strong. Just go to waywordradio.org/donate.

Thanks.