As you know, I’m a big JEOPARDY fan. I’m way too dumb to be on it, but I like watching other smart people being rewarded for having intelligence. So my readers tend to ask numerous JEOPARDY-related Friday Questions. Here’s one that warranted its own post since I went right to the source to provide the answer.
Cecil Newson asks:
Can a person make a living writing questions for Jeopardy? Is it a stressful job?
Billy Wisse is the Co-Head Writer of JEOPARDY. I posed this question and he was gracious enough to respond.
Hi Ken. Yes, you can make a living writing questions for Jeopardy!. It can be a stressful job but you get to learn a lot, exercise your creativity and work with great people. And there is not a lot of turnover, so job insecurity is one stress we are generally free from. Or should that be “from which we are generally free”? As you see, the job does bring out one’s nitpicking side.
Hope this is helpful.
Billy Wisse
Co-Head Writer, Jeopardy!
Very helpful and greatly appreciated. Thanks, and I’m ashamed to say I got the Final Jeopardy question wrong on Monday night and the category was “Movie Comedies.” This is why I’ll never be on that show.
25 comments :
So his job is not in jeopardy.
There's someone standing behind the podium in that pic and it ain't Alex Trebeck. Sacrilege.
A friend who's worked on several game shows told me the goal is to have a full-time gig at either Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, or The Price Is Right, which are in no danger of going off the air any time soon. (Let's Make a Deal may also fall into this category.)
Another friend has produced two of the short-run game show revivals airing in prime time. Great gigs, but they're not full time.
eliminate the problem and put the emphasis at the end for transition ease
"one stress we are generally from is job insecurity"
I like the show, but to be honest, it's more about knowing trivia than it is about having intelligence. Intelligence is needed only sometimes to fathom the question out of the clue in the answer. And yes, I believe grammar dictates you don't end a sentence with "from." Though I just did.
Coincidentally I just recently rewatched the Frasier in which Niles comments on a letter that Martin is writing: "It's best not to end a sentence with a preposition." Martin writes another line and shows it to Niles, who says "Not to be technical, but 'off' is a preposition too."
I think the person at the podium is the executive producer, Michael Richards. They usually have other people hosting the run-throughs. Michael might be doing Jeopardy!’s run-throughs; he used to be a game show host.
Ken, thought you might be interested in this guest column in The Hollywood Reporter by a former studio executive turned restaurant owner about the current state of the independent restaurant industry.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dear-hollywood-support-the-restaurant-act-guest-column
I think these covid era episodes, where most of the contestants are local, have resulted in much easier questions than normal (kids/teen/celebrity episodes excluded). I know this because I'm getting far more questions right than normal. Some of them border on insulting. My guess is that the contestant pool is so small right now that they've lowered the standard of "intelligence," if you will. In other words, this is the best time for people like us to apply.
But if you're into winning $100,000+ in one day, you should practice your high/low card guessing. Card Sharks is giving away boat loads of money these days.
Jeez KB ... I had just finished composing an almost identical comment in Word and was going to paste it here and you stole my thunder. I was starting to think I was getting smarter but ... what you said.
I took the online Jeopardy test a few years ago and did well enough to be invited to try out. Unfortunately, the tryout was in a city several hours away, early enough in the morning that I'd have to stay overnight to be sure I'd get there on time. And I figured even if I did make it on to the show and did ok, I'd blow it on the final question.
Sue in Seattle
If the pool of contestants has shrunk, I wouldn't guess that it's because the pool is limited to local people(of which there are several million)so much as that people are not keen on gathering with a lot of strangers for the tryouts what with the pandemic hanging over them. You have to believe the kind of people who are Jeopardy contestants are the kind that are not in denial over the threat of Covid-19.
This seems like a great job for me, since aside from writing topical humor (where I have to get all the details of the news story correct or else my clients could get fired or sued), I'm also known as a trivia buff and write tons of material like my "Hollywood Hi-Fi" book on celebrity recordings and other arcane showbiz history. One of my earliest jobs was at a record store where people who didn't know what song they wanted would be sent to me to tell me a few words of the lyrics or whistle a few notes, and I'd tell them what it was. One of my favorite gigs I ever had was when I was hosting a morning radio show and had to write trivia questions for callers to win dinner at a local steak house. The PD eventually told me to make the questions easier so that more people could win. I told him I thought I was already making them too easy.
When I was a kid, Jeopardy was a favorite of mine. Back then there were actual paper cards for the clues. Art Flemming was the host and Don Pardo was the announcer who went on to SNL.
Years later I had a friend who was dating the tuba player during the the second season of SNL. She got us tickets to see a live taping. We met Mr Pardo outside Studio 8H. He was excited about his new Nike waffle sole running shoes, they were the cool new thing back then I guess. After the show we stood in the exit and had all the original cast members walk by us. All I really remember now was how short they all seemed.
Technically, isn't Mr. Wisse writing ANSWERS for "Jeopardy?"
M.B.
I,too,had trouble with the Monday question. I only figured it out at about the 28 second mark. So I wouldn’t have been able to write it down in time. About a week ago the catagory was Academy Award Actress. That was the one that I totally whiffed on. I completely forgot about Cher winning the Oscar for MOONSTRUCK in 1988.
Ooh! Ooh! I got the Hollywood Hi-Fi book years ago and have been inflicting cuts from the CD to my friends on various mix discs for nearly as long. I'll have to pull it off the shelf again now, but first let me Do the Lurch.
Friday Question:
I know reboots are kinda passé now, but if you and David Isaacs were offered the chance to head a revival of a past sitcom you worked on, which would it be?
I went to the Jeopardy! archive (j-archive.com) and looked over the clue, which actually made me agonize more than it should've, given the context. No shame in not getting that one.
>>There's someone standing behind the podium in that pic and it ain't Alex Trebeck. Sacrilege.<<
Yeah, some of us said that back in 1984 when it was Alex at the podium instead of Art Fleming. Things change; we have to roll with the punches.
You're humble in saying you're not smart enough to be on the show. Recently, there was an entire category on Yiddish. I'll bet you would have run the board without breaking a schvitz. (The contestants only go two out of five.) The writers must have had a blast researching this one.
Currently, all parts of the tryouts are being done online. So no worries about being in a room with tens of people.
To E. Yarber: You're the one who bought it! We got screwed by St. Martin's Press, who failed to get the book into stores in the pre-Amazon era, then immediately put it out of print because it wasn't selling. Every piece of fan mail we got said they had to go to eight book stores before they found a copy. We now have the rights back and have been working for years on an expanded, updated and corrected edition, but the problem is finding a way to publish it with all the photos it requires, without it being too expensive or having Amazon take 95% of the money. If you know any publishers who'd like to handle a new edition of the Arizona Republic's "Best Weird Book of the Year," please send them our way.
In the meantime, I invite everyone to hook up with us at http://www.facebook.com/hollywoodhifibook where I post updates, videos and other fun stuff about records that could be in HHF. In fact, it's about time for me to start inflicting celebrity Christmas records on people, like Barry Gordon's "Zoomah, the Santa Claus from Mars." You don't want to miss that.
George and I are also working on a YouTube series with a production company he's involved with that we hope to get rolling soon, if these virus germs ever go away.
Ken, I'm a big fan too and have enjoyed all of your Jeopardy related posts and podcasts. I too believe it would be difficult to get on because I don't have broad enough knowledge. If I did though, I would have two goals A) don't make a fool of myself and B) just make it to final Jeopardy. Its fun to know an answer to a question that none of the contestants get like "What dish made with black-eyed peas is eaten for good luck on New Year's day. Answer - one of my favorite foods - Hoppin' John.
I knew a young lady who wrote questions/answers for Jeopardy! She didn't stay with it very long and found a better job with the tobacco lobby. She was also very lovely.
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