An Interview with Ken Jennings

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An Interview with Ken Jennings

POSTED: Wednesday, January 23, 2008, 5:20 PM

Filed Under: Arts | TV Books

A: This pop culture fixture, who ESPN: The Magazine once called "smarmy [and] punchable," recently released the largest published trivia collection in American history.

Q: Who is Ken Jennings?

The 33-year-old Seattle native, of course, is best known as "the Jeopardy! guy," but he's also the author of 2006's excellent (and best-selling) Brainiac . Last week, he hit the bookshelves again with Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days (Villard Books/Random House).

The incredibly addictive 531-page tome hits you like a fact-shilling tsunami, each day of the year crammed to bursting with everything from date-driven ephemera (on this day in 1991, a New Mexico rock station played "Stairway" for 24 hours straight) to themed sets of craziness ("A Matter of a Pinion — questions about wings, avian and otherwise") to the stuff of twisted high school history quizzes ("Match each famous name to its owner's characteristic headwear").

Jennings (whose most triumphant Jeopardy! moment has been triumphantly immortalized on YouTube ) was kind enough to answer some of our burning questions about his book, his life and trivia in general via e-mail. Follow the jump to learn about his favorite non-trivial diversions, what weird stuff he knows about Philly and which presidential candidate he'd most want on his Quizzo team.

City Paper : As an occasional pub quiz player, I often find myself stymied by something as simple as wording. How important of a concern was the literal construction of your trivia questions for the Almanac ?

Ken Jennings: The layperson typically doesn't realize that trivia can't just be produced by opening the Encyclopedia Britannica to a random page and throwing a dart. Questions have to be composed very carefully. In just a few words you have to tell players what they're looking for with no ambiguity whatsoever (quiz show writers call this "pinning," because it "pins" each question to exactly one uncontestable answer), provide whatever hints you want the reader to know, and hide whatever information you don't want them to know, almost like a magician would. The best questions will even have a narrative arc, like a little short story — with a dash of humor, maybe, or a twist ending when the answer is revealed.

Above all, the listener has to care deeply about what the answer is, even if the subject is trivial. If the question or answer leaves someone saying, "Yeah, so?" then it fails. It's a tight, very demanding art form, like almost like writing a haiku or a villanelle. So yeah, the short answer is that every word in every question gets labored over carefully, to the point where I would often be telling myself, "Chill out, F. Scott Fitzgerald — it's just a trivia question."

CP: How did you organize all this information when you were putting together the Almanac ? Was it just one big Microsoft Word file?

KJ: I wish I could say I had a cabin in the woods papered with trivia questions on little scraps of paper, almost like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind , but actually the whole thing took shape in two pretty orderly word-processor documents, one for the questions and one for the answers. The almanac has a day-at-a-time calendar format, which really simplified the process. I didn't have to build up a database of 9,000 trivia questions and then figure out how to divide them up into categories — as soon as I had a quiz, or an idea for one, I could figure out where in the year it might fit and immediately attach it onto the calendrical "skeleton."

I kept them in one big document rather than breaking them up by month for one simple reason: It made it easier to search for which facts I'd already used. By the time the first draft was done, I had dozens of duplicates in there that had to be methodically stripped out. You don't want to ask people for Indiana Jones's real first name or the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere twice .

CP: Your Tuesday Trivia e-mail quizzes go out to players around the world. Are there any particular areas or countries that you've noticed score particularly high? Does somewhere really random like Luxembourg dominate?

KJ: The weekly Tuesday Trivia quiz on ken-jennings.com is pretty Americo-centric, a fact for which I had to apologize many times early this year when I attended the European Quiz Championships in Blackpool, England. Many European countries have a thriving quiz scene, it turns out. England and Belgium are the real superpowers, for some reason (Belgium?), but Norway, Finland, Hungary, Monaco, Estonia and several other countries competed as well.

CP: I've found that the most entertaining and fun parts of the Almanac are the themed sets of questions. Were there any themes that you really wanted to use, but they just didn't pan out in terms of finding enough (or the right) material?

KJ: Maybe it's just because I've been conditioned by a lifetime of Jeopardy! , but I really like trivia that comes neatly packaged in cutesy categories, as well. There was one quiz that ended up being shorter than I would have liked, because I had a hard time finding the facts to fill it out, but I hesitate to mention it because it's probably in poorer taste than almost anything else in the book. It's about killer trees: You have to match late celebrities to the kind of tree that killed them (in car crashes, plane crashes, skiing accidents, and so on). The quiz is probably called "Mourning Wood" or something hideous like that. Anyway, trees kill people all the time, but it's surprisingly hard to find out exactly what species of tree sometimes. I guess that never makes it into the police report. ("Authorities are looking for a large Manitoba maple ... ") I remember spending most of an afternoon on the Internet trying to figure out what kind of tree killed Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes of TLC, for example, but all to no avail.

CP: Which current presidential candidate would you most want on your pub quiz team?

KJ: If spouses can play too, I have to go Hillary here. She's bright herself, of course, but I was pretty impressed by Bill Clinton's puzzle acumen in that crossword documentary Wordplay . If spouses can't play, then Obama or McCain ... probably Obama. I'm a teetotaler myself, so we wouldn't even need Romney as a designated driver. Can you imagine playing with Huckabee? What if there were science questions? ‘No, no, it's a trick question! There were no such thing as dinosaurs! The earth is only six thousand years old!'"

CP: I don't have children, but I'm familiar with the bizarre phenomenon that is parental brinksmanship (particularly among dads). Do the parents of your kids' friends ever throw random questions at you and expect you to answer? What about in everyday life, like, a guy at the video store grilling you with obscure queries about Hal Hartley's early-early-early work?

KJ: I wish it was Hal Hartley questions at the video store. At least I'd have a chance at getting those right. Typically, it's even more random: The produce guy at the supermarket last weekend who took time out from misting eggplant to ask me, "What's the more common name for solid-leaf parsley?" Or the doorman at the hotel last week who wanted to know all nine vice presidents who succeeded to the presidency mid-term. I like to pretend that people like this didn't recognize me from TV, that they just ask questions like this to random passersby, possibly as a result of some sort of mental illness. It makes life seem a little more surreal.

Mindy Jennings

CP: I'm sure there were times during the writing of the book when you just wanted to step away from your desk or computer for a second and decompress. What's your diversion of choice when you want to get away from work?

KJ: Unfortunately, my routine was typically to get up and look through the fridge. That's the only downside of working from home: I gained five pounds writing each of my two books. Healthier options (i.e. there was nothing good in the fridge) include shooting baskets out back, working on the mural I'm painting on my daughter's bedroom wall or taking my kids to the park.

CP: My dad gave me an original Trivial Pursuit set that came out before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and I was shocked by the amount of questions that were no longer correct. In your experience, what categories of trivia are the most susceptible to the ravages of time?

KJ: This happened all the time while I was writing the Almanac . I'd no sooner write that Julia-Louis Dreyfus was the only female SNL-er to return as a guest-host than Molly Shannon would be announced, making my fact obsolete. I'd ask a question about Duke being the only back-to-back NCAA basketball champs since UCLA, and then Florida would repeat. But politics is the worst. There are new members of the Cabinet pretty much every year, new senators every couple years ... anything you want to ask will probably be wrong by the time your book makes it to the "remaindered" bin. If you never want to be wrong, stick with history. They haven't updated, say, the French and Indian War in a long time.

CP: I read that you're planning a third book that will have nothing to do with trivia. Any idea of what it WILL be about yet?

KJ: Writing nine thousand plus questions for the Almanac about killed me. As trivia aversion therapy, it totally worked. The next book will be geek culture-related for sure, and a narrative book like my first book, Brainiac , but I haven't yet chosen between two ideas that I really like. And I'm in no particular hurry — if I write up a proposal, what if it gets bought by somebody? Then I might actually have to write the damn thing.

CP: Finally, I have to ask — are there any Philadelphia-centric trivia bits you've come across in your research that are particularly memorable?

KJ: There are a couple cool things about Philadelphia that I didn't know before writing the Almanac . I didn't know that the kudzu that now crawls all over the southern U.S. (and R.E.M. album covers) isn't a native plant. In fact, it's all Philadelphia's fault: It's a Japanese species that first invaded the U.S. during the Philadelphia Centennial Expo in 1876. I didn't know that the Elton John song "Philadelphia Freedom" was written as a tribute to Billie Jean King. I didn't know that the word "Pennsylvania" is spelled with just one 'n' on the Liberty Bell. And I didn't know that Rocky Balboa's real first name was Robert.

Irene Young

Posted 2008-02-03 01:35:57

Dear Ken,

I've enjoyed reading some of your info on your website.  We send our love to you and your family.  Your name is mentioned periodically in the ward amongst the members, and we all wonder how you are doing.  Your Internet sites obviously let us know you are very successful.  We hope your family is well and okay.  If you can e-mail me a picture of the new baby and all of you, I will share it with the ward in Relief Society.



Best wishes,

Irene Young

jim

Posted 2008-08-14 21:53:00

what was ur last response to the last answer on jeprody?

Posted by Drew Lazor @ 5:20 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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