in memo Alex Trebek

[calimac]

the long-suffering (it seemed to me, from the shenanigans the contestants and the category listings put him through) host of Jeopardy!

Has anybody ever explained why they insist that answers be put in the form of questions? It's irritatingly artificial.

I am going to commit an open copyright violation here, because this is too good to leave out. The great Christine Lavin wrote words to the Jeopardy theme song:

Back in high school you were a square
Carried books and slide rules everywhere
You got straight A's year after year
They called you geek, they called you queer

For every one who laughed in your face
Now's your chance to put them in their place
Because you're on a TV show
Where your big brain
Earns
Big
Dough

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

Has anybody ever explained why they insist that answers be put in the form of questions? It's irritatingly artificial.

According to a number of Trebek's obituaries, it was a gimmick created in reaction to the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. For instance, from the NYT:

Merv Griffin, the talk show host and media mogul who created the show, recounted in “The ‘Jeopardy!’ Book” (1990) that he had been talking to his wife in 1963 about how much he missed the old quiz shows. But, he said, he recognized that the format had lost all credibility after revelations that contestants on some programs had been secretly fed the answers.

Well, then, his wife, Julann, had said, Why not give contestants the answers to start with and make them come up with the questions?

Sources differ on what the first answer/question example was.