I’m watching the Arabic version of this famous quiz show. The stupidity of its format is very irritating. I don’t know weather the stupidity originates from the original version or is added in the Arabic version. What’s the point of giving answers in question forms? What’s so difficult about that? Or does it test contestants’ ability to form a grammatically correct questions?
Questions in the Arabic version go like this:
Presenter: It’s the longest play Shakespeare had written.
Contestant: What is Hamlet?
Presenter: Its a stupid quiz show, yet very successful.
Contestant: What is Jeopardy?
All answers given by contestants begin with “what is” followed by the answer. What’s the point?
It’s a gimmick that dates back to the original version of Jeopardy, which premiered a few years after the great quiz show cheating scandal in which the contestants were given the answers in advance of the shows. Jeopardy made itself distinct from those “cheating” shows because in Jeapardy the contestants are given the answers during the show and have to come up with the questions.
The concept probably seemed like an interesting twist on the conventional Q+A quiz show format when the show was created in 1964, and the show’s been stuck with it ever sense.
Some more info per Wikipedia:
"According to Merv Griffin, the idea for Jeopardy! began when he and his wife Julann were on a plane trip from Duluth, Minnesota to New York:
I was mulling over game show ideas, when she noted that there had not been a successful “question and answer” game on the air since the quiz show scandals. Why not do a switch, and give the answers to the contestant and let them come up with the question? She fired a couple of answers to me: “5,280” – and the question of course was “How many feet in a mile?”. Another was “79 Wistful Vista”; that was Fibber and Mollie McGee’s address. I loved the idea, went straight to NBC with the idea, and they bought it without even looking at a pilot show."
Jeopardy’s success was due to the questions. (By the time it came on, the quiz show scandals were long past, so that wasn’t a factor.) It was just the right mixture of difficulty – the questions were a mix of easy and hard, with plenty of “Oh, I know that. What was it?” mixed in. very entertaining.
It also helped that, for years, it was broadcast at noon. People would watch it on their lunch hours, and the urge to join in and shout an answer was irresistible.
This part of Jeopardy’s hook has always bugged me. How is Most of the “answers” on the show aren’t that straightforward and any pretense of giving the answer and answering back with the question went the window a long time ago.
I remeber a few times when Alex Trebec received the “answer” from a question, not in question mode. He just said “In the form of a question, please.” No penalty or anything else.
He only does that in the Jeopardy! round. In Double Jeopardy! he’ll wait for you to correct yourself, and you’ll get it wrong if you don’t.
I haven’t seen that happen in some time, though.
It’s the same with being too vague - in Jeopardy! he’ll ask you to be more specific, in Double Jeopardy! he’ll just wait for you to clarify. (That still happens plenty.)
I have seen times where people have blurted out an answer, not in the form of a question, and Alex says no, and another contestant phrases the same answer as a question and is correct.
This makes no sense to me. What does this have to do with lunch time? Or with the answer-and-question format (note that you even write ‘shout an answer’, when you’re supposed to ‘shout a question’)
What I find funny is that the “answers” would never work with the “questions” in real life.
If you asked someone “Hey, Doug, what’s a bat?”…
NO ONE would answer “The Jamaican fruit type of this emits high-frequency calls to orient itself in the dark!”
And from the same day’s show as the “bat” answer:
“Hey, Doug, I forgot-- what’s a sword?”
“After God expelled Adam & Eve from the Garden of Eden, cherubim & this flaming weapon were put at its entrance.”
Nowadays, Jeopardy’s main schtick is that it’s the longest-running and most popular of the quiz shows, with a reputation for (mostly) intelligent contestants. But of course, when it started, it didn’t have any of that, and so it needed some other gimmick to sell it.
Occasionally people will use the “Is it…?” form with no penalty. I vaguely remember one contestant consistently using “Is it…?” throughout the single Jeopardy round, but by the Double Jeopardy round, he had mysteriously switched to the more usual “What is…?” form.