Humor Is In Jeopardy!
Hello. Today we are talking to Drew Goins, the dreamy 30-year-old Washington Post Opinions writer and podcast host who recently made it into the second round of the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.
Me: On behalf of all of us out there who think we could easily be millionaire Jeopardy! champs if only we understood the mechanics of winning better than we do, I would like to ask you about something I noticed in watching you on a bar TV, as you were eviscerating the competition in the first round of the Tournament. I could be misreading this, but it seems to me that at virtually every moment you buzzed in, you had a clueless look on your face. Total spaniel-like, stupefied, dead-eyed. But in the three or four seconds that you got your wits together, you found the right answer. Is that true? Is a key to winning this sucker that you have to hit the buzzer when you think you MIGHT know the answer but your brain is still a-jumble?
Drew: First, I appreciate the careful description of my mid-game visage. Every time I watched myself slack-jawed on TV, I thought of Mary Poppins’s admonition that “we are not a codfish.” Second, there’s a whole bunch of debate as to the wisdom of preemptive buzzing. Some folks try to get in even if only the dimmest light flicks on in their brain; I needed a little more illumination than that – say, an answer comes to me but I’m not quite sure it’s right and I need to reread the clue. The exception is with anagram/missing letter/other wordplay clues. I trusted myself to get those in the time allotted even if I had no clue at buzz time.
Me: Has your amazing run on Jeopardy! affected your sex life? And please be very specific.
Drew: The greatest effect was on pillow talk, which was overtaken by reciting the U.S. presidents in order twice every night before sleep. The knock-on effect is accidentally calling your bedmate Warren Harding in flagrante delicto, which could be either a positive or negative depending on your thoughts on normalcy.
Me: Whoa!
Drew: What?
Me: I also repeat the names of the presidents in order every night! But not for any competition prep. I do it to confirm to myself I am not yet senile, at least not today.
Okay, so, I am now going to ask you a very specific Jeopardy! answer. (I know the logic and syntax of that is is wrong, but I don't see a way around it.). First, I need you to assure me, before God and the restless ghost of Alex Trebek, that you will not look up the answer in advance.
Drew: I’d sooner die.
Me: Splendid. I first want to explain the stakes here. Several years ago I asked this question, on Twitter, to Ken Jennings, after securing his promise, which he kept, that if he didn't know the answer, he would follow me for a full day on Twitter. HE DIDN'T KNOW THE ANSWER. He did, indeed, follow me, though he dumped me a day later as though into a toilet.
Okay, here goes: “He ran against FDR, and lost, in 1944.”
Drew: Oh, God. Sorry, that’s not my answer; God definitely beat FDR, though I think that was partway through that fourth term. Okay, I do not rightly know, so I shall attempt to deduce: I think Willkie was the previous election and then Dewey -- famously! -- went against Truman thereafter, so my best guess is one of them. I am going to suppose that Dewey kept his powder dry (and that Alf Landon did not seek yet more punishment), so … Who is Wendell Willkie?
Me: Well, you get half credit.
Drew: Dewey!
Me: Yep.
Okay, what kind of a name is "Goins"? It looks like it should rhyme with Groins, but I have learned from reliable sources that it rhymes with Cohens. You are not Jewish, are you? Or are you Norwegian or some weirdo ethnicity like that? (Not that any ethnicity is bad, except, you know, like, Walloons.)
Drew: When I had to do a family heritage project in elementary school, my dad told me the Goins background was “uhh, German”; genetic testing revealed a European medley with, unfortunately, 0 percent Ashkenazi. The most fitting descriptor I ever encountered, however, came via a piece of candy:
There is actually a somewhat funny backstory to the pronunciation of the name. We grew up rhyming it with “coins,” which hits ears very poorly and welcomes “groin” jokes; my parents still pronounce it this way. But when my brother joined the middle school football team, he wanted people to be able to cheer “go-ins, go-ins, gone!” and thus changed his own pronunciation. It took me like a decade, but I eventually adopted it as the better sonic option.
Me: Do you ever suffer from the Impostor Syndrome? And if so, how do you deal with it?
Drew: I suffer horribly. Coming up through the Second Chance Competition on “Jeopardy!,” having never won a regular-season game, how could I not? By the time I was in the Tournament of Champions, I was nearly paralyzed by it. Any time these competitors mentioned a fact I did not know, I had a vision of myself setting the show record for deepest score into the negative. Then I would think about how Wolf Blitzer very nearly did that and feel a bit better. But I also feel like an impostor throughout my life – within journalism, at the gym, out surfing. Sincerely, I have not found a way to get rid of it, but rather just chip away at it by, I suppose, doing things and then having them go pretty all right. Eventually you get a little momentum – but then the expectations for you get greater, too!
Me: You are obviously a very smart guy. What is the stupidest thing you've ever done? The rest of us would like to be encouraged.
Drew: There is a very tight lifetime competition between the instances I have gotten automobiles stuck in sand/snow and the number of times I have shown up to the airport without identification.
Me: Do you ever obnoxiously correct friends and/or colleagues when they get some small fact wrong? Do you ever begin this by saying "Actshually..."
Drew: I try not to do this, but there is one I allow myself as a treat and do without fail. Thankfully, it is seasonal: The twelve days of Christmas are following Christmas, not preceding it! And Advent (usually) does not begin on Dec. 1!
Me: In your experience, what ethnic group is the dumbest? (I am just effing with you on this one. We're done.)
Drew: Well, I do feel I have been subconsciously tricked into anti-Walloon sentiment.
—
Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls. No cheating. Guessing is fine:
—
Okay, here is the elongated button where you ask questions and make observations:
And here is the button where you comment if you are a paid subscriber:
And here is the button where you agree to give us $4.15 a month so you can leave comments and get to imperiously order me around, because you are my employer:
A very sweet and funny interview which, unlike the first commenter, I thought made a refreshing break from everything else going on these days. PLUS, I got all the questions right. So I'm feeling quite proud of myself.
The more things change... During that FDR-Dewey campaign in 1944, the Republicans were credibly accused of attempting to suppress the votes of those on active duty and denying that the Great Depression was, if not directly caused by, facilitated by, their party's policies. Then there were those attacks on family and disinformation as FDR noted in an after-dinner speech.
"These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or my sons. No, not content with that they now include my little dog Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent attacks…Being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out, had concocted the story that I’d left him behind on an Aleutian Island, and had sent a destroyer to find him at a cost to the taxpayer of two, or three, or eight, or twenty million dollars, his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since."