Jeopardy!

Ever since I was a kid I've loved watching Jeopardy! My family is a tv family, and there were many times that around the 7:30pm hour we would sit down for dinner in front of the tv. It was either Jeopardy or Entertainment Tonight. My parents always preferred Jeopardy, and except for a brief period during late middle school where I ate in my room to Entertainment Tonight, I would watch with them, and routinely kick their asses. Every once in awhile my mom or dad would win, but for the most part I would get the most questions right (notably, I also became very adept at guessing what the contestant would wager on the Daily Double).

I always thought that I won because I was smarter than my parents; hell, I was a straight-A student, so as far as I was concerned I was the genius in the family (it made no difference to me that my mother and father were also very strong students in their day). Then something peculiar began to happen. My younger sister started getting older, and somewhere around 8th or 9th grade she started getting the most questions right. Mind you, at this point I was in my early 20s, either graduated or nearly graduated from college, so I was at a point in my life where my brain should've been the sharpest. What the hell was going on?

It was at that time that I first hypothesized that younger people get more questions right on Jeopardy because they are studying useless shit like historical dates and scientific terms which appear frequently on the show. Moreover, they are more in step with present-day culture which I've seen trip up more than a few genius Jeopardy champions.

As I sat down with my study-break spaghetti dinner, it was around 7:42 and the only thing worth tuning in for the last 18 mins was my old favorite Jeopardy. It's not as much fun without others to play with, but I was desperate and I wanted to try my luck at modern questions. They had just begun the Double Jeopardy round when I tuned in. I think I got 2 questions right - both having to do with movies.

What's this got to do with my old days of glory? Well, let's take a look at a couple of categories and their ranking questions. The two questions I got right in the "Moviephone" category were the first question - worth $200 - and the last - worth $1000. The first question described a movie premiere in 1939 in Atlanta - duh, Gone With the Wind. The next three questions had to do with movies pre-dating 1970, and the last was the 1989 Spike Lee joint taking place on a hot July day. Clearly, the "easy" questions were skewed to an older audience and the harder one, the most valuable one, was something younger people can easily tell you is Do the Right Thing.

But this example isn't the best. In the category "Double Words" in which you had to guess the word that was made up of two other words, there was a clue about an Adam Sandler movie (Spanglish) and a clue about a spork. Again, the younger crowd is very familiar with Adam Sandler and sporks, but your parents? Well, at least mine, Not So Much. Furthermore, the Daily Double in the round (which, I might add was under the $600 clue, and the spork was under $800) asked what two words made up cyborg. The lady answering and I had no fucking clue. The answer: cyberkinetics and organism. Now, I'm not saying your average high schooler could guess that, but since those words are used more in their daily lives of biology and shop class (maybe?) or science, they definitely have a deduction advantage.

So, are kids these days really more intelligent? Perhaps, but don't let Jeopardy! fool you. Those fuckers are just more engrossed in trivial matters than we are. After all, they don't know shit about mortgages and taxes...oh wait, neither do I. Damn. Maybe they are smarter than me after all. How the hell did this happen? I'm in law school, right? We'll have to leave this for another day, I think Real World: Key West is on and the anorexic girl cries and screams every time she gets drunk, so I don't want to miss what crazy hijinks happen next.