On Friday, Alex Trebek’s last “Jeopardy!” episode will air, closing his remarkable run on the show. For future anthropologists, the beloved host’s historical contribution may not be his status as trivia icon, but rather his friendly role in the show’s awkward small-talk sessions. The real test of a contestant’s mettle on “Jeopardy!” often begins after the first commercial break, when competitors put down their buzzers and tell Trebek about themselves. Described as “the oddest 2 minutes of television” by Chad Mosher, the creator of a “Jeopardy!” stories Twitter account, the anecdotes can be captivatingly bland: what does the contestant who likes telling “dad jokes” have in common with the one who was once at an “incredibly cold football game” or the other who tried to jump-start a car, only to make the cables melt? Through their narratives, these contestants are engaged in what the sociologist Harvey Sacks called “doing ‘being ordinary.’ ” The verb “doing,” in this curious formulation, suggests the work that being ordinary takes, and points to the effort involved in constructing an agreeable and innocuous social façade.
Sacks was a “conversation analyst” and a university lecturer in California until his untimely death from a car crash in 1975. With sources ranging from Nathalie Sarraute’s writing to tape-recorded telephone chats, he set out to scrutinize the everyday stories that people tell and came to see that what is even more interesting are the non-stories we most often relate. Even when we describe supposedly exciting experiences like a recent date or a sunset, we go out of our way, Sacks noticed, to report only the commonness of what occurs. In his view, we are all constantly scanning situations for ways to affirm our normalcy: “What you look for is to see how any scene you are in can be made an ordinary scene,” because this is what society rewards.
Sacks asks us to imagine if, instead of being ordinary, we were to come home from work and describe “what the grass looked like along the freeway; that there were four noticeable shades of green, some of which just appeared yesterday because of the rain.” In this case, Sacks warned, “there may well be some tightening up on the part of your recipient.” If you were to make such unorthodox reportage a habit, you might lose friends, and people might find you strange or pretentious: “That is to say, you might want to check out the costs of venturing into making your life an epic.” Sacks argued that banal speech, far from unworthy of study, offered insight into the hidden structures of the social contract.
Sacks would have found a gold mine in the interview archive of “Jeopardy!” Hobbies, brushes with celebrity, animal encounters, and travel highlights are all popular sources of banter, along with self-perceived eccentricities or quirks: “Teachers had trouble saying my name in school”; “I’m a right-hander who does crosswords with my left hand.” The prosaic nature of these stories is all the more striking given how they are supposed to represent the most noteworthy things about the raconteur. In an interview from Season 26, Trebek introduced a college student whose information card described her swimming accomplishment..
True to Sacks’s point, the contestant is quick to deflate any claim to drama or distinction. Her quick pivot from the notable to the mundane enacts the occupational ordinariness that Sacks painstakingly described.
When contestants have qualified to appear on “Jeopardy!,” they are asked to fill out an interview sheet, including five interesting facts about themselves (“keep it upbeat,” the instructions advise), as well as a questionnaire, both of which are turned into the chat cards used by Trebek for the interview segment. When Ken Jennings, who holds the longest “Jeopardy!” winning streak, ran out of stories to tell, he confessed that he had made some of them up, ultimately amassing more than seventy. The hokey anecdotes that he’d unspool are models of the form, demonstrating his mastery not only of trivia, that most innocuous and nonthreatening form of intelligence, but also of the game show’s behavioral conventions. As he recounted,“Alex would look at my card and be like, ‘Hey, Ken, it says here you really like airline food.’ And I’d be, like, ‘I do, Alex—I kind of think it’s a fun treat!’ ”
Though the interview segments offer a reprieve from the competition’s intensity, they extend the show’s question-and-answer format and also its performative pressures. When they don’t go off the rails, what they stage is the nail-biting feat of transforming a situation of extreme social pressure into forgettable television filler. There is probably no better theorist of the coup of seeming ordinary than the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose own studies of everyday talk referenced Sacks’s. Goffman is known for his dramaturgical analysis of social interaction in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” but as important as the theatrical analogy was to Goffman’s sociology, so was his view of conversation as a “game.” In his essay “Radio Talk,” Goffman argued that the seemingly benign small talk that fills our airwaves is actually composed of a series of calculated moves and countermoves in which the slightest stumble can result in an embarrassing loss of face. He maintained that mediatized interviews mimic the bouts of informal bandying that make up our everyday lives: “Catching in this way at what broadcasters do, and do not do, before a microphone catches at what we do, and do not do, before our friends. These little momentary changes in footing bespeak a trivial game, but our conversational life is spent playing it.” Bear this game in mind during your next Zoom meeting.
Goffman’s and Sacks’s accounts of the rewards conferred by being ordinary couldn’t find better corroboration than in the American game-show industry, where prizes are literally doled out to those competitors most in tune with the mentality of the majority. In “Family Feud,” for instance, families compete to come up with the commonest, most predictable responses in order to win. The show favors those who can most instinctively inhabit the median response. Likewise, “Wheel of Fortune” deconstructs common phrases into consonants and vowels so that the audience can breathe a sigh of relief when they are reassuringly put back together again. Critics might describe the hosts of these programs as accessories to capitalism’s conformity sweepstakes, but, for contestants, they can be benevolent guides through the choppy waters of the reputation economy.
In our viral culture, “Jeopardy!” contestants likely have a new social wariness: don’t become an embarrassing meme. If we cringe watching these anecdotes unfold, it is because they present an inverted mirror of the scripted biographical tidbits we all carry around in our pockets, ready to deploy at the first conversational lag. On such occasions, we should all be so lucky as to have an interlocutor like Trebek, who gamely salvaged our ramblings, steered us back on course when we strayed, did not bat an eye when we stuttered or bungled our sentences, but, like the best sidekick, playfully followed up with a helpful question or normalizing rejoinder. “Can’t trust cats. I love ’em, but you can’t trust ’em,” he responded to one more yarn involving a mischievous feline stunt. Yet another revelation of the “Jeopardy!” anecdote is not what it says about the culture, or even the teller, but the window it offers into the character of the listener.
