Did you think I forgot you?

No such thing. I was waiting for Jeopardy, since I knew that was what I wanted to post about today. Specifically, the ridiculousness that is Celebrity Jeopardy.

I have a total love-hate relationship with Celebrity Jeopardy; LOVE that celebrities come on and play for charities; HATE that you can play the entire game with a 6th grader and both of you will get more answers correct than the celebrities.

Ok, I know we all know just how bad Celebrity Jeopardy is; SNL's take on it was amazingly funny, and sadly, not too far from the mark.


Sean Connery wasn't on the roster tonight, the contestants were Harry Shirer; Isaac Mizrahi, & Soledad Obrien (who happens to be the subject of a hilarious post by Dooce today, btw). I'm going to start off by saying that tonight's players screwed with my post. Because they mostly knew what they were doing, managed to get through a large portion of the board, and actually had a semi-difficult Final Jeopardy question (which caught two of them).

However, they are not the norm. And even in tonight's good showing, there were more than a few softball questions.

In the category new - someone recently married (newlywed)

Under 11 - in blackjack this card can be either 1 or 11 (Aces)

For Fly Overs: Heading North from South Dakota, you fly over this state before hitting Canada (how about North Dakota?)

And in Double Jeopardy, the supposedly more difficult round,
Under C - "nn" : A cozy little hotel, maybe for a honeymoon

But maybe they need the help: most often, the celebrities forget that if they get it right they get to choose the next question, waiting for Alex's prompting or who knows what. They also usually don't get very far in the boards, since we have to waste time with musical guests (who I happen to like in other circumstances, but in Jeopardy? When there's about 34 seconds for the question? No thanks.)

I get that it's for charity, and that you don't want to make the celebrities look stupid, but isn't asking them questions that are ridiculously easy really just saying: "We all know that you're too dumb to actually play this game with the real questions, so we'll give you the easy ones."


Again, tonight's questions were a bit harder than last week's: not entirely insulting their intelligence. Instead dumbing it down just enough for them to make it through the DJ round and rack up some good scores.

But then they went and ruined it by having a "stupid answers" category. As if they all weren't stupid answers.

Case in point:

Last week the question was something like this:

Celebrity relatives

Her grandmother, Louisa Drew starred in a play with John Wilkes Booth. (they said the name of the play, but I don't remember it)

Two of the celebrities wrote down NANCY DREW, for god's sake. Nancy Drew is A) not a real person; B) not a celebrity & again, a FICTIONAL CHARACTER!!; C) not likely to be related to a real live person, since she exists only in books.

The actual answer was Drew Barrymore.

It's nice of the celebrities to do things for charity, and it's nice that the show will pay the charities as much as they do (certainly larger payoffs than any of the contestants manage to get.)
But wouldn't it be better if you could show that the celebrities have brains?

I mean some of them must ~ right???

Alternatively, they should just let Will Ferrel host.