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And Quizzo was its Name... o

By Walbert Young

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The “Pub Quiz” is nothing new; there are documented instances of them happening in the United Kingdom since at least the 1970’s, and there were surely a few adroit individuals who had combined obscure trivia and mind-numbing alcohol even before that.

The word “Quizzo,” however, is a distinctly Philadelphian invention that can be traced back to the New Deck Tavern in 1993, where the Pub Quiz concept was introduced by Patrick Hines.

“Quizmaster Chris” Randolph ought to know – he started playing Quizzo in 1993, and has been a Quizmaster at several of the city’s bars and pubs for six years. Currently, Chris regularly hosts quizzes at The Draught Horse, 12 Steps Down, and El Camino Real each week.

“Pat Hines invented the word ‘Quizzo,’” Chris said. “He was asked if people were playing Bingo and he said, ‘No, we’re playing Quiz… o.’”

The name caught on, and Quizzo and other pub quizzes have since spread from Philadelphia and become popular throughout many other parts of the country.

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Why do people play Quizzo?

“I think that there’s a recognition that you get for actually knowing something,” Chris said, “especially for those of us who had a professional career. The bottom has fallen out of the economy and there aren’t a lot of jobs available now; there are all these mixed jobs where people make their own work, catch-as-catch-can.

“I’m in a society right now where most Americans are proudly ignorant of most things and those of us who worked hard to attain an actual education in most cases do not get rewarded for it, in anyway.

“So, I think that even if you just go with your friends to a bar, have a beer and get some god damn credit for a change for actually knowing something and not being completely obvious to the world around you - that’s a refreshing feeling.

“That’s sort of my tribe - the people who actually give a flying shit about knowing something - and, for the most part, they’re pretty good people.”

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This is where the magic happens each Monday. Chris writes his weekly Quizzos in this small room of his south-Philadelphia home, surrounded by his stash of books and records.

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Chris earns about $75-$125 (plus food and drinks) per Quizzo night, depending on the venue.

He supplements his income by selling books, music and movies online, but, he insists, “most of the things in this room are things that are mine. I may sell some things eventually, especially the things that I just have because, say, they have an outlandish cover or something, but the other things I plan on keeping because they’re either books that I’ve read – mostly nonfiction – that I’d like to be able to reference later… books that I haven’t read yet that I’d still like to get around to… and most of the music is staying, since it’s been built from 20-years plus of music fanaticism.”

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Chris writes, essentially, one quiz per week for the three venues he visits, though there is some room for changeability. While there is some variability amongst different Quizmasters in the city, Chris’s quizzes generally have six different rounds of ten questions each. A correct answer in each round offers more points than the last.

The first round is the “Easy Round.” Chris insists that this is the hardest round for him to actually write, since “easy” is in the eye of the quizzee, not the Quizmaster.

The second round is the “50/50 Round” in which each of the ten answers is one thing or the other. Did this event happen before or after 1945? Does this name belong to a current US Senator, or a Charles Dickens’ character?

The third round is the “Speed Round” and bonus points go to the first team to turn in their list, i.e., name 10 of the world’s top 20 avacado-producing nations.

The fourth round is the “Subject Round” and is the only one guaranteed to be different at each of the three venues in one week. Recent subjects have included Seinfeld, diseases and vacations.

The fifth round is the “Secret Themes Round” in which each of the answers to the questions are linked by a common theme, like the movie Animal House. Bonus points are awarded to all teams who correctly guess the theme.

The sixth and final round is the “Unreasonably Difficult Round” and is pretty self explanatory.

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While Chris might use books, the internet, and his own imagination as separate sources for Quizzo content, ultimately, each of his Quizzos get written by hand into his notebook.

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This old notebook contains nearly a year’s worth of Quizzos and score counts. Chris prefers to keep his handwriting small and neat.

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This is where the magic happens on Wednesdays. Wednesday nights bring Chris to 12 Steps Down, a basement bar in the Italian Market.

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Wednesday nights also bring out the team “Same Name as Last Week,” i.e., “Lil’ Roy Rogers Hornsby.” Some members come and go, but their core - Mark, Johnny, Jim, and Ed - have been playing Chris’s Quizzos since they started, and most of them have played against Chris before that.

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Lil’ Roy Rogers Hornsby has held the record for the most points scored in one of Chris’s Quizzos since 2008. When I first meet them, they’re sweeping the lead in the fourth week of a five week tournament sponsored by Chris - and with good reason.

“I often forget while I’m looking things up in the dictionary,” Johnny casually mentions to a teammate. On the two Wednesdays at 12 Steps Down that I see him, he’s wearing a characteristic black fedora, black sleeveless T-Shirt and black slacks. “I’ll look up 12 other words, then forget what I meant to look up in the first place.”

Johnny is devoted to the acquisition of knowledge, he tells me. “I’ve been reading the Encyclopedia recently. Maybe once or twice a week I pick it up, read, you know, eight or ten pages. I jot down information on stuff.”

Johnny pauses for a moment as he tries to explain his rationale. “I just like to know stuff. I make flashcards about things sometimes; I memorized the world’s capitals with flashcards. I just like knowing stupid shit. Maybe it’s because I fucked up in school so much – and, honestly, I really lack a proper education.”

Without skipping a beat, Johnny’s pitch drops as he quotes The Big Lebowsi: “I haven’t had the necessary means - for a necessary means for a higher education.” (Jim tells me later that Johnny has seen this movie at least six times.)

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Johnny also has this habit of writing down the hard questions so he can refer to them later. He’s been playing several Quizzos per week in Philadelphia for ten years.

Naturally, I’m a bit curious about his day job, so I ask.

“I work shipping and receiving at a super market.” He shrugs. “It’s what I do. I unload trucks. I wake up, I drink coffee, I go to work, I come home, I drink beer. That’s about it.

“I drink water at work,” Johnny adds. “It balances out the coffee and beer.”

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Johnny sweeps in to turn in Lil’ Roy’s scoresheet first at the end of the Speed Round.

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The rules of Quizzo dictate that answers should not be said aloud so Lil’ Roy writes possible answers downs while they brainstorm.

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“I think our team is good because we specialize in different areas,” Johnny says. “Like, I like geography and history. Jim knows… just a lot of shit. He’s the old guy. Our team’s good, too, because we’ve got a guy in his sixties, a guy in his fifties, a guy in his forties, I’m in my thirties. We’ve got a guy who knows science and astronomy, we’ve got a guy who knows a lot about black and white movies...”

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“I know stuff that other people don’t because I’m much older than anybody else,” Jim tells me. Jim wasn’t around when Johnny called him their token “old guy” but I’m sure they’ve had this conversation before. “So, that’s what I contribute. People come in and play and see if they can contribute or not. A lot of people can’t. They sort of drift away. If you can contribute, you’ll stay with the team. Everyone who’s here throws in a lot.”

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Ed has been playing Quizzo since its inception at Fergie’s Pub in 1994, when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Ed is the team’s tippler, and his enthusiasm for the game is readily apparent.

I”t comes down to brass tax,” Ed tells me. “It comes down to coming out and having a good time, and not getting too crazy about Quizzo… I saw a girl, once, studying state capitals before the game started.

“I was like, ‘No, you don’t need to do that. Just use what you got. Use what you know.’”

Ed has a knack for betting his life on answers during rounds. “I bet my life on a lot of things at Quizzo - and I’m still not dead,” Ed jokes.

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While Carmen is not a regular member of Lil’ Roy, she knows them all. Carmen randomly walked into Fergie’s Pub in 1994, unaware of the Quizzo going on inside. She overheard one team answering questions wrong, so she decided to help them out by giving them the correct answers.

That team happened to be Chris’, and she has known him and been entrenched in the Quizzo community of Philadelphia ever since.

“It was a male that first mentioned it to me,” Carmen tells me, “that, if a female says, ‘This answer is right, I know this answer is right,’ she’s very sure that she’s right – 90%.

“A male person, however, when they say the same thing, ‘I know this answer is right, I definitely know, I’m sure’ – they’re about 40-50% actually accurate…

“It might sound a bit wishy washy, but the difference between the two genders: a female will not swear that something is right if she doesn’t actually believe that it’s right. A male will swear on his life that something is right, even if he doesn’t know.” whether it’s right or not.”

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At the end of the fourth week of Quizmaster Chris’s Quizzo Tournament, Lil’ Roy is in the lead with a cumulative score of 560 points. The second place team, Anpan Man has a score of 486 points and the third place team, Nudist Baloonists has a score of 481.

Chris tells them that they’ve pretty much got the tournament in the bag, so long as they show up next week and don’t have a mental breakdown in the middle of a round.

Sure enough, Lil’ Roy won. Their prize was a gift certificate to 12 Steps Down and some nerdy books from Chris.

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“It’s an enjoyable way to spend an evening,” Jim tells me at the end. “It beats watching television. It beats a lot of things. You can watch the ballgame while you’re playing Quizzo. You meet different people on other teams, you get new people in… We win, and it’s cheap. It’s cheap beer, that’s what it amounts to.”

Ed notes, bluntly, that “Chris - otherwise known as Quizmaster Chris - he’s pretty fucking solid with his style.”

Johnny agrees: “Chris Randolph has the best quiz in the city I’ve ever played.”

While Carmen remembered playing pub quizzes in England long before she came to America in the 90s, she noted that, lately, it really seems to be catching on in Philadelphia. “I think it’s becoming in that way more of a city phenomenon,” she tells me, “and more of the young people are doing it more on a weekly, almost daily basis. Some of the people I know are doing it three days a week, every week, in different bars all over the city.

“Which is cool,” she continues, “because it’s better than just sitting in a pub, a bar, smoking and drinking and doing nothing.

“Anything that gets the brain juices flowing, you know?”

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