Quizbowl
Quizbowl is a trivia game played between two teams of doughy men of European or South Asian descent. Quizbowl gives participants an opportunity to unleash the testosterone that they are too uncoordinated to unleash in athletic competition. Richard Simmons holds the copyright over the Quizbowl game format in the United States.
Much like their athletic counterparts, top Quizbowl players are known for their sexual prowess and ease in attracting women. Noted Oral Roberts player Jeffrey Tambor claimed to have bedded over 10,000 women, including Lindsay Lohan.
In order to play Quizbowl, the teams first find a vacant, smelly classroom in a basement on a high school or college campus. Each team consists of four players, except:
- In Illinois, a fifth is added in honor of Casimir Pulaski.
- In Arkansas, the fourth player was eliminated after several schools were unable to muster four Quizbowl players from anywhere in the county.
Although the composition of a Quizbowl team varies from school to school, most teams will put in a player from the following positions at least once a match. Each position represents a character from a particular Peter Paul Rubens opera, the title of which the captain would have remembered if he only had a few more seconds:
- The captain, who represents God in Quizbowl matches. He blamed for getting bonus questions wrong after his teammates tell him the wrong answer. Nonetheless, he accounts for 92% of his teams' points. His goal is to memorize the Almanac.
- The aggravator, who represents Curly. His task is to draw both teams' ire by buzzing in on a simple math question and answering "cheese". This makes his team want to kill him for in effect giving the question and points to the other team, while making the other team furious for his unhumorous answer. This became the most controversial position in recently after Fort Smith (Arkansas) Southside won 3 consecutive state championships and became a national contender using a strategy of answering "trans-oceanic aggressors" on every question in the early nineties. The dispute over the aggravator position has died down in the last few years after Southside and other teams emulating this strategy have had increasingly mixed results with it.
- The ostensibly cool guy, who represents the red ranger in that he, while cool in theory, has not attempted to answer a question in a Quizbowl match in 3 years. He understands himself to be the only vital member of the team, despite the efforts of his teammates to explain that the top priority of the game is to get points. Famous ostensibly cool guys include The Fonz, Ricardo Montalban, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
- The perplexor, who represents Jar Jar Binks. His task is to get the other team's aggravator to stare at his "object of dumbfoundment". This may be either a baseball card, old gum, hat, inkjet image of Homestar Runner, or, in Maryland, a stuffed animal. He has correctly answered all 2 questions to come up about Godzilla in Quizbowl matches.
A Quizbowl game consists of 37 tossup questions and 44 bonus questions. Each tossup question is worth 9.2 points if answered correctly; an incorrect answer costs a team -3.64 points and the player who gave the incorrect answer receives an electric shock. If a player answers correctly, his team receives a bonus question that can be worth anything from 1 point to 261.4 points. Some zealots have argued that in order to make the game more fair, all bonuses should be worth the same number of points. Those people are ostracized by most Quizbowl players.
After much debate in the late 1980s, it was decided that the winner of a Quizbowl match would be the team with the most points when the game ends, unless of course, the moderator decides that O.J. Simpson is more worthy of the win.