Bar trivia is ridiculous.

And it's only getting harder!

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You know how it is when you’re starting a new tradition, or even assimilating into a preexisting one. There are new rules and intricacies to figure out, a new overall cadence and a bunch of new people, and some number of other, stranger, newer things specific to that tradition that you can’t really figure out before you start. When I began doing trivia night with my girlfriend and her friends and their partners, I had been going through a couple of previous rituals and routines and a great many recurrent failed hobbies and more get-me-over bullshit than I care to remember. While I believed these pastimes would prepare me somewhat for this new tradition, I knew there would be stuff that I did not know how to do, and a vast amount of knowledge that I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

I started doing trivia nights somewhat consistently years ago, and I remember worrying at the time that I was too scatterbrained for it. My god-given Connecticut Instincts and master’s degree finishing should, in theory, make me uniquely well-suited to extended exposure to random tidbits about art and history. Even if I wasn’t privy to these structural advantages, it may be that as I get older/dumber/worse, guessing the answer to how many noses a slug has would start to feel more comfortable, and even somewhat natural.

I suspect this is more or less how HAL the computer felt while being turned off in 2001, but in the midst of a brutal work week/year/years, I’ve begun to feel a giddy and thrilling weirdness with Tuesday Trivia Nights at the neighborhood bar. Although I am not so happy to report that I managed to get a bunch of stuff very wrong—I have accepted that as an American living in fucking Toronto, I lost an American-themed trivia night. I was the only American there. What was supposed to be a fun way to relax and unwind devolved into me leaving the bar sobbing after answering a total of two questions correctly. I have accepted that I will never have any real idea of which condiment was originally sold as a medicinal cure for diarrhea, but everyone within a few blocks of me just saw me come second-to-last in bar trivia and thinks I’m a smoothbrain. The only thing that saved me from complete intellectual humiliation was the last-place team forgetting to submit their answers because they were too drunk.

I enjoy a challenge, but this is demoralizing. We need to have a frank discussion about the difficulty of bar trivia. I thought bar trivia would consist of 6th-grade science and songs from the ‘00s. Instead, it’s authors and world politics and Tony Award winners. Now I have to prepare by memorizing every country in Africa. Bar trivia should just be trivia about bars. Instead, I have to watch my girlfriend, who is currently working on her Ph.D., struggle to guess the author of Of Mice and Men. There was one trivia night when one of the questions was, “Who directed I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho?” and a group of Zoomers answered, “Some misogynistic asshole.” (Both were directed by Mary Harron). There was another instance in which the quizmaster asked a question about Toni Morrison, and I overheard a young white woman sigh loudly, complain that the person running trivia only cares about dead white men, and then spiral into a diatribe about how she’s a librarian and only reads didactic YA slop novels that have dropped within the past year or two and that it’s tiring that men like him only read other men. Anyway, I hear the secret is to go with a group and be the person who writes the responses; you never have to answer anything and you get the bragging rights that come with being a part of a successful team.

Our group won trivia the first time we tried, so we got cocky and went again the next week and the topic was “anime.” You can only answer “cowboy bebop” so many times before they ask you to take it seriously. We left during the third round.

Or, there’s a scenario like this:

Game Master: “The category for this round is Disney Channel Original Movies.”

My team of millennial women: “OH MY GOD! WE’RE GONNA CRUSH THIS!”

Game Master: “Question One. This man’s son was the key grip on seven Disney Channel Original movies, but left the industry to be a lawyer and now works with the UN advocating for humanitarian aid.”

My team of millennial women: 👁️👁️

When the second round is the “last lines of novels,” you know you’re in for a long night…

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