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The Pursuit team has three private categories into which most questions fall. The hardest ones are "stoppers," designed to trip up the trivia fiends. "In one edition," Abbott recalls, "we asked what hospital room number Ed Norton of The Honeymooners stayed in after being injured in a sewer explosion. Nobody in his right mind would know that. But somebody will." At the other extreme are the "mongies" (for mongoloid), "for people who are brain-dead at 1 in the morning," says Chris, "and they'll still get them right." Most questions, though, fall into "the broad middle ground, where any player feels he has a fair shot," says Chris. The best of these questions are the "snappers," short punchy questions with a kick. "Trivia," says Abbott, "isn't 'Who is Vanessa Williams?' Trivia is 'What's the name of the girl she posed with in all those pictures?'"
If Trivial Pursuit has suffered less from overexposure than the former Miss America, there are good reasons. First, the game is fun for more than one: you can be intellectually humiliated by all your friends all night long. Players must also exercise that most traditional of game skills, brain-mouth coordination; this is Pac-Man for smart people. Finally, the game exploits the baby-boom generation's love of disconnected facts. For anyone who came of age amid the blitz of ten-second commercials, three-sentence radio news reports, rock videos, the burgeoning soft-news industry and movies that are all special effects and incoherent plots—for anyone, that is, who has been trained to digest random bits of information the size and nutritional value of Pretz-l Nuggets—Trivial Pursuit is like condensed mother's milk.
As their empire has expanded, Abbott and the Haneys have hired a fact checker, to avoid repeating such mistakes as crediting Aldous Huxley with coining the phrase "brave new world" (it was Shakespeare). And with this marketing phenomenon have come the galloping imitations. More than 40 trivia boards are now available, from a Trivial Pursuit prototype, Jeopardy, to games sponsored by TIME, People and TV Guide. There are quizzes on Bible history and rock music, and the inevitable Sexual Trivia, with its searching questions on sperm counts, necrophilia and tribal puberty rites.
None of these games have so far led the public to beat a trivial retreat from the one and only. Nor are they likely to as long as its creators can keep tickling the cerebrum with flashes of wit and macabre whimsy. Back at the motel, Chris Haney rehearses a question from Genus II: "What did Stan the Wonderdog, the first dog in Spain to be fitted with contact lenses, not see on his first day wearing them?" Abbott chimes in with the answer: "The car that killed him." —By Richard Corliss. Reported by Adam Cohen/Toronto