The Whig brings back trademark trivia

One of Columbia’s favorite trivia nights is back.

The Whig’s weekly trivia (Called Trivi-Yeah! on Facebook) returned after a nearly yearlong hiatus last week. The weekly feature is now a Monday event, moved from its traditional Wednesdays. Trivia, much loved and missed by Whig regulars, will be paired with the bar’s regular Monday $3 house liquor special.

Trivia at the Whig runs the gamut of categories and is often quite challenging, with teams working hard for the grand prize of a $50 bar tab. Eric Bargeron, editor by day and trivia master by night, writes 50 new questions each week – 10 questions for each of five rounds – with a twist on the traditional categories.

“For example, a ‘Bird’ category might have a question about the extinction of the Carolina parakeet, but it will also have a question about the Jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, whose nickname was ‘Bird,’ and then maybe a question about Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘The Birds,’” Bargeron said.

The quirky and diverse questions are designed for trivia enthusiasts – “the kind of people who probably own more than one edition of Trivial Pursuit, people who watch ‘Jeopardy!’ and get a lot of the questions right,” Bargeron said. Some challenging rounds in the past have included alternative uses of cigarette brand names and identifying different wars based on paintings and photographs from Civil War photography to Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.”

“The Whig’s trivia has a reputation of being more difficult than other games around town, and I think that has a little to do with the content of the questions,” Bargeron said. “But I believe the most challenging aspect of the game is that you are competing against the absolute best trivia players in the city. The winning team usually gets around 48 out of 50 questions correct, which is an amazing achievement.”

One regular Whig trivia team has a member who has competed on “Jeopardy!,” and Ben Ingram, who lasted nine nights on the show and went on to win $250,000 in its Tournament of Champions, has played a few rounds.

“I’m not sure his team won,” Bargeron said.

Bargeron on his best questions: “We have a recurring category in which the answers are all celebrity names that have been mashed together to create new ones. In this case, though, I also wrote the questions in such a way that they rhymed. I think I was proudest of the question: ‘Red-headed stranger puts apartheid in danger?’ If you know your country music, then you’ll remember that Willie Nelson had a big hit with the album ‘Red Headed Stranger.’ And the best-known opponent of the South African apartheid regime was Nelson Mandela. So the answer to the question was ‘Willie Nelson Mandela.’

“Another one that went over well was a math problem: ‘What do you get if you divide the number of Y’s in the name Lynyrd Skynyrd by the number of umlauts in Mötley Crüe?’ The answer (two) is pretty easy to figure out when you see it on the page, but when the question is delivered orally, you need to know how to spell both band names, and you need to know what an umlaut is.’”

Best team name: “Our regular crowd is incredibly smart and witty, and the teams come up with amazing names that often make me laugh out loud. And, thankfully, I almost never get the kind of cheap, sexist or homophobic puns that often carry the day at other trivias. Among many great names, my favorite is probably from Feb. 29, 2012. Davy Jones, a singer for The Monkees, had passed away that day. Jones, of course, sang lead vocals on the hit 1967 song ‘Daydream Believer.’ Well, one team named themselves ‘Daydream Bereaver,’ which is just an excellent combination of topicality, economy of phrasing, and wit.”

If you go: The Whig’s trivia is from 7 to 9 p.m. every Monday. It’s free to play. The Whig is located at 1200 Main St. on the basement level and can be accessed by outdoor stairs.

Amanda C. Coyne

This story was originally published May 27, 2015 at 1:49 PM with the headline "The Whig brings back trademark trivia."