4/1/08 - Jeopardy - Sitting Vice President question - April Fools joke?

[dgates]

This won't be too relevant to non-American citizens...

My girlfriend and I just watched today's Final Jeopardy question and
it was: Who was the only sitting vice president (since Van Buren, I
believe) to be elected president?

We thought we must be misunderstanding the question, since we could
both immediately think of an answer so simple that any Jeopardy
contestant would also get that immediately.

And then, two out of the three contestants gave answers that they
surely couldn't think would be right -- Nixon and Al Gore -- and then,
finally, the winner got the correct answer.

Did anyone see this? Was it somehow an April Fools joke?? (I can't
see how, unless maybe the winner was so far ahead of the other two
that they couldn't win, and the show had some far-out provision for
such a thing.)

Any thoughts?

[LDC]

On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:05:35 -0700, dgates <dga...@somedomain.com>
wrote:

I saw it and don't think it was a joke. The leader's lead was quite
small and could easily have been caught.

When I saw the Gore answer, my first thought was the guy had no
idea, so he just put that down as his joke. On reflection, I
wondered if he over-thought the question, perhaps thinking they were
fishing for the fact that Gore won the popular vote.

I thought the guy that answered Nixon didn't recall Bush and simply
guessed incorrectly. [Many people try to forget we have had a
president named Bush! :-) ]

BTW, an interesting and sometimes useful site for Jeopardy! games:
www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2390

[Don Del Grande]

dgates wrote:

>This won't be too relevant to non-American citizens...
>
>My girlfriend and I just watched today's Final Jeopardy question and
>it was: Who was the only sitting vice president (since Van Buren, I
>believe) to be elected president?
>
>We thought we must be misunderstanding the question, since we could
>both immediately think of an answer so simple that any Jeopardy
>contestant would also get that immediately.
>
>And then, two out of the three contestants gave answers that they
>surely couldn't think would be right -- Nixon and Al Gore -- and then,
>finally, the winner got the correct answer.
>
>Did anyone see this? Was it somehow an April Fools joke??

When I saw the question, the first name that popped into my head was
Nixon, but then I realized other VPs had become president. Then I saw
the operative word, "sitting"; I also remembered a Doonesbury
storyline from a few years ago where Skull & Bones presented Bush the
Elder with something like van Buren's skull.

Perhaps the answer "Al Gore" was not as much a joke as a political
statement, since many people consider him the most recent VP "elected"
President.

(However, there was an April Fools gag during the show, and I don't
mean the Truman Capote categories...)

-- Don