Eternal dumb-nation

A Jeff Fox-unworthy show

BEN POGGEMILLER STAFF

Thank you Fox Network. You’ve managed to take an established idea and bludgeon us over the head with it yet again. You’ve had us marrying multimillionaires, skating with celebrities, and advocating bigamy (sort of), and now you have us comparing our intelligence with elementary school children while hilarious sitcoms choke and die (*cough* Arrested Development *cough*).

Fox has introduced a new show called Are you smarter than a fifth grader? which is exactly what it sounds like. Although the screening process for this show is questionable at best, the answer seems to be invariably, “no.” Judging from the commercials alone, I knew it would be a disgraceful idiot-fest. So why did I watch it?

I’m beginning to think that moderately intelligent people with an IQ higher than that of an alkaline battery like to laugh at people dumber than they are.

This concept is nothing new, at least from a Canadian perspective. Rick Mercer’s hilarious yet horrifying Canadian show Talking to Americans made us painfully aware of the ineptitude of many Americans when it comes to general knowledge.

Americans have also been partaking in similar ventures. Jay Leno’s “Jay-Walking” also involves making people look outlandishly stupid. The only difference is that it’s Americans talking to Americans.

The new game show 1 vs. 100 also exploits some people’s stupidity, en masse. Sometimes dozens of people will get a basic math question wrong, and then they are lit up like carnival acts and asked what the hell they were thinking when they answered.

Enter Fox. First, they acquired Jeff Foxworthy, who isn’t even washed up because you have to have been famous at one point to receive that honour (I mean, when he was performing his only joke was “you know you’re a redneck when your collar’s blue because you can only afford primary colours, ha-ha.”). Then, they decided to compare adults to children in terms of cognitive faculties.

The result was Are you smarter than a fifth grader? One thing that Fox did right, probably unintentionally, was to make the precocious, spunky children the stars of the show. Other than that, it’s quite embarrassing. In the episode I watched, the lady competing had to think long and hard about which star was closest to the Earth. Meanwhile, the kids are snickering and laughing like they would in a real classroom. In fact, through lifelines, the children had to bail her out a couple of times. Contrary to other game shows, there is no suspense: anyone with an eighth of a brain will know the answers and the rest will be trying to figure out what an eighth is. They’ve also removed all strategy by letting the contestant see the question before they decide if they want to quit or not. In the episode I watched, the contestant quit because she didn’t know how many decades were in two millennia. I find it shockingly unjust that she walked away with $100,000. Sometimes I wonder how these people can even live through the day.

The purpose of the show is unclear. It could just be a way to make us feel secure in our knowledge and laugh at people who are dumber than we are. Others might say it’s a social commentary about the state of American schools or about most people’s inability to retain information. Wing-nut conspiracy theorists might claim that the show is a right-wing scheme to spread propaganda that George Bush is improving the American school system. Whatever the purpose is, the show is frustrating to watch.

I think during the show’s presumably short run, I’m going to have a love-hate relationship with it. I both laugh and cringe at these shows. I guess that’s part and parcel of a society where cheap laughs are rampant and attention spans are getting shorter. It might even stop writers from finishing their arti . . . .