Fun and Games

I don’t watch game shows. I especially don’t watch game shows in which the contestants clap and hoot with false enthusiasm in order to demonstrate that it’s the most fun thing they’ve ever done in their entire wretched lives.

They undermine honest emotion, contribute to national opacity and probably should be imprisoned as fools and klutzes.

I realize I may be in the minority on this. There are two dozen game shows on every week day, and they are watched by millions of viewers who hoot and shout right along with the clucks on the screen.

I have a cousin who does all that and sometimes even cries when a contestant of whom she is particularly fond loses a bid for a free, weeklong deluxe vacation at a place like, say, the Milwaukee Holiday Inn.

She scorns shows like “Super Sloppy Double Dare” as beneath her dignity, but considers “The Price is Right” an intellectual challenge and its host, Bob Barker, as quick as a college prof.

“God,” she said to me once, almost drooling with desire, “to be kissed by Prof. Barker. . . .” Then she rolled her eyes and fell back on a couch in a sexual swoon.

I squirm with annoyance at such fatuity and seriously believe this cousin, whose genealogy I have not bothered to trace, must be a relative by adoption. No blood kin would ever clap and hoot, much less want to kiss Bob Barker.

But if I dislike game shows so much, I hear you cry, what was I doing watching a new one being rehearsed in a room in Santa Monica that vibrated with false sanguinity?

I love it when you’re perplexed.

It has to do with what we in American Journalism regard as the People’s Right to Know. Whether or not you appreciate or comprehend what we offer is neither here nor there, since the People’s Right to Understand is not at issue.

I was in that room with game show veteran Dan Enright watching the run-through of a syndicated show called “The Opposite Sex,” which will go on the air next month.

What attracted me to the project was the show’s executive producer, Enright, a tight, fidgety man who was a central figure in the so-called Game Show Scandals of the late 1950s, before sex, war and rock ‘n’ roll captured the capricious national spotlight.

Enright admitted his quiz show “21” had been rigged to the extent that answers were supplied to some contestants. At the time he considered it no less evil than supplying a script to an actor, since the sole purpose of the show was to entertain, not to establish a national standard for honesty and intelligence. Nixon did that later.

An aide hints that Enright took the fall to protect others, like a mother shielding her children from cannibals, but it’s too late to debate all that now. Enright admitted he was wrong, a law was passed against game show rigging and that, thank God, was that.

Such was the temper of the 1950s, however, that good friends turned their backs on him and he couldn’t get a job in the U.S. for 15 years, working instead in places like Australia, Canada and Germany.

He got back on the air in the U.S. with “Tic Tac Dough” in 1974 and now has four shows going, including two on Spanish-language television, in the spirit of drive-by entertainment.

“The Opposite Sex,” for those stimulated by fatuity, involves 14 contestants; seven, as far as we know, from each of the two major sexes.

It asks the question, as fun-lovin’ host David Sparks explains, what do men know about women and what do women know about men?

Drags you in right by the old libido.

As an example of how the game works, Sparks asks the men what they’d do if their beautiful female boss suggested their careers would be enhanced if they’d, you know, “cooperate.”

Would they (A) ignore the offer, (B) quit or (C) hop under the covers with her for the sake of a nice job upstairs?

To much happy shouting, winking and arm-waving, Sparks selected Stu, who sells swimming pool covers, and Lori, a newlywed, to face each other, the idea being that Lori was supposed to guess which of the options Stu would select.

Lori correctly decided Stu would chose to cooperate. The guys chortled, the woman jumped up and down with glee, and I, washed by waves of nausea, said, “Well, I guess that’ll do it for me,” and left.

Enright, Lord knows, has suffered enough for doing what lawyers and congressman do all the time, which is to rig answers to anticipated questions, so I wish him well.

But as Gore Vidal once said, “It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.” In that spirit, I hope all other game shows fail and we are left with only one to remind us there is something for everyone in America, even those with only wit enough to hoot.