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Excuse Question
- 122 statements
- 22 feature instances
- 7 referencing feature instances
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"Hey hey, reader! Welcome to the TV Tropes Ultimate Competition line! Answer the following question to win an egregious prize: a five-week holiday on beautiful Sugar Bowl Beach! Your question: is this article about: Competitions that consist of nothing but an insultingly easy question, often designed to loophole around lottery laws by making them nominal "tests of skill", or tempt gullible people into entering? Princesses? Custard? Call now on our premium rate example line! Phone early, phone often! And win, win, WIN!" The question may be in a call-in competition, which usually means the phone call is going to cost you money; require you to text-message your answer, at normal texting rates, of course; or on a form you need to mail in — then the question means that the contest is not a "lottery" by legal definition, and therefore not subject to the regulations concerning lotteries, and you provide your address and/or phone number which can be added to mailing lists for sale. When used on the radio, the point of the competition is usually thinly concealed advertising for a local business rather than a true competition. In North America this kind of "competition" is usually primarily used to collect personal information which can later be sold to spammers and other advertisers at a premium. |
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At least one barroom trivia game had a multiple choice question asking "Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the hit sequel to what 1984 sci-fi film?" The game did not seem to be kidding, either. | |
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There is an ad featuring Naruto that asks "What cartoon character is this?" A: Naruto. B: Fullmetal Alchemist. C: Ninja Turtle. Bonus headache points for Cowboy BeBop at His Computer. | |
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Parodied at the end of one episode of Only Connect, where Victoria Coren-Mitchell says the viewer competition question is "Is it 'Puff the Magic Dragon' or 'Puff the Magic Hamster'?" ... and the number to call is a six digit number where the digits can be added together to form a prime that is in the Fibonacci sequence. | |
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The magazine Cube was a bit odd about this. On the one hand, an issue had a contest to win a Spider-Man DVD, with the question "Who plays Mary-Jane in the movie? A: Kirsten Dunst. B: Burstin For-Dump. C: Princess Peach". On the other hand, a contest to win a GameCube, some controllers, several games, a big-screen TV, and surround-sound speakers, the question was "What does RGB-SCART stand for?" This was in the days when Wikipedia only had a couple of thousand entries and tended not to even appear on Google searches, so in order to win, you needed access to some relatively obscure documentation. | |
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2000 AD usually hangs a lampshade on this, with a line like "To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is answer this brain-bustingly easy question." | |
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NGamer once ran a contest with the following (paraphrased) question: "Who is the star of The Fast and the Furious? A) Vin Diesel B) Jim Petrol C) Kim Oil. Send your answers to itsvindieselyouidiots@ngamer.co.uk." | |
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Played with in You Don't Know Jack: Volume 3. The category for one question is "It's a Dog!" and the question is "What has four legs, a tail, and barks?" The answer is "a dog." This is labeled as an Impossible Question, and worth twenty thousand dollars, which could easily turn the tide in any game. The reason it's played with is because the game is expecting a player to psyche themselves out; normally, Impossible Questions are Nintendo Hard, with answers ranging from "there's no way anyone would know that" to "it's a pure guess" in difficulty for their answers. Surely an Impossible Question couldn't be this easy... right? | |
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The PC game for Blood Bowl had one of these in the commentator's chatter to win a year's subscription to Spike magazine. The question has to do with who held a certain record, listing a player by name and then "his son" and "his mum". The other commentator even points out that only one of them ever played Blood Bowl. | |
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Parodied on A Bit of Fry and Laurie: | |
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Paul Merton likes to recount that he was once watching one of those breakfast shows and the question was, "Which comedy double act consisted of Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker? A) The Two Ronnies, B)..." | |
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In Ireland, when Toy Story was released, there was a competition where the question was "What is the name of the cowboy?" The application form gave his name in the plot summary. | |
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Tweep plays with this when Jack has a "guess how many fingers I have up" duel with Graham, the ex-Hipster King. | |
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In Father Ted episode "Competition Time", celebrity Henry Sellers is shown asking one of these to a quiz show contestant: | |
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Private Eye once subverted this with a spoof phone-in quiz: What is our phone number? Is it: A) 0898 876876; b) 0898 876877 or c) 0898 876878. Ring NOW on..... The second part of this joke here is the fact that in the UK 0898 numbers are premium rate, so the terminally stupid may spend money phoning the wrong number.. | |
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The clues in the Saturday Night Live "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketches turned into these over the course of the series as the celebrities' ineptitude grew, with some categories giving less-than-subtle hints to the correct responses ("Colors that end in 'urple'", "Drummers Named Ringo", "Black Comedians Named Whoopi", "Months That Start With 'Feb'"), and the clues reinforcing them ("This Ringo is the "starr" drummer of The Beatles.", "This is the only month that starts with 'Feb'.") They still can't answer correctly anyway. | |
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Doctor Who Monthly regularly has a contest to win copies of the DVDs/CDs/books reviewed in each issue. They always have a multiple choice question followed by the right answer, a plausible wrong answer and a "what the hell are you thinking?" answer. Although there are sometimes two WTHAYT answers: "Can you name the deadly insecticide in this story? A) DS9; B) DN6; C) WD40" This was openly parodied in one issue: |
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One episode of The News Quiz featured the following in the amusing cuttings: | |
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An number of interactive game shows on Australian TV did this, with questions such as "Who is the Prime Minister of Australia? A) Daffy Duck, B) Kermit the Frog or C) John Howard." This is parodied by The Chaser's War On Everything: when the above question is mentioned, Julian replies, "Which I guess leads to the question, 'Who are these shows aimed at? A) Bicycles, B) The Sydney Opera House, or C) Morons.'" | |
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Inverted in the UK show QI, which would frequently have questions that looked temptingly easy only to have the real answer be something weird and complex. Questions like "How many moons does the Earth have?" Go, on, you know that! It's obvious! What kind of moron doesn't kno- did you say "one"? Oh dear... note At the time, 3753 Cruithne was classified as a moon; it's now been reclassified as a semi-satellite. |
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On South Park the townspeople did this to the unbelievably-annoying Jackovasaurs with a fake game show, hoping they would "win" a permanent trip to France. They were so stupidly unable to answer any of the questions (and Officer Barbrady, their competition, was too stupid to remember he was supposed to lose) that they eventually gave up and just declared them the winners anyway. | |
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Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: Used as a plot point. The Big Bad's Artificial Intelligence, TEC-XX, has been allowing the captive Peach to visit its main terminal to converse with her (as it is secretly in love with her). After a few visits, TEC seems conflicted about something, then it suddenly challenges Peach to a quiz game. The first few questions are about things the player must already know, but then; TEC proceeds to use the rest of the quiz questions to explain Grodus' entire plan to Peach without technically violating Grodus' order not to tell her about it, and then rewards her "victory" by allowing her to send a message to Mario, which she of course uses to relay the new information. |
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American Idol had a text-message contest during season 7 that was similarly ridiculously easy. Of course, you had to pay to text. | |
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.
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