What Is Jeopardy!'?

"Who were the Iberians?" answers contestant number 2, correctly.

"I really blew it." Pankratz concedes, "but I'm sure the Visigoths were there, too."

He shrugs and throws up his hands. "I don't know," he mutters. "Maybe I was smarter when I was 17."

TRIVIALISTS FOR $100: Harry Eisenberg sits behind a big disheveled desk in front of a bookcase crammed with encyclopedias, almanacs and atlases. The walls are covered with lists of Jeopardy! categories that have already been used, the detritus of civilization—The Dick Van Dyke Show, Those Darned Etruscans, Pickles. Reams of computer printouts spill onto a couch. The room has a faintly 19th-century look. Bartleby the Scrivener would not have been uncomfortable here.

As the Jeopardy! chief of research, Eisenberg oversees the show's fact factory. "Jeopardy! may be the only show where intelligence—or at least a form of intelligence—is rewarded and looked up to." he says. He was working as a photocopier salesman in the early "80s when he heard Jeopardy! was being revived and needed a whole new staff. Citing his master's degree in history, he applied. He was told to submit a sample game board. "The question that clinched the job was in word origins." he recalls. "It was something like, 'A term for prostitutes from the Civil War general who believed they raised troops' morale.' " Fans of General Joseph Hooker know the answer.

The pursuit of the trivial is no trivial pursuit, according to Eisenberg. "We have 230 shows a year, and we prepare 73 questions per show," he says, ticking off the calculations in his head. "That's 16,790 questions a season." Hard questions, easy questions, really tough Final Jeopardy questions. Eisenberg and his staff of 12 professional trivialists toss potential questions around a conference table, fine-tuning them. "We're looking for clear, concise interesting questions." he says, "not trick or boring questions. We don't want ones only a Ph.D. or a nuclear physicist would know."

Eisenberg is the final arbiter of any dispute. During taping sessions he and his adepts monitor the answers from the back of the studio, reference books at the ready.

"What would happen if the Pope came on and we had to call him wrong?" asks writer Carol Campbell.

"That's obvious," says a fellow staffer. Kathy Easterling. "We'd be struck dead."

The constant quest for questions has skewed Eisenberg's perspective. "Everything has become a potential question." he says. In case of sudden inspiration, he always has a pad handy. Questions come to him in dreams, while shaving, on vacation in Texas. "I found one in the AAA Travel Guide," he says. "The name of the Lone Star city that was the first word uttered by a man on the moon." If you guessed Throckmorton, try again. (What is Houston?)