If the virtual version of the Gonzo Quiz Show on the Main Events channel Friday at 7PM was weird and full of chaotic energy, then one can only imagine what the live show is like. Never having seen the live show myself, I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. If you’re like me, the best way to describe it is a panel show in the British style run completely amok. It is a series of games played for points, but it’s not entirely clear to the audience, or the participants, whether the points actually mean anything.
The six participants—Hal Lublin, Symphony Sanders, Laser Malena-Webber, James Urbaniak, Mark Gagliardi, and Jonah Ray—were split into two teams. Each team got to choose their own team name, which was maybe where things started to go off the rails. The Blue team, consisting of Lublin, Ray, and Urbaniak, named themselves Team Aaaaayyyyy like the Fonz remember the Fonz from Happy Days (and yes, co-hosts Ken Plume and Aaron Fever were pointedly reminded to say the whole thing each time). The Green team of Sanders, Malena-Webber, and Gagliardi went through several revisions of their team name to keep it PG before finally settling on Team Bad Biscuits.
In the time that was available for the panel, Plume was able to run five games. The first game was a guess the song game called “Doo Doo” where the object is to guess as many songs as possible in 60 seconds without actually singing any lyrics from the song. Molly Lewis joined in as a special guest to prompt the participants with their songs. She happily “whipped her cock out” (a chicken puppet) and gave her clues with enthusiastic “bawk-bawks.”
The second game was a scavenger hunt where each member of the team had to gather either blue or green items with points awarded for how many items were brought back and how unique or interesting they were. There were some disputes about what was blue and/or green, but there was too much going on anyway to really figure out who was being awarded points for what. Somewhere during the counting of the items, Sanders’s dog started to bark and she could be seen on video tossing the dog a biscuit. Whether it was a bad biscuit, no one will ever know.
The next two games also had special guest stars in the form of video questions asked by Weird Al Yankovic and illustrator Josie Devora who drew two 3-minute rounds of movie or tv show doodles for the panelists to guess. Before the last game, Team Bad Biscuit was in the lead, but the last game could tie it all up. The rules of the final game, “Pick Up Songs” were a little… vague, but it mostly involved being able to sing a song to the music, then not to the music, and seeing how accurate you are when the music comes back in.
According to the official final tally, by some measure, Team Bad Biscuit actually won. Plume promised them some kind of trophy, but we’re not sure if that means anything either.
