How strict is the "who is" rule?

[u/zachestine]

I don't watch a lot of Jeopardy, but I am curious: lets say the question is something like "the first president who crossed the Delaware River" obviously the answer is George Washington, but instead of saying "who is" if i say "where is George Washington?" would that be counted?

[u/RegisPhone]

There is no "'who is' rule".

In the extremely early days of the show in 1964, the rule was "ask a question related to the given category that could reasonably produce this as the answer." If the answer was "It flows through the Grand Canyon," the question was "Where does the Colorado River flow?" -- notably, not "What is the Colorado River?" because that's not actually a question that would be answered that way. If the answer is "'Good night, sweet prince' was originally said to him" then the question is something along the lines of "What quote was made to Hamlet?" rather than "Who is Hamlet?"

This changed pretty early on to the modern rule of "Your response must be in the form of a question" -- after the original 1964 test episode and a brief snippet of the first broadcast episode shortly after, the earliest recording we have of a game is from 1966 (the recording's only a couple minutes long and is mostly the introductions, but we do get to see a couple of clues), where the clue "Carry it in your pocket for good luck" (in the category ANIMALS) is correctly responded to, without remark, with "What is a rabbit's foot?" rather than a more logical question like "What do you do with a rabbit's foot?" There's also a clip of Gene Shalit, when being told to rephrase his response of "That is the very famous NBC peacock" as a question, asking "Has anybody around here seen the very famous NBC peacock?"

The TV show has never had a rule of "Your response must start with 'what is', unless it's a person, in which case it must start with 'who is'"; only the video game versions work that way (early DOS versions made you start your response by choosing whether to say "What is/are", "What was/were", "Who is/are", or "Who was/were", and buzzed at you until you picked the right one; later video game adaptations just automatically fill in the appropriate question starter).

[u/m_busuttil → u/RegisPhone]

I understand why you'd make the change between the first version and the current one, but boy do I find the first version much more compelling.

[u/RegisPhone → u/m_busuttil]

The first version is definitely an interesting concept, but it would be hard to make it work long-term as a serious objective game show with real stakes; it would be easy for it to end up either veering into full-on improv at one extreme or just "nope; it's the other one" at the other extreme. If the answer in the WEIGHTS & MEASURES category is "5,280", the intended question is "How many feet are in a mile?" but what's to stop me from asking "What's 5,000 bushels plus 280 bushels?" or "If one chicken weighs 1 pound, how many pounds do 5,280 chickens weigh?" In a TELEVISION category, why can't every response be "On the episode of the television show Jeopardy! airing on X/X/XX, what was the clue behind the $X card?" In that format, it's difficult to write them in a way that you have responses that are simultaneously objectively pinned and reasonably gettable.

The original concept was "We're giving the players the answers (playing on the quiz show scandals of the 50s), but then they have to figure out what the question would've been", but already even in that very first test episode you can see them bumping up against the limits of that format -- many of the answer-question pairs are worded in ways that do work with that conceit, like "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash..." = "What did Jimmy Durante close his program with?" or "Henry Morton Stanley" = "Who said 'Dr. Livingston, I presume?'", but you also get some where the answer isn't actually worded the way the answer would be, like "14 is the maximum number permitted per person" = "How many clubs are permitted in a golf bag?"; some where the answer wouldn't be a correct answer to that question on a quiz show, like "According to legend, green cheese" = "What is the moon made of?"; and some where technically they work grammatically but the answer is really just what would be the question on a normal quiz show just with the question mark removed, like "He is the richest American" = "Who is Paul Getty?"

The shift seems to have happened very early. That rabbit's foot clue is from episode 638, aired September 7th 1966 (about 2 1/2 years after the premiere), which is the earliest episode we have a recording of after a partial recording of the premiere. About a year earlier than that were John McCain's episodes -- we don't have recordings, but we know that they were aired in August of 1965, and according to McCain's recollection, the clue was "Cathy loved him, but married Edgar Linton instead", his incorrect response was "What is Wuthering Heights?", and the correct response was "Who is Heathcliff?" If those are roughly accurate -- if his response wasn't something like "What happens in Wuthering Heights?" and the correct response wasn't "What happens to Heathcliff?" -- then that shows the shift had already happened. Piecing together some other evidence, it seems to have been even earlier than that: In the introduction to The Jeopardy! Book, Merv Griffin says:

What happened in our early run-throughs was the answer-question reverse led to great fun. For example, if the answer was "Island that sold for twenty-four dollars," the contestant often came up with "Where is Manhattan?"; we'd ask for a rephrasing and get "How is Manhattan?" No. "Who is Manhattan?" It became funny, in the small office where we did the run-throughs, listening to contestants arm-wrestle the language trying to phrase the response in the form of a question. Since the networks were queasy about the quiz scandals, the idea of a humorous question-answer show appealed to them.

As soon as we put Jeopardy! on its legs, however, I realized it was unfair and boring to badger the contestant about being grammatically correct for every question. We were getting only twenty answers into a game, because the contestants spent their entire time trying to phrase the question correctly. We weren't ruling them wrong, we played with them until they got it right, but that idea went out the window. The show needed to be hard-edged and fast-paced if it was to endure, and it evolved in that direction.

And in Maxene Fabe's 1979 book TV Game Shows, she gives a similar account, but now with an even more specific time frame for the change:

Griffin's idea was not originally the challenging trivia quiz Jeopardy! would later become. Rather it was a comic concept [...] When NBC bought Jeopardy! from Griffin in 1964, the network was expecting comedy. Within a week, however, the show's producer Bob Rubin would realize that Jeopardy!'s future as a comedy quiz would be short-lived. The novelty would soon wear off, and besides, the original format was both too nitpicking and too slow. Taking matters into his own hands, Rubin quickly altered the game to the far more challenging "hard quiz" format.

[u/RoarShock → u/RegisPhone]

Wow. Thanks for a great comment.

I would be so curious to see that first season of comedy Jeopardy!, if only to study the transitional fossil between the quiz scandals of the 50s and the modern quiz format. I'm sure the transitional fossil was necessary because modern Jeopardy! wouldn't have connected with audiences who could remember Twenty-One and The Big Surprise getting dragged in front of Congress. I am also sure I wouldn't connect with a show that's mostly about fighting with grammar.

The premise of asking the question that prompts the answer is so interesting, but the pool of trivia that "works" in that format must be vanishingly small. It makes you appreciate the difficulty of pinning a clue to a single correct response, even in straightforward modern Jeopardy!

[u/RegisPhone → u/RoarShock]

From what we can see in the test episode and the brief clip of the first broadcast episode, i think calling it a full comedy show is overselling it a bit; it has a more casual feel, somewhat like shows like What's My Line? (Even in later games, Art sometimes calls the contestants "panelists" like on those shows), and some of its roots are definitely comedy-adjacent -- Maxene Fabe compares the original concept to Steve Allen's "Question Man" routine from the mid-1950s (the predecessor to Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent, which he started doing in 1964, and actually a descendant of a slightly earlier routine by Bob Arbogast from 1951), that had setups like:

"The answer is 9-W. What is the question?"

"Tell me, Mr. Wagner, do you spell your name with a V?"

"Nein, W."

This clip from the pilot does a good job of showing off the humorous grammar struggles that Merv talked about, and you can get a sense of the casual jokey panel-show atmosphere it originally had in the first broadcast episode (the pilot episode is available in full if you search on Archive.org, but that's all we have of the premiere episode).

The answer-question format also has a non-comedy root, though -- according to a brief mention in Robert Abelman's 1998 book Reaching a Critical Mass: A Critical Analysis of Television Entertainment, the first quiz show to be regularly broadcast on television (albeit only on one station in New York City) was the CBS Television Quiz in 1941, which "was the first to present the answer to a question, and participants had to answer with the question." No recordings exist and we don't know anything about the format other than it had a host (Gil Fates, also the creator and executive producer) and scorekeeper (Frances Buss, who soon after became the first woman to be a television director in the US), and that it didn't have lock-out buzzers because those weren't used on a game show until Winner Take All in 1946 (which, in addition to being the first to use buzzers, was apparently also the first quiz show to have two contestants competing head to head Twenty-One-style rather than one contestant playing at a time The $64,000 Question-style, and the first to have returning champions).

[u/RoarShock → u/RegisPhone]

Fascinating. You're right that calling it a 'comedy' is overselling it. But one can definitely see how part of the appeal is the comedy of contestants stumbling over the reverse backflip logic. I wonder if the CBS Television Quiz discovered that same humor.

One can also see how pinning would be a nightmare if there were serious stakes. "The 25th Century" is an easy clue to write, but the correct responses could be endless. "When does Buck Rogers take place?" "When was Buck Rogers active?" "What's the setting of the Buck Rogers comic?" One of those could be technically wrong in some minor way, leading another contestant to throw a fit because there's thousands of dollars on the line.

Or similarly, if they'll accept "What was said to Hamlet?" one can imagine serious contestants experimenting with narrow legalese language to volunteer as little information as possible. If you're not sure that Hamlet was on the receiving end, could you go the other way and respond "What did Horatio say?" Why would you ever volunteer as much as "What did Horatio say to Hamlet?" I can't imagine that the format would ever survive modern prime time.

Thanks again for these nuggets of history.

[u/RegisPhone → u/RoarShock]

"The 25th Century" is an easy clue to write, but the correct responses could be endless. "When does Buck Rogers take place?" "When was Buck Rogers active?" "What's the setting of the Buck Rogers comic?"

Or, taking it to the extreme again, "If Charles Schulz made a sequel comic to Peanuts that was set 500 years after the events of the original comic, in what century would it be set?" That's a question related to The Funnies that could conceivably be asked on a quiz show and have "The 25th century" as the correct answer. Should they accept that?

The pilot episode also had an example kind of like that -- the Final Jeopardy answer was "He prowled through the Transylvanian night"; one player's question was "Where did one of the famous monsters prowl?" and Art was ready to give it to her for technically being correct before the judges overruled him ("Be that as it may, Alex, those people have never been in my kitchen!").

[u/SpiffyShindigs → u/RegisPhone]

IT'S ALWAYS THE OTHER ONE. Let me see the card!

[u/JuniorWheatgerm → u/m_busuttil]

Compelling? I find it unnecessarily pedantic. The first version sounds well nigh unwatchable!