Dept. of Trivia
The Honorable Answer Man
By Jonathan Kay
The chances that an American adult will get to the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" hot seat in any given eighteen-month period are about one in three hundred and fifty thousand. But if he or she happens to be a former law clerk of Judge Danny J. Boggs, of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the chances are one in fifteen. Boggs's chambers, in Louisville, Kentucky, have become a sort of minor-league hotbed— a San Pedro de Macorís—for young trivia buffs eager to appear on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Of the forty-five clerks who have worked under him since he was sworn in, fifteen years ago, three have made it to the show's hot seat, which is where you've got to be if you want to make a million. Just last month, one of them won two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which isn't bad.
There is a reason for this. Each year, Boggs, a Cuban-born fifty-six-year-old polymath, administers what he calls a "general knowledge" test—he avoids the term "trivia"—to the roughly one hundred law-school graduates he is considering for his clerkships. Last year's quiz had seventy-one questions, including "Who gave the famous speech 'Ain't I a Woman?' " (Sojourner Truth); "What does the Herfindahl-Hirschman index measure?" (industry concentration); and "Who killed (a) Duncan (b) McKinley (c) Cock Robin (d) Ron Goldman, and (e) Vaudeville?" (Macbeth, Czolgosz, the sparrow with the bow and arrow, etc.) The Judge seems to have a thing for questions involving Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and the phrase "order of magnitude." For most aspiring lawyers, the quiz is not easy. The average score is about thirty per cent.
"When I got the test, I thought, Wow—Danny Boggs has got to be the coolest judge in the world," Brian Kalt, a Yale Law School graduate who clerked with Boggs three years ago and was on the show last year, said the other day. "Immediately, I knew I wanted to work for this guy." Other applicants, however, have been put off by it. "I don't think the quiz has any legitimate screening function," said one of Kalt's law-school classmates, who withdrew his application to Boggs after seeing the quiz. "He might as well have assigned us a challenging home-repair project."
Maybe so. But Boggs sees value in a test that asks applicants to identify the world's most populous city beginning with "O," to provide, within an order of magnitude, the number of photocopies made in the United States each year, to define an Orc, an Ent, and the Oort, to distinguish Belisarius from Bucephalus from Bocephus, to name three quarks, and to solve the following: "If the moon were made of green cheese, and if green cheese floats in water, what is the most that the moon could weigh (within a factor of ten)?" "It's not just knowing a fact that's important," Boggs said recently. "It's that you've read widely enough to learn it. I have had some tremendous autodidacts."
The quiz has also helped Boggs find potential star clerks at less prestigious law schools. "I hired a person from Vermont Law School a few years back," he said. "This is someone I would not have taken a serious look at without the quiz." A good score, however, does not guarantee a job offer. "I think the highest score I ever saw was seventy-five per cent. The applicant was forty-five years old and he obviously knew lots and lots of stuff. But I didn't hire him. He had terrible grades."
Boggs is quite fond of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and has tried to get on it himself. He has aced the touch-tone quiz on its automated phone line several times, but he has never been selected in the random drawing that follows. His voice, however, has made it onto the show. Two of the three former clerks who appeared on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" picked Boggs as their Phone-a-Friend lifeline—the person you call on the phone when you're stuck trying to answer a question on the air. Last year, the Judge came through for Kalt, feeding him the answer (the Royal Navy) to his thirty-two-thousand-dollar question ("In which force did Jack Aubrey, hero of Patrick O'Brian's twenty novels, serve?"). And, during an episode last month, while struggling with a question that, if answered correctly, would have earned him five hundred thousand dollars ("How many actors passed through the Three Stooges comedy trio?"), Henry Olsen, another former clerk, called on Boggs. This time, the Judge was stumped. "That's way out of my league," he said. Olsen threw in the towel and walked away with a quarter-million dollars. (The answer, by the way, was six.)
Published in the print edition of the May 14, 2001, issue.