Profile of Jeopardy-famous Ken Jennings on how he parlayed his 2004 rise to TV archetype into a career. He’s just doing what he does best.
It’s clear that Jennings doesn’t view himself as an intellectual in the traditional sense, and this partly explains why he’s been able to endure without the show. He’s a product of pop culture who happens to know all the roads in Delaware. (At another point in our discussion, we talk about the comedian Norm MacDonald, and as soon as I mention one of my favorite jokes of his — an elaborate bit known as “the moth joke” — Jennings doesn’t just recognize it, he starts quoting lines.) “For so long, I was always the guy in the office who you could ask the name of a TV show or guys in a band, but that’s not really valuable in the Google age,” Jennings says. “I’d always been good at that, but I turned my back on it because I didn’t really think I could make a living that way. I thought being a programmer was a safe thing to do, and by accident, I became much more successful doing what I was actually good at.”
Here’s a link to Norm MacDonald’s Moth Joke.