Quiz recap: Know your audience

And thus, our return to the Boston area is a glorious one. Thanks, everyone, for the warm (and crowded) welcome back to Oberon. Still one of our favorite venues anywhere, it must be stated.

Tonight I was reminded of that ol' showbiz maxim: Know your audience. Thus loud bursts of applause for trashing on the New York Yankees (while I love NYC, I've often said that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the sun), Dick Cheney (well, duh, Massachusetts), and Yale University (I went to the Harvard of the Midwest). Plus conspiratorial laughs for the Oberon staff team's Smart-Ass Point about the promiscuity of a particular bartender. Fun all around, but none of this shit will fly when the BQT finally debuts in Boise.

But there's only so much knowing of one's audience a performer can do, and I must say, we suffered from a peculiar disjoint: Tonight's audience was on the older side (my parents' team were only very north of the average age, rather than the usual exceedingly north), which made "The '90s Music Video Mash-Up" harder than it should have been. The audio round about your favorite topic, sex (sex in the movies, specifically), had a similar issue, since we didn't feature any films pre–the early '70s (though since sex was invented in 1961, there wasn't much sex in the movies before then). Why so many oldsters? Who knows? Perhaps ultimately, one's audience is never completely knowable.

This didn't stop us from having an A-double-plus quiz show, friends. From the aforementioned '90s and sex rounds to "Not the Capital," "Dead Person Fashion Show," and a Jew-centric Text Message Challenge (nope, Hanukkah didn't eight nine days ago), I was pretty proud of the content tonight, and your knowledge thereof. I swear, I wasn't mocking the team that thought the answer to "What famous event took place on April 28, 1789, on a ship 1,300 miles west of Tahiti?" was "the sinking of the Titanic." (Okay, maybe a little.)

Some background info:

—Yes, Peter Weber, the "power stroker," is the bad boy of professional bowling. Here he is, forgetting for a moment that he's an expert at a sport where you have to rent the shoes:

—The little-heard lyrics to the Odd Couple theme song are fairly entertaining (and written by the great Sammy Cahn and Neil Hefti). The nerds discuss.

—Shakespeare (his b-day today, BTW) wrote some pretty nice poems, of which The Phoenix and the Turtle and The Passionate Pilgrim are merely the most amusingly named. I think that kid's going to go far.

The finale was quick and dirty: Mnemonica Lewinsky (formerly known as Habeas Porpoise) scored their second ever victory over the oligarchs From His Mother's Womb Untimely Quipt and Levon Helm Kicks Ass!!, winning on two questions and two questions only. A mere four members: That there's some impressive quiz might.

The standings:
1. Mnemonica Lewinsky
2. From His Mother's Womb Untimely Quipt
3. Levon Helm Kicks Ass!!
4. The Monstrous Humanoids (planning to make a stand at our Tenth Anniversary Marathon!)
5. The Real Housestaff of Oberon
6. Mek-A Lek-A Hi Mek-A Hiney Ho
7. Busted Zipper/I Don't Care/Whose Lion Is It Anyway? (tie)
10. Cartagena Is for Lovers

Next: Just three weeks till we return to Oberon. Then, we're focusing on the big one: Our Tenth Anniversary Marathon Quiz spectacular. Ten solid hours in NYC, with $1,000 at stake. You in?