If you can find the bootleg-Substandard from this week, good for you. Some endnotes and digressions from the show that wasn’t:
* Surely Monty Hall was the only game show host in history to have a complex mathematical proof named for him: The Monty Hall Problem.
The Monty Hall Problem is a piece of game theory which asks the following question: Suppose you are a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal. Monty offers you a choice of three doors. Behind one of them is a car, behind the other two are goats.
You pick a door—let’s say Door #1. Monty then opens one of the remaining doors (let’s say, Door #2) to reveal a goat. He then offers you the option of keeping Door #1 or switching to Door #3. What should you do?
The answer, strangely enough, is that you should switch.
Why? Think of it this way: When you select your door initially you have a 1-in-3 chance of getting the car. But once Monty removes Door #2, he’s really informing you that there is a 1-in-2 chance that Door #3 has the car. So switching doors improves your odds. Considerable.
Entire books have been written about the Monty Hall Problem because it’s so counter-intuitive.
* Other game-show ephemera: Here’s that long-read piece on Terry Kniess, a card-counter who hacked The Price is Right. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s an amazing story, but the writing on this piece (Chris Jones) is beautifully executed. Magazine feature-writing at its best.
* And here’s the video of the famous moment on The Price Is Right when a contestant popped out of her shirt:
Bob Barker’s response, “She came on down, they came on out” is positively Matusian in its genius.
* Not to be confused with this moment from The Newlywed Game, where the creeptastic Bob Eubanks asks, “What’s the strangest place you’ve ever made whoopee?”
* Funny right? But not as deeply funny as the video clips where you can see Steve Harvey losing tiny pieces of his soul as he hosts Family Feud.
* I got the sense during the show that Sonny had no idea who Charles Nelson Reilly was. It’s hard to explain, because CNR was one of those people who were inexplicably famous during the 1970s. Don’t get me wrong—he was glib and kind of funny. But everyone in America knew who he was despite him having no discernible talents or achievements. God bless him.
* Finally, here’s the Don Van Natta Jr. deep-dive on Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King and “The Battle of the Sexes.” You should print it out and read the whole thing. It’s amazing.
