History Main / UnexpectedlyObscureAnswer

* Music/WeirdAlYankovic's "Albuquerque" has the protagonist win a radio contest involving guessing the number of molecules of Creator/LeonardNimoy's butt.

** Another Python sketch had a British television host a game show with the leading figures of Communism: Creator/KarlMarx, UsefulNotes/VladimirLenin, UsefulNotes/CheGuevara, and UsefulNotes/MaoZedong. Marx, Che, and Lenin are shot down with obscure English Premier Football questions and to name the Teddy Johnson and Pearl Carr song which won at the 1959 Eurovision Song Contest ("Sing Little Birdie"), to which Mao unexpectedly knows the answer. In the ''Film/MontyPythonLiveAtTheHollywoodBowl'' version this last question is changed to naming "Great Balls Of Fire" by Music/JerryLeeLewis.

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* The music video for "I Lost On Jeopardy" by Music/WeirdAlYankovic is full of this. How may bricks are in the Great Wall of China?

* The music video for ''I Lost On Jeopardy'' by Music/WeirdAlYankovic is full of this. How may bricks are in the Great Wall of China?

* In ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'', Mettaton starts throwing some bizarre and improbable questions at you during his deadly quiz game. You can probably guess "what are robots made of" for yourself; while the game has never mentioned that the answer is [[spoiler:metal and magic]], the other three answers are ''obviously'' wrong. But when he throws [[http://lparchive.org/Undertale/Update%2021/11-1701.png this]] TrainProblem at you, you're probably going to resort to guessing. [[spoiler:Or cheating; the intended solution to this quiz puzzle is to notice that Alphys is showing you the correct answer with her fingers.]]

--> '''Porky:''' ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalleria_rusticana C-C-Cavalleria Rusticana]]''?\\

* In the ''WesternAnimation/TinyToonAdventures'' short "One Minute Till Three," Granny quizzes each student with a ridiculous-sounding question, with Plucky as Granny's last student and dreading every second of it, hoping for the clock to reach 3:00 so he can leave and not have to answer. Granny DOES gets to Plucky, however, and tells him, "Using Faustic's Method of bifractal computation, give me the minimum number of quantified pixels needed on a bilateral view screen." (This is complete gibberish, for the record.) After a bit of stalling, Plucky tells her, "But Granny! It's two-fifty-nine!" regarding the time--which turns out to be the correct answer of 259.

* The music video for ''I Lost On Jeopardy'' by Music/WeirdAlYankovic is full of this. How may bricks ''are'' in the Great Wall of China?

* ''Series/LateNight''[='=]s "Wheel of Game Shows" combined this with a MoonLogicPuzzle: the game "Find the Red Tissue" had the red tissue be on the ''bottom'' of the box instead of inside it, and then on a rebus puzzle, the contestant's seemingly correct guess "[[DoubleEntendre Tickle my balls]]" was rejected in favor of "Play my sports"

While ''Series/{{Jeopardy}}'' was the inspiration for this trope (see the discussion page for the most egregious examples), it's NotAnExample because the writers honestly thought that someone among the contestants would get the answer right. Most examples of this sort (i.e., Nine Times Out Of Ten that it happens in RealLife) fall under MoonLogicPuzzle.

* The ''Series/ThirtyRock'' episode "The Beginning of The End" featured an unfair game show called "Homonym" as a CutawayGag; the contestant has to give the correct definition for a word that has homophones, [[LuckBasedMission but always ends up incorrectly giving the answer for "the other one"]]. The CreditsGag features a contestant getting a second chance on "Sent" wrong because of "the third one", and then is told that the correct answer for "Au pair" was "Oh, pear!", an exclamation about a fruit. Later episodes featured celebrity and Iranian versions.

* The university in the ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}} IOU'' setting has an "Advanced Cheating" class, in which the final exam is nominally a series of impossibly obscure trivia questions. The ''real'' test is to [[NotCheatingUnlessYouGetCaught cheat on the test without getting caught]].

* Played for laughs in the "Bridge of Death" segment of ''Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail''. The page quote has part of this exchange. Ultimately, the trope gets inverted when Arthur's third question requires him to know [[CallBack the airspeed of an unladen swallow]]. He doesn't know, since it wasn't covered in the SeinfeldianConversation about swallows earlier in the movie, so he asks whether the question is about African or European swallows. Since the bridgekeeper doesn't know the difference, ''he'' gets tossed off the bridge.

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* The first episode of ''GarfieldAndFriends'' had a segment where Garfield goes on a gameshow hosted by Binky the Clown to win a birthday gift for Jon. One of the increasingly ridiculous challenges is "Name That Fish", with Garfield given a selection of fish species to choose from. The fish's name? "Walter", an option that ''wasn't even on the board!'' The bizarre nature of the show is eventually justified when it turns it was AllJustADream.

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* Played with on Creator/{{MTV}}'s ''Series/RemoteControl'' with the "Public Television" channel/category, which consisted entirely of obscure scientific facts, etc. One contestant selected the channel and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPi2GMMbzTE got the question right]], however, leading to a MomentOfAwesome.

* A sketch in ''APrairieHomeCompanion'' had special guest Fred Willard host a "Wheel of Willard" game, functioning as ''Series/WheelOfFortune'' where the puzzles were quotes of his. The categories were "Lines from my movies", "Things I've said to myself while by myself in a soundproof room", and "Things I have said at some point in my entire life". One of the contestants, self-proclaimed as Fred's biggest fan, gets all of them correct. The final one was guessed without any clues, and was a fifty-plus word ramble about getting bananas from the grocery store.

* The $100,000 Mystery Tune/Big Prize Tune on ''NameThatTune'' was this as well. More often than not, the song was an extremely obscure Broadway showtune, or an old Tin Pan Alley song, or even a classical piece that was designed to be the hardest song to name. Although, during the Tom Kennedy era, there were seven $100,000 winners, so some hardcore musicologists were able to name it.

*** Eventually, they ask Marx another set of three questions about "worker's control of factories": "The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development?" [[note]](the development of the industrial bourgeoisie)[[/note]], "The struggle of class against class is a what struggle?" [[note]](a political struggle)[[/note]], and finally "Who won the cup final in 1949?" [[note]]*Marx throws out a few Marxist-themed answers for the hell of it and loses, the answer being Wolverhampton Wanderers.)[[/note]]

** The three-answer questions can fall into this, by having one answer that's fairly easy to dismiss, and two which are so close together it has to be a guess. One question asked the contestants which of three famous Peters ([[DragonsDen Peter Jones]], Peter Andre, and Creator/PeterKay) was the shortest. [[note]](Peter Jones is about a foot taller than the others. The correct answer was Peter Kay, by ''one inch''.)[[/note]]

* Done deliberately in the late 1950s thanks to ExecutiveMeddling, and hence part of the reason for the quiz show scandals -- if contestants weren't given answers in advance or told to take a dive, but the execs wanted them gone anyway for whatever reason (''especially'' if the contestant said ScrewTheMoneyIHaveRules), the show would feed answers to their opponent(s) and/or go this route.
** On ''Series/The64000Question'', these kinds of questions were used in an attempt to force losses from contestants Charles Revson (head of show sponsor Revlon) didn't like, going so far as to swap out the questions that had been secured in a bank vault prior to the show. Dr. Joyce Brothers was one such target, but she managed to win the $64,000 legitimately by studying every book about boxing she could find.

** In a Series 3 episode, Helen Atkinson-Wood correctly answers a question "so impossible that Stephen Fry shall award a gigantic 200 points if anyone gets the answer right." After she answers, the other contestants, rightly astonished, ask "How the hell did you know that?" For the curious, the question was "What does this chemical equation: "C[[subscript:6]]H[[subscript:12]]O[[subscript:6]] + 6O[[subscript:2]] --> 6CO[[subscript:2]] + 6H[[subscript:2]]O", represent?" Her answer: "An explosion in a custard powder factory."
*** The equation is for the combustion of glucose (a key element of said powder). According to those behind the show, "an explosion in a custard factory" is the standard TextbookHumor example used when the combustion of glucose is taught at school (it's also a common example of the effects of static electricity), hence how she knew it.

** Daffy is the host of a radio game show parody of ''TruthOrConsequences'' and Porky is the hapless contestant. Daffy throws several of these at Porky throughout the cartoon, including asking for the maiden name of Cleopatra's aunt, or asking him to name an opera based on hearing ''a single note''.

* This is the MO of the PhoneInGameShows that went through a brief amount of popularity amongst the television money-men from 2005-10, as [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZu9Sdj_OjA this]] clip shows -- the host isn't even able to ''pronounce'' the big answer.

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* ComicBook/DisneyDucksComicUniverse:
** In the ''DonaldDuck'' story "The Crazy Quiz Show" by Creator/CarlBarks, Donald and his nephews participate in a television quiz, hoping to win a (literal) barrel of money. The nephews each successfully answer their question, but to Donald's dismay they pick a new bicycle instead of the cash. When it's finally his turn, the quizmaster decides that since Donald has been such a JerkAss throughout the show, he gets the most difficult question ever: how many drops per hour fall from the Niagara falls? [[spoiler:He knows the answer! But the stress of reciting it causes him to go mad and ''also'' pick the bicycle as his prize.]]

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** Parodied. John Cleese's game show host asks a housewife (played by Terry Jones) a very obscure question about philosophy ("Which great opponent of Cartesian Dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena to a physical state and insists there is no point of contact between the the extended and the unextended?") . When she protests she has no idea, Cleese nudges her to take a guess, which she does, correctly guessing Henri Bergson (despite never having heard of him). She has more difficulty with the second question, What do penguins eat?
** Another Python sketch had a British television host a game show with the leading figures of Communism: Creator/KarlMarx, UsefulNotes/VladimirLenin, UsefulNotes/CheGuevara, and UsefulNotes/MaoZedong. Marx, Che, and Lenin are shot down with obscure English Premier Football questions and to name the Teddy Johnson and Pearl Carr song which won at the 1959 Eurovision Song Contest. ("Sing Little Birdie."), to which Mao unexpectedly knows the answer. In the ''Film/MontyPythonLiveAtTheHollywoodBowl'' version this last question is changed to naming "Great Balls Of Fire" by Music/JerryLeeLewis.
*** In a case of TimeMarchesOn one of the questions was "In what year did Coventry City win the FA Cup?". At the time it was correctly identified as a trick question "Coventry City have never won the FA Cup". That changed in 1987.

* ''Series/LateNight'''s "Wheel of Game Shows" combined this with a MoonLogicPuzzle: the game "Find the Red Tissue" had the red tissue be on the ''bottom'' of the box instead of inside it, and then on a rebus puzzle, the contestant's seemingly correct guess "[[DoubleEntendre Tickle my balls]]" was rejected in favor of "Play my sports"

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* Parodied in ''VideoGame/SamAndMaxSaveTheWorld: Situation: Comedy'', where you have to win "Who's Never Going to Be a Millionaire?". The questions are just as ridiculously arcane as you'd expect with a title like that. [[spoiler:To win, you have to switch the question cards with questions (actually song lyrics) that are insanely simple.]]

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* In the WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes short ''WesternAnimation/TheDucksters'', Daffy is the host of a radio game show (a parody of ''TruthOrConsequences''), and Porky is the hapless contestant. Daffy throws quite a few of these at Porky throughout the cartoon, including asking for the maiden name of Cleopatra's aunt, or asking him to name an opera from a ''single note'' ("C-C-Cavalleriana Rusticana?" "Audience?" "''Theatre/{{Rigoletto}}!''"). Porky gets even after winning the $26,000,000.03 (...yep) cash prize and buying the radio station with it, giving Daffy the same treatment Porky got after the question "At what latitude and longitude did the wreck of the Hesperus occur?"
* The first episode of ''GarfieldAndFriends'' had a segment where Garfield goes on a gameshow hosted by Binky The Clown to win a birthday gift for Jon. One of the increasingly ridiculous challenges is "Name That Fish", with Garfield given a selection of fish species to choose from. The fish's name? "Walter", an option that ''wasnt even on the board!'' The bizarre nature of the show is eventually justified when it turns it was AllJustADream.
** The challenge before that is even worse, Garfield has to answer the question "What did Christopher Columbus have for breakfast the day he discovered America?" The answer? "He didnt have breakfast that day". The question also has a ridiculously low time limit, something like three seconds tops.
--> '''Garfield''': Just as well, seeing as how I cant talk.

* Both ''Series/{{Debt}}'' and ''Idiot Savants'' made use of categories based on a contestant's selected field of pop culture expertise. During each game's bonus round, questions would come from these categories, but would be extremely obscure to anyone but absolute experts. For example, one ''Debt'' question about ''WesternAnimation/TheFlintstones'' asked who gave the voices for the adult Pebbles[[note]]([[Series/AllInTheFamily Sally Strutters]])[[/note]]; an ''Idiot Savants'' question about the ''Franchise/BackToTheFuture'' series involved the ''exact time'' Marty woke up when he returned to 1985.

* A sketch in ''APrairieHomeCompanion'' had special guest Fred Willard host a "Wheel of Willard" game, functioning as WheelOfFortune where the puzzles were quotes of his. The categories were "Lines from my movies", "Things I've said to myself while by myself in a soundproof room", and "Things I have said at some point in my entire life". One of the contestants, self-proclaimed as Fred's biggest fan, gets all of them correct. The final one was guessed without any clues, and was a fifty-plus word ramble about getting bananas from the grocery store.