Game Show Network has brought reruns of What's My Line? back to their overnight line-up. What's more, they've reached back for the earliest shows available, back to 1952, and will proceed sequentially from there, airing whatever episodes haven't been lost to posterity. I like these shows, in large part for the chance to see celebrities of the day (last night's Mystery Guest was Walter Winchell) and to hear everyone talk about what was going on in the world at the time.
But I find it a bit disconcerting to realize that the show was, in a way, rigged. I don't mean "rigged" the way the later "big-money game shows" were rigged, with Charles Van Doren and others being surreptitiously fed the right answers. What's My Line? was a low-money panel show and its fun came not from seeing folks win but from seeing the panel fumble. It's obvious in many cases that they were steered not to win but to fail; that is, they weren't told what the contestant's occupation was but that certain misguided questions would elicit laughs. On the episode aired last night, a lady's occupation was that she hand-painted designs on men's underwear. Steve Allen, supposedly posing queries at random, asked her…
"Is there an end product involved?" (Big laugh at the use of the term, "end product.")
"Could I get along without it?" (Huge laugh, in part over Allen's seeming bewilderment at why everyone found that so funny.)
"Would you be apt to find one or more of these objects in my living room?" (Screams)
"If friends came to visit me, would they admire it?" (More screams)
"Could you sit on it?" (Likewise)
None of those would have been funny if the lady had made ash trays or grandfather's clocks which, at that point in the questioning, would have been just as likely as underwear. Clearly, Allen was briefed and it appears that the non-comedian panelists were also set up with a few of these. In his book on What's My Line?, its producer Gil Fates admitted that they did this (he called it "gambitting") but minimized its use and said Steve Allen never required any such briefing. I think Fates is downplaying a tactic they used much more than he later liked to admit.
I've always wondered, hearing about the Quiz Show Scandals and how they hauled Van Doren and Dan Enright before Congress, why that selected bit of televised dishonesty bothered anyone. Pro wrestling has a fifty year history of lying to the American people, and talk shows habitually pretend a walk-on celeb was unexpected, or that the host just happened to ask a question for which the guest had a terrific corresponding anecdote. An awful lot of what passes for spontaneity is scrupulously planned and even rehearsed. Somehow, if you don't call it a "quiz show," you can get away with just about anything.