The Points Mean Nothing: Difference between revisions

== Newspaper Comics ==

* In [[Calvin and Hobbes|Calvinball]], the points determine who's winning, but they're completely incomprehensible. Unless you're playing, of course.

'''Calvin''': I already ''had'' oogy! }}

 

** "One billion points to Colin. You hear that, [[Take That|Regis Philbin]]? [[Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?|One billion points.]]"

* ''[[Have I Got News for You]]'': This is a particularly bad (read frequent) offender: because of the amount of editing involved, the teams will end up with points without you seeing them answer the questions. Nobody cares about winning, but occasionally Paul will mention winning 26 of the series against Ian's 3. He has mentioned on commentaries being more competitive than Ian, even jumping in with an answer Ian was about to give (during Ian's team's turn) and getting the points, but the lack of clarity on the points hardly matters so long as its entertaining.

** A particularly clear example of this came when Anne Robinson hosted and gave one of them points whenever the other mentioned her husband. Hell, for all we know they deliberately cause Ian to lose.

** When (famously rotund) MP Roy Hattersley had pulled out for the third time, at very short notice (and was due a [[Take That]] - he made a joke about when he finally did turn up) his place with Paul was filled in by a tub of lard:

'''Angus''': We did everything we could, Ian. }}

** Its [[Sound to Screen Adaptation|radio counterpart]], ''The News Quiz'', works similarly. Former host Simon Hoggart used to regularly offer "two points to ''somebody''" or "two points to Jeremy for getting the right answer, and a bonus point to Alan for telling us what it was", and often ended with "And thanks to my unique scoring system, the winner is..." Before him was Barry Took, who gave points to Richard Ingrams if it looked like he might have once known the answer, or at least once known ''an'' answer. Current chair Sandi Toksvig deducts points for height jokes (although [[Hypocritical Humour|she herself will make them about Andy Hamilton]]).

* The apparently Canadian comedy show ''Kenny vs. Spenny'' constantly features competitions between the two fellows, but the whole idea of the show is how Kenny always rigs the competitions some way. In the odd episode Spenny wins, it's usually because the joke's still on him, e.g. {{spoiler|he races Canada's tallest stairs up by himself while Kenny takes the elevator.}}

* [[Chappelle's Show|Dave Chappelle]] held a quiz segment called "I Know Black People", selecting non-actors and genuinely testing them on whether they did 'know black people'. The points didn't matter for most questions, as some question gave points for any answer, and some where:

* ''[[Would I Lie to You]]'' generally averts this as the points are awarded on a very simple and straightforward basis, although not all of the questions make it through to the edit so sometimes it seems like a team is on top yet loses because the points the opposing team scored were cut. Both team captains (particularly Lee Mack) are quite competitive about the scores and who has won which series (in a series 5 episode, David Mitchell defied the trope by saying he did feel a genuine sense of competition about the game).

** As of series 6 the producers are working out the final score from the edit and dubbing it on in post-production so the points reflect the half-hour highlights and not the full recording. Whether this has made the pointless more or less meaningful is debatable.

== Music ==

* From Steve Goodman's/Arlo Guthrie's "The City of New Orleans":

Penny a point, ain’t no one keeping score }}