Are You Smarter Than Me Am?

You are if you had the good sense to run away after (make that during) the first episode of...

What seemed promising in concept, turned out to be depressing and even infuriating. I watched the premiere episode of Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader on Fox, then stayed around because of Jeff Foxworthy. Not only is my neck red, my face is redder. Foxworthy is the show, but the show it not Foxworty, if you know what I'm sayin'.

A review I'd read led me to believe the program wouldn't be what one might have thought, but I never expected that what I hadn't expected would be so unexpected..

Host Jeff Foxworthy started slowly, but he actually turned out to be the one small highlight of the show, and the kids were, in fact, exactly what I'd hoped they'd be - bright and polite (I was worried beforehand that they might be smug and small brats).

Things dragged right from the start. Adults don't play against the kids, the kids are actually helpers, so I don't know what they get for participating, lollipops? I mean, at least the mob gets to keep what the contestant loses on 1vs100, which makes that a pretty entertaining show despite being slow yet ten times faster than "5th Grader."

And it seemed there were so many ways the kids could help that I expected the first guy, decently dressed and seemingly of at least average intelligence, would be playing for the top prize in no time.

Man, am I a bad judge of people. the dope didn't know the answer to a any of the first four questions, and I think at least two came from preschool coloring books. But he still got them right because the kids bailed him out. Then came question five with our hero now out of kids (I don't know why, that's just the way it is). The question was: Who was the first President to be impeached?

"Oh...so easy," I muttered to the wife. And it was. Foxworthy announced that every single kid correctly answered it. Then Joe Contestant pondered aloud, "The only one I can think of is........ John Quincy Adams," but he couldn't be sure, so he finally had to quit.

To get the few grand he'd accumulated - or rather that the kids had accumulated for him, he had to tell the world that he was not as smart as a fifth grader, something he proclaimed far too proudly to suit me. Yeah, and his mother wore combat boots.

But there's even a kicker to all this: our boy, the loser, mentioned that he'd even graduated from UCLA - - - - with a major in American history. It's too bad they didn't give Foxworthy the option to John Wilkes Booth his behind.

So there went a guy who's probably making a good living at something, hopefully not related to his major or national security, and he knows virtually nothing about anything.

He was followed by a woman, and I was amazed that, everything considered, the two of them were the least mature of all the people on the stage.

Now it's one thing to laugh at the street corner rabble Jay Leno accosts on the street but never destroys with his simple questions. After all, they are just a fringe element we tell ourselves, or, "C'mon, they live in LA, what do you expect?" But this game demonstrated that American stupidity runs deep, and that it's not that funny.