Jeff Foxworthy – Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?

By starrymag | May 27, 2015

Q) I was wondering if there was anything that you learned in fifth grade that you find is still helpful today, through daily life?

Jeff: You know what, probably the only thing that I learned during that fifth grade year were the lyrics to the Gilligan’s Island theme song.  Everything that I learned in school is gone and that is in a file that has a permanent do-not-erase tab on it, which is what makes the show work. When Mark first called me, Lord, almost a decade ago, and his first question was “Would you be interested in hosting a game show?” and I said, “Oh, I don’t think so.”  I said, “What’s the premise?”  And he said, “Adults taking an elementary school test for a shot at $1 million.”  And I just started laughing. I said that’s brilliant, because everyone is going to think they can do it.  Everybody is going to think oh, it’s an elementary school test?  Yes, I can do it.  And you just find out that you can’t, that all those things that you learned for a test, my brain goes, keep the Gilligan’s Island song, get rid of anything about triangles.  We don’t need triangles.  We never use triangles.

Q) And do you think that, because I watched the first episode and there was a question on there, I won’t spoil it, but where if you had just thought about it for a second, it’s the one about the states, and—right, that one?  And so, that if you had just thought about it, but maybe he was overthinking it too much and thought oh, there’s no way I’ll be able to figure this one out, but you maybe play a mind game with yourself, like you won’t know the answer if you overthink it, or something.

Jeff: I think that you totally do, and you think they’re first grade questions, so six-year-olds are answering this every day, and then when it comes up on the screen, as an adult you’re thinking there’s a trick to this.  And there’s really not.  As adults I think we tend to answer too quickly without thinking things out, and that’s what makes the show entertaining to me. I can look at somebody, when they come out there, because the producers might walk out there before the show and go, this lady is really smart.  We may be giving away $1 million.  And she’ll get out there, and the crowd starts yelling, and those lights come on, and I look at her face and I’m like, we aren’t giving away $1 million.  It’s different.  It’s totally different when you get out there and stand on that mark. And when you’re a comedian and that starts, you’re just looking up going thank you, God.  This is gold right here.

Q) This show is very family friendly and appeals to many generations of viewers.  Why do you think that is?

Jeff: Well, and Barry and Mark, feel free to jump in, I think part of the appeal, it’s probably one of the few shows that’s on at primetime that appeals to three different generations.  When we first started doing the show, I would get—I still get letters from teachers going, you’ve made it cool to be smart again.  So the show appeals to kids because it shows them knowing the answers that adults don’t know, or saving the day with adults. It’s popular with their parents because these parents are going over this stuff nine months a year with their kids, helping them do their homework, and it’s popular with the grandparents.  So its three generations, and I can’t really think of anything off the top of my head that appeals to three different generations.

Barry: I was going to add one thing to that, which is also the questions on the show are all pulled from grade school curriculums over the last 40 or 50 years.  It’s not stuff like any tech stuff or changes in historical or scientific data, like Pluto not being a planet, isn’t part of our show. That’s, I think, also why it relates to everybody, because we all learned it and nobody feels left out, whereas shows like Jeopardy! do appeal to a wide audience, but they also alienate a lot of people who don’t know—who never learned that information.  So I think that’s also part of the broad appeal, is the reference material that we use.

Q) This time around, what are the biggest differences this show has this season?

Jeff: Well, since we began, technology just keeps growing in leaps and bounds, so I think that’s the first thing you’ll notice is electronics wise, they’re much more sophisticated.  We do profile pages on the kids, which speaks to what they’re doing in their real life, where we show you what subjects they’re good at, what they like to do when they’re not in school, their pets.  And so you learn more about them, because I think they’re the stars of the show. One of the coolest things that we’ve added this season is a thing called the Grade School Giveaway, and we actually went out and researched looking for elementary schools that needed something, whether it was playground equipment or band equipment, or there was one town where the two major industries there had shut down, and these kids, they were struggling.  They didn’t have enough lunch money and the teachers were actually pulling their own money out of their pockets so these kids could eat, and so on the $10,000 question we Skype with that school. They’ll have the entire school in the cafeteria or the auditorium and find out a little bit about what’s going on with them, and then if the contestant answers the question right, we turn around as a show and give that school $10,000.  And just to see them jumping up and down and so happy and—it’s just really one of those feel-good moments.  The kids on our show, the ones that are in our classroom just get such a kick out of helping another school out.  I think that’s wonderful, and so having the ability to sit there and Skype with somebody and do something cool for them is really neat.

Q) I know that when you get to my age, certainly I can blink and five years goes by, and yet for an entire high school class runs through or an entire primary school class, they run through the whole gamut of it, five years is a long time when you’re that age.  I’m curious, though, when you look at it now from having done the show, I guess it was five years ago or so that it went off the air, have the kids changed dramatically?  Have the adults changed at all in terms of what they know?  What’s the biggest difference between who’s changed the most, the adults or the kids?

Jeff: To me it was a little bit like riding a bicycle, and since in that five years I had done a bunch of other shows, and Barry and Mark had, and I will say that’s one thing that’s really unique about this show.  Out of anything I’ve ever done on television, this was the thing, if I was in the grocery store or the Home Depot, people would walk by me and go, they need to bring 5^th Grader back. And you smile and nod, but you’re thinking they don’t do that.  Once something is gone, it’s gone, but every time I would see Barry, every time I would see Mark, we would bring up this show.  There was just something special and unique about it. When we started talking about it and then Fox called and said they wanted to bring it back, that was the question in my mind, okay, will it—can we still do the same thing?  Once we got back, like I said, technology has changed and these kids are much more techno-savvy, I think they were, than in the beginning, because it’s the world they live in.  They don’t use notebooks anymore.  They use iPads. And I laugh, and I don’t know how old you are, Bill, but I say—I’m 56, and so I’m like, technology wise, I’m in the middle, because my parents can’t text and my kids can’t write.  They don’t even teach cursive anymore.  But I’ve got to tell you, this group of kids that we’ve got on this season, they’re as fabulous as any group we’ve ever had. And they’re just regular kids.  It’s not kids that want to be TV stars, they’re just regular kids.  And I had a ball doing it.  I don’t know how Mark and Barry feel, but to me, after one day back, it was like oh yeah, man.  This is like your comfortable pair of cowboy boots.

Mark: I’ve always loved it.  Jeff and Barry know that, and as you said, every time we meet we talk about it.  But what’s great, even though we’ve updated the show a little bit, it really is the core values. This is a show that comes out of when you have a kid who’s ten years of age, you suddenly realize you cannot do their homework.  What used to be basic stuff, and our hard drives get full.  There’s so much going on with jobs, marriages, life, and the kids have only got to think about, pretty much, their grade school.You bring in these super smart contestants, some of them went to law school or great universities, lawyers, and they cannot answer first, second, third, fourth, or fifth grade.  It’s an amazing show, because what it does, it makes the kids feel empowered.  It raises up kids, and that’s what happened for years on television with this, and it’s coming back. If you look at the landscape of nonfiction TV, it’s the old standards that are the winners.  Like, you still know Dancing with the Stars, rock solid.  The Bachelor, rock solid.  Survivor, Apprentice, The Voice.  These shows have been going on forever, and when you find a show that just works and you know it feels good and it’s very entertaining, there’s a reason it should be on TV, and it really, for the three of us, have made hundreds of episodes over a decade together. This was great fun getting back together, and the show looks amazing, and it just makes you feel good.  You love it when you see that the contestant, deer in the headlights, the light is on, the audience, and they’re asking a fifth grader to come and help them cheat on the test.  It’s hilarious.

Q) I know it’s an easy thing.  Sometimes people can look at society and say oh, society is getting dumber, we’re specialized in some things, but we don’t have general knowledge of things anymore.  If this show had existed, say, in the 1950s or 1960s, do you think that the adults would do better, or about the same, or worse?

Jeff: That’s a great question.  I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that.

Barry: I would think that it would be the same, in that as a parent, you do move on with what you’re focusing on and what you’re studying, and so I think you do put all that seemingly useless information aside.  But with any of us, if when I was in school somebody said pay attention, you could win $1 million remembering this stuff someday, I would have paid more attention!

Jeff: I remember when my youngest daughter and my niece, who lives next door, was taking them to school one day, and we had been studying.  That week they had a science test, and it was about clouds.  We’re riding to school and I look up in the sky and I say, “Hey, girls, what kind of clouds are those?”  And my daughter goes, “Dad, that was three days ago.  I have no idea.” So she learned it for the test, which we all did, and then it was gone.  I think that probably always has happened.  And then as an adult, when you find, once you get out of school nobody is asking you the difference between an adverb and an adjective, and so you forget those rules.

Barry: There’s something I was going to add, also, about when you were talking about who has changed more, the kids or adults.  When we did the casting search cross-country, we saw kids from all different cities and states, and what was funny was these kids were just born when the show was created.  They didn’t really grow up with the show, because in the last five years, we weren’t on the air and they weren’t aware of us. When they were auditioning for the show we were telling them what the show was, and these kids couldn’t believe that grownups didn’t know this stuff.  It was funny to see their reaction.  They were genuinely shocked when we told them that there are grownups who don’t know how many quarts are in a pint, or pints are in a quart, and so it was really funny.  So I think there’s a humor that still exists that kids get excited by knowing stuff that their parents don’t know.  That seems timeless. With the contestants, what was interesting was money values have changed, I think, because of the way the economy dipped and rebounded over the last few years.  We weren’t sure if they were going to be as greedy as they once were in risking their money. But I think for our sake, what’s great is people are just as greedy as ever.  They’ll take the gamble, but it was a little bit less predictable this time, which I think makes for a fun show, because before, it was like everybody would go for it.  Everybody would risk it, even though Jeff would be out there saying this is $100,000.  I could put it in your pocket right now.  You could take that.  And they would almost always go for it. Now we had a different ebb and flow where people really took a beat [ph].  Once they got up into $100,000, $175,000, $300,000, they really started to think about how that would change their lives, and I thought that was a really good addition and evolution of mankind in some way.

Q) I was wondering if you’ve heard from the effect on the kids of having been on the show, if it has effect on their academic life or anything else?

Barry: What’s really cool is when we were talking about relaunching the show, just out of curiosity we reached out to all the kids from the first class who are all in college now and doing great, excelling in sports and academics and studying medicine and just really, they’re all really good kids. One member of the class stayed in show business.  She went on to do the show on Disney, Austin & Ally.  It was Laura Marano.  When she left and we replaced her, those five are all in university and doing great, and so I think we picked good kids and then they were also part of a good show that celebrated them for being smart, and so I think it really does set them on a good course.  All of our kids in the subsequent classes all—they were smart when we met them and they’re still doing well.

Q) Do they come back to you and say that it changed their attitude about school, that they’ve come on and they’ve really felt the effect of having a good education, of having answers, of being able to shine?

Barry: We’ve heard that a lot from viewers, fans of the show, where parents will say I’m glad you made it cool to be smart, because I’m able to use that as an example to my kids.  My own kids, who are in first grade and third grade, every time they say am I going to be able to be on the show when I’m in fifth grade?  I’m, if you’re smart enough, so work hard.  I think it’s a good excuse for parents to encourage their kids to work hard in school.

Jeff: Well, and we also live in a world where negative drives headlines, because that’s what makes people watch.  So many of the things that you see and hear about kids now, it comes from a negative aspect.  It’s like Mark said.  This is a show that empowers kids.  I think it shows kids, hey, if I apply myself and do well at this, this gives me power in the world.  It shows kids in such a positive light. One of the things that we changed this time around is when we do the copy, the child at the podium actually gets to go confer with their classmates.  I would go into the little huddle and we’d bring the camera into the huddle, and to listen to them discuss the question, you realize, oh wow, that they’re paying attention, because they’re talking about not just the question, but things leading up to it and details and no, I remember when we studied this that so-and-so said this and I’m like, they blew me away.  I’m like, wow, they know what they’re talking about.  They’re just not up there guessing blindly.

Q) Jeff, is there any future for your other game show, for Bible Challenge?

Jeff: I don’t know.  They had an option on it.  It’s hard.  It was only one of two original programs on GSN, and it costs money to do an original program.  I think it was an economic thing, because it was the top-rated thing on GSN, and I enjoyed doing it, but as of now, we haven’t heard anything about doing more of them.

Q) Between the two, are you really now a professional game show host as well as a comedian and everything else?

Jeff: It’s so funny.  Never say never, because when Mark first talked to me about—I think my first thought was, game show host?  No, that’s cheesy.  And I found that I loved doing it because I like people. People will come up to me in the airport and go I know you hate people bothering you, and I’m like no, I really don’t.  I like people.  I like to get to know their stories and where they’re from and I love kids.  I’ve spent so much of my life working with kids off the stage, whether it’s being a parent or having my nieces next door or working at the school.  My wife and I have been chairmen of the fundraising stuff for the Duke Children’s Hospital for over 20 years, and so that was a natural for me. And I could be funny.  That’s what I liked about this show is I didn’t have to act like I was Alex Trebek and I knew all this stuff, and so I could make jokes.  Because even when you’re doing well, you’re answering questions an eight-year-old is answering, you can’t get too puffed up about it.  I just found I enjoyed hosting.  I was like well, isn’t this a pleasant surprise at this point in life?  You found something else you really like doing.

Mark: People said to me the other day, “Has Jeff Foxworthy ever done anything else other than 5^th Grader?”  The whole career has been erased.

Jeff: Yes, I had two lives before this.  But here’s the funny thing.  I really thought that I was going to go through life being the redneck guy because of the redneck jokes, because everywhere I’d go, people were like hey, you might be a redneck.  Once I started doing this show, I have 50-year-old guys walk by me in the mall and tapping me on the shoulder and go, I’m not smarter than a fifth grader.  Yes, so now I’m the 5^th Grader guy.

Q) You never know what you can do until someone gives you a chance to do it.

Jeff: Yes, absolutely.  And I’m so glad I said yes to it.  It’s been one of my favorite things I’ve ever done.

Mark: It’s such a great brand.  The amount of people who talk about 5^th Grader in passing, when they talk about different shows I’ve done.  It is because it raises up the kids and it is because you see blue collar, white collar, you see white collar, college-educated contestants who literally are deer in headlights.  They really cannot remember how to calculate the area of a triangle.  They can’t even remember first grade art, what do you get when you mix primary blue and primary red? It’s funny for the audience, and the kids are laughing, but Jeff Foxworthy did something brilliant in the first ever few episodes which we continue to this day.  Jeff never, ever allows a contestant to be humiliated.  Jeff will laugh along with them.  He wants them to win the money.  The kids are kind, and this is a show that was ahead of its time. Now, kinder, gentler TV works, obviously.  We’ve seen the shift in television.  5^th Grader was always that way, and it’s just great to have 5^th Grader back on network TV.  I love the show, and it is a thing that’s one of those things that got in the lexicon of the United States of America, hey, you’re not smarter than a fifth grader, and that’s a hard thing to achieve in this nation. And that really happened.  It’s a catchphrase in the nation.

Jeff: I would not bet against these kids, I’ll tell you that.

Barry: We did have a valedictorian on, a current valedictorian on in the last version of the show, and she did okay, but not great, and I think it just proves that these kids are in it to win it.

Q) I just wondered if you could give an example of the process that the kids go through to be on the show.

Barry: Sure.  Well, it’s three parts that we evaluate them on.  One is they take a test that they have to excel at.  Two is they take a personality test, like an audition, where we make sure that they take the game seriously but they still have a personality that’s not typical showbiz kids.  We wanted them to have hobbies and interests outside of show business, so some of them are sports and piano and lots of different things. And then the last part is, honestly, is we meet with their parents, because we learned early on that we’re going to be spending a lot of time with their parents as well, and we wanted to make sure they were people that were polite and professional and fun and easy to work with.  If they passed all three tests, then we put them into the next level of the process and we discuss them with the network and pick a diverse mix of kids with different areas of expertise and from different parts of the country so there’s a real cross section.

 

 

*CONFERENCE CALL*