The following is an excerpt from the interview. Many people will find his unique perspective on the challenges of learning Chinese in comparison to the other languages insightful. Chinese is his 3 rd language he learned back in the 70’s as a Canadian diplomat to China. I had the privilege to interview him for our podcast and talk about his story of learning Chinese and his perspectives on learning languages in general. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.Steven Kaufmann is a world renown polyglot (a person who knows and is able to use several languages) who speaks 20 languages. Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. Lingo airs Wednesdays at 9:00 PM ET on CBS. This formula has helped Harvey’s version of Family Feud run for 10 years, and if Lingo catches on, then RuPaul might challenge him as the king of cheeky games. Either way, the end result is the same: A predictable game gets a jolt of excitement thanks to some light blue humor. This flatters the audience, too, but unlike RuPaul’s strategy, it encourages them to think they’re smarter than the host instead of in a secret society with him. He says he’s never heard of a dominatrix, or that everyone in the studio audience is going to hell because they’ve heard some wild answer or another. In its current form, Feud almost begs for inappropriate answers by asking players to name “ a job that uses a whip” or “ something you like your girlfriend to do to your face.” Harvey, however, always acts shocked when things get out of hand. That’s the opposite of Steve Harvey’s strategy on Family Feud, which is the dirtiest game show on TV right now. He knows he’s being naughty, and the audience knows he’s being naughty, but by being a little coy, he lets them imagine they’re having a private joke with him. His subversive self-awareness is part of the fun. When he reaches his hand in that vat of balls to draw one that reveals the amount of bonus cash a player will receive, he understands exactly why it’s lurid. These bits also highlight Ru’s particular brand of humor. It adds an air of wit and sophistication, and it assures the audience that the show will reward their attention. So when the answer is “glove,” and RuPaul jumps in to say “no glove, no love!” before moving to the next round, his reference to the safe-sex slogan is arguably the most important ingredient. ![]() It’s decently interesting to guess whether the word being decoded is “poker” or “joker,” but that format will never have pizzazz on its own. Lingo, on the other hand, is basically just endless rounds of Wordle. Games like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire don’t need risqué hosts, because the difficult questions are compelling on their own. It’s his way of adding sparkle and personality without pulling too much focus from the players.Īnd boy, does it help that his jokes are a little dirty. ![]() From the first moments, it’s clear he’s comfortable hosting Lingo, particularly when he uses jokes to cap an interview segment with a contestant or transition between rounds. That pop culture quizzer was chaotic and low-budget, but it was also minor-league training for the primetime gig he’s got now. Plus he got direct experience on that front in 2016, when he hosted Logo’s short-lived Gay for Play Game Show Starring RuPaul. Inspired by Match Game, the louche ’70s series that thrived on gently off-color humor, the Snatch Game is mostly a showcase for the queens’ celebrity impersonations, but it’s also an opportunity for Ru himself to wrangle a traditional game show format. RuPaul’s been prepping for this job since the second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, when the Snatch Game challenge first appeared. Anyone can encourage two roommates from Chicago to realize they’re two vowels away from spelling “trigonometry.” It takes a special kind of TV star to make such a simple game feel edgy. That’s where the show gets its personality. But in between the nuts-and-bolts portions of the job, he injects sly jokes about sex and religion and a big tub of plastic balls that’s rolled on stage in the second round. Hosting CBS’s reboot of the classic game show, he mostly guides contestants through the competition, cheering them on as they decode words for increasing amounts of cash. RuPaul doesn’t make Lingo obscene or anything, but he makes it just dirty enough.
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