Adriano Celentano – "Prisencolinensinainciusol” (1972)

Eni go for doing peso ai

In de col mein seivuan

Prisencolinensinainciusol (ALL RIGHT!)

“Humble” is not an adjective that is often used to describe 2 or 3 lines.  (Other adjectives that are not often used to describe 2 or 3 lines include “modest,” “reserved,” “unassuming,” “deferential,” “demure,” “self-effacing,” and “self-deprecating.”)

But playing competitive bar trivia can humble a man . . . especially a man who is plays all by himself – whether because he thinks he’s so smart he can score higher than the five- or six-person teams he is playing against, or because he has no friends and has no choice but to play solo.

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I’ve used several strategies to lasso trivia partners so I don’t have to play alone.

For example, I’ve arrived early enough at a popular trivia venue to grab a large table all to myself, and then offered a group of later arrivals a place to sit – on the condition that they allow me to play with them.

On occasion, I’ve struck up a pre-game conversation with a couple or a small group, and managed to wangle an invitation to join their team.

But my go-to strategy for finding trivia teammates is to sit at the bar and ask the bartenders if they want to play with me.

That usually works because bartenders have to be nice to their customers.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that I have a reputation as a big tipper.  (20%?  The hell you say!  I routinely tip 22% or 23%, and have been known to go as high as 25% on occasion.  You best believe that gets a big – albeit insincere – smile from any bartender around.)

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Despite all that, I sometimes end up playing alone nonetheless.  

Like last Thursday, when my usual neighborhood trivia spot decided to cancel their game at the last minute – either due to covid concerns, or because they figured most people would have better things to do on the eve of Christmas Eve.  

I usually play at craft breweries, but the only place offering trivia that night that wasn’t too distant  from my home was a little pizza joint in a local strip mall.

All the other teams playing there had several members, and looked like regulars – I figured it would be pretty awkward to invite myself to join any of them.

And there was no bar at this place – so no bartenders I could glom on to as my playing partners.

I decided to give it a shot all by myself.

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Actually, I wasn’t that sad to be playing as a one-man team.

I’ve never won playing solo, but I still entertain a fantasy of walking into some place where no one knows me and single-handedly beating all the multiple-player teams I’m competing against.

That fantasy is a foolish one because no matter how much one person knows, there are going to be many subjects that person knows nothing about.  For example, there are usually a lot of pop culture questions – questions about music, TV shows, toys, movies, video games, etc.  I know a lot about sixties and seventies pop culture, but my abilities when it comes to more recent pop culture-related questions are quite limited – I would do much better with a couple of teammates who are two or three decades younger.

But the place where I played last Thursday tempted me because there were only five other teams playing – the place where I regularly play on Tuesdays draws two or even three times as many teams – and because most of the other players looked about as sharp as a marble.  (Just sayin’.)

Finishing first in even an unimpressive six-team field would be a tall order for a one-man team.  But finishing third out of six teams?  That seemed eminently possible.

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At least it seemed eminently possible until I missed five of the first seven questions.

These weren’t near misses either.  For example, the host played snippets from three Christmas records and asked us to identify the three artists who made those records.  If you got two out of three correct, you got credit for the number of points you had wagered – if you got all three right, you got bonus points to boot.  

I came close to the two-correct-answers standard – I was only two correct answers short!  

That’s right – I got exactly zero correct.  I guessed – and I do mean “guessed” – Mötley Crüe, Harry Connick Jr., and Miley Cyrus.  The correct answers were Twisted Sister, Michael Bublé, and Gwen Stefani.  (Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.)

I did better on another three-part question.  By “better” I mean that I was able to name one of the three European capitals that begins with “R” – Rome, Italy.  I whiffed on Reykjavik, Iceland, and Riga, Latvia.  

Getting one out of three instead of none out of three makes one feel marginally less stupid, but you get zero points either way.  (It’s like hitting a weak grounder back to the pitcher in baseball instead of striking out– you feel a little better that you made contact with the ball, but you’re an easy out either way.)

Perhaps the worst of my whiffs on those first seven questions was failing to name the drink made with rum, curaçao, and lime juice that is popular in Polynesian-themed restaurants and has a rhyming name.

Pretty much every one I’ve told about that question has come up with “Mai Tai” as the answer.  But I didn’t.

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I was beginning to avoid eye contact with the host when I handed my answers to her – being wrong so many times was embarrassing.

But I made an inspired guess on the 8th question – “What politician criticized the fictional Murphy Brown TV character for choosing to get pregnant and raise her baby as a single mother?”  I could think of a lot of politicians who might have questioned whether we should encourage women to get pregnant and have babies when there was no father in the picture, but I decided to take a flyer on former Vice President Dan Quayle.  YOU ARE CORRECT, SIR!  (I won bonus points by knowing that Quayle was from Indiana.)

Suddenly I started to roll, answering question after question correctly.  In fact, I answered the final 13 wagering questions without a miss _ including the question that proved to be the most difficult wagering question of the evening: “Which 95-year-old EGOT winner recently published an autobiography titled All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business?

After ascertaining that “EGOT winner” meant someone who had won at least one Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, I correctly went with “Mel Brooks” as my answer.  (I earned bonus points for knowing that the Oscar-winning actress he was married to for 40-plus years was none other than the late Anne Bancroft.)

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That answer helped me to advance from 6th (and last) place to 4th place – which is one spot out of the money.  

The 3rd-place team had a sizable lead on me, but I had a chance to leapfrog over them and take home a prize if I got the final question right and they didn’t.

Unfortunately, the final question was “What is the highest-grossing American movie of all time that has the word ‘Christmas’ in its title?”

I didn’t know the answer, and neither did any of the others teams I was playing against that night.  (And neither do you, I’m willing to bet.)

So I remained in 4th place – which wasn’t bad for a solo player, but wasn’t exactly the outcome I was hoping for.

On the bright side, that restaurant’s pizza was very good, and they sold the local craft beers on their menu for only $5 per can during trivia.  Plus I learned a badly-needed lesson about humility.  So the evening wasn’t a total loss.

Although I’ll probably forget that humility lesson pretty quickly and be right back where I started.

[Final note: the answer to the final question was Jim Carrey’s 2000 movie, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which grossed $260 million domestically.  That’s a fairly anemic number compared to the much higher box-office figures for Titanic, and Avatar, and Star Wars : Episode VII – The Force Awakens, and Black Panther, and Avengers: Endgame (to name just a few).  But it beats every other movie that had “Christmas” in the title.]

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The lyrics to Adriano Celentano’s 1972 single, “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” are pretty much 100% gibberish.

Celentano was apparently trying to make some really important point: 

Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did.  So at a certain point, because I like American slang – which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian – I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate.  And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything.

(Whatever . . .)

“Prisencolinensinainciusol” was used in the first episode of the third season of the FX TV series, Fargo – which may be the best TV series in history.  (At least it was before the fourth season was released.  The fourth season sort of jumped the shark.)  

Click here to watch the scene that is accompanied by “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” which is the damnedest record you’ve ever heard.  It’s completely insane and completely irresistible.

Like Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park,” “Prisencolinensinainciusol” is not just a fabulous pop record – it’s one of the absolute masterworks of Western civilization.

Click here to watch Celentano lip-synching the record on some crazy Italian TV show.  

Click here to watch an even crazier Italian TV performance of the song.