Quiz Names…

About once a month, Nik and I like to meet friends over in Greenwich for a cheeky pint and a little quiz action. The Richard the 1st pub quiz is one of those quizzes that is relatively simple and given the fact that there are only around five or six teams each week, quite an easy one to win.  The prize is never that big and sometimes amounts to nothing more than a voucher to be used behind the bar, but it’s the winning that counts right!?

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The group of us usually stick with the same safe team name every week (‘The Tolley Dolleys’- even though it’s explained to me and everyone else in the pub every week, I still don’t know what it means!)  Yesterday, the normal quiz master was away so we thought we’d change it up a little… and this is where the arguments began. It seems that when it comes to naming your quiz team you can’t please everyone.

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How do you come up with a decent team name at a quiz?  You need something that is funny and if you’re lucky topical… however, it’s got to be something that the whole room can understand (not just a private joke amongst friends).  It helps to be quite witty but then you don’t want to come across as being smug twats.  Personally, I like a bit of a rude team name, but you are then treading a fine line of being too crude or just a little pathetic.  I don’t know why, but it always descends into farce whenever this moment comes up at a quiz…. it’s just a name for pitys sake!  But if you nail it, and you actually get a laugh from the room when your score is read out at the end, it can almost mean more than the victory itself.

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Yesterday, we marked a paper at the end of the quiz by a team with the simplest of names, ‘Hand Shandy’.  I can’t tell you why I found this hilarious (and still do now) but I can reassure you I was the only one who did.  Every time we go, I suggest ‘The Bearded Clam Of Destiny’ (copyright of Dan Cooper) and every time I get shot down.  The only other time I’ve thought a name was worth a damn was when a friend came up with ‘The Guatanamo Bay City Rollers’.  I suppose for some people it’s just a gift that they have..

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