The music is way too loud. The food is hit-or-miss. It’s always crowded. It’s trivia night at the Burgundy Lion, where every Monday evening we trivia enthusiasts fill two floors of the British pub under the largely-benevolent dictatorship of the Quiz Master. Most weeks begin with his shout of “Shut up, it’s my meeting,” like we’re trapped in a drunken union hall general assembly. He’s right, of course: as moderator, we are all hopelessly at his mercy. 

The Quiz Master calls his events’ language policy “the opposite of Quebec City,” in that it’s proudly bilingual, a line that reliably causes groan-tinged laughs. My team of six, dubbed Henry Cavill’s CGI Upper Lip—if you know, you know—leans anglo, but the questions are asked in both English and French. We started participating regularly in January, and as the weeks have gone by, we began to recognize not only other regular team names (“Ah, it’s The Shitty Boys”), but also their members’ faces, expressing varying levels of inebriation. 

This weekly sojourn is devoted to testing one’s knowledge in geography or sports; but for many of us, it’s also a social lifeline, a regular chunk of hours to tend to friendships. As pandemic-era isolation continues to linger and time-honoured social environments disappear, it’s easy for us to feel alienated from one another. Trivia night is always there to bring us back together, in all its drunken, dog-eat-dog glory. 

For me, trying to hang on to that element is crucial, because so far, my team’s only won once. It isn’t about winning, except that it is. We want to win. So bad. The trouble is, you can’t really prepare for the Quiz Master’s categories. They can be as inscrutable as “Slim Shady and Hillary Clinton,” or, simply, “Potatoes.” All trivia nights are, in a way, studies of their hosts’ interests, preoccupations, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. Rather than try to prepare by reading general reference books or Wikipedia, one must learn from, and of, the Quiz Masters themselves. 

In our case, it’s all about the music. Beyond the ever-present music categories, almost every question is accompanied by a musical clue: for instance, if the answer is “the New York Jets,” Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” might play. A question that may initially appear impossible can become clear with an errant lyric. My team has been listening to a lot more nineties music, anticipating our Quiz Master’s tastes. Plus, every week, between the first and second halves of the night, the entire bar is enlisted to sing along to the theme song: a rendition of Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time,” the lyrics changed by the Quiz Master so that the chorus begins, “This trivia is killing me / I need to win, so please help me.” The first few weeks, it felt cringe to join in. Now, I can’t imagine not shouting along. 

I first fell in love with trivia nights while living in Ottawa, when my friends and I discovered that they provided an opportunity to see each other once a week, rain or shine, for relatively cheap—the cost of a single beer, or, occasionally, a mediocre plate of fish and chips. The trivia team became my social nucleus, and my sense of community became wrapped up in this oddly cutthroat world of team-based camaraderie. When I moved to Montreal in 2019 to begin my doctorate, I lost both that world and the feeling of community. I tried, in fits and starts, to get another trivia team going. It wasn’t until last year that it came together in a real and lasting way. 

I’ve asked myself many times why a feeling of community seemed beyond my reach until it reassumed the form of the pub quiz. Perhaps there’s something about how, as the Quiz Master runs through everyone’s scores, your team is united in the desire to not be one of those whose performance is assessed with a single word: “Bad!” In that moment, you are not just friends engaged in a contest of intelligence and wisdom. You are comrades in arms, and whether you win or lose, you do it together. Plus, there’s the thrill of that coveted promise: a $50 bar tab for the winners. ⁂

Jake Pitre is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. His work has been published in the Globe and Mail, This, the Atlantic, Jacobin and elsewhere.