The Newlywed Game

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Karen Lurie

Short-sighted TV viewers might believe the airing of couples' dirty laundry on television started with the talk show craze of the 1990s, with Jerry Springer as the ultimate ringmaster. But it actually began back in the 1960s, in the realm of game shows, courtesy of Springer's spiritual forefather, veteran producer Chuck Barris.

The Newlywed Game ran on and off, daytime and nighttime, between 1966 and 1990. It featured four couples who had been married less than a year, competing against each other. After the wives were "safely secured offstage," the husbands were asked questions such as, "Would your wife say she sleeps with her toes pointing toward the ceiling, the floor, or the wall?" "What animal would you compare your mother-in-law to?" "If your wife were a car, what would need to be repaired most, her fenders or transmission?" The husbands guessed how the wives would answer, then the wives came back and answered the same questions, and couples got points for matches. Then the husbands got sent out and the process repeated. The couple with the most points won some sort of domestic "newlywed" prize, like a dishwasher.

Presiding over the festivities was Bob Eubanks, an unctuous, pompadoured host who humiliated himself in Michael Moore's film Roger and Me by telling a racist joke. Eubanks got to ask the prying questions, and provided deadpan reactions to the wackiness. Sometimes he took it on the road, staging the game in shopping malls all over the country. Eubanks hosted the day and nighttime incarnations of the show until 1989, when he was replaced by Latino comic Paul Rodriguez for a season; the show was soon canceled.

The real idea behind The Newlywed Game and its slightly older cousin, The Dating Game (also from Barris, and hosted by the oily Jim Lange), was to see how much sex talk could be gotten away with without getting in trouble with the network's Standards and Practices division. America's puritan/voyeuristic dichotomy was never more apparent than in the loaded questions, the coy yet revealing answers, and most of all, the titters in the audience, members of which seemed almost shocked at the mere idea that these married people had sex. In fact, those who thought The Dating Game ("Bachelor Number One: If I were an ice cream cone, would you lick my cream or bite my cone?") was sleazy were often surprised to learn, that, although the contestants were married, The Newlywed Game was somehow even sleazier.

This was a time, after all, when jokes about the rabbit-like sex lives of newlyweds still made sense. Couples weren't living together as much yet, and convention still dictated that no one was really having premarital sex. Of course, the word "sex" was not used on the show. It was "whoopee" that the audience was imagining the couples feverishly making, not love. Against the backdrop of the burgeoning sexual revolution, it's almost laughable, and somehow, more trashy with the euphemism, which became ingrained in the American consciousness.

Legend has it that Howard Hughes was planning to buy ABC, but after catching The Newlywed Game one afternoon, he was so disgusted that he immediately called off the deal. The show is also the stuff of urban myth: in response to a question from Eubanks about the "most unusual place you've ever made whoopee," amid other responses such as "on the kitchen table" or "in the bathroom of a 747," a female contestant supposedly responded, "That would be in the butt, Bob." It never happened; even if it had, the network censors would never have allowed it on their air. Barris claims it happened in his book The Game Show King; however, he admits he didn't witness it himself. Bob Eubanks, who should know, has repeatedly offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who provides him with a video of the incident. He also told the Village Voice that he could probably have sold about a million "In the Butt, Bob" T-shirts.

The later, 1980s versions of the show, such as The New Newlywed Game, were a little more explicit and mean-spirited ("If your sex life were made into a movie, which part of the video store would it be found in--horror, fantasy or XXX-rated weirdo?" "Which of your wife's friends would most likely be harpooned if she were floating in the ocean?"). Reviewing the series in 1987, TV Guide called it "the worst piece of sleaze on television today."

Barris, who later spawned The Gong Show, once noted that if a newlywed couple loved and respected each other, they probably would never have thought about appearing on The Newlywed Game; if they had, they probably wouldn't have been chosen, because they wouldn't have made good contestants. If that opinion doesn't seal the connection between The Newlywed Game and the talk show expose-a-ramas, consider the contestant who accused her husband, on the air, of having an affair, saying "I knew about it, but I wanted to wait until we got on national TV to tell everybody."