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This was the first time we gathered in person to play in three years, but for many of us it felt longer. “I’ve aged about a decade,” said quizmaster Luke Pettigrew during his introduction to the crowd of 90 or so players. I know the feeling.

Trivia has always been a fun thing to do on a weeknight, but it’s become much more meaningful since the pandemic. After many local games pivoted online, they’ve now come roaring back to life, more ubiquitous than ever. They’ve both specialized and diversified, and now there’s a pub quiz to fit virtually every personality or interest.

Pub quizzes spread to pc28����from the UK, and at their core they’re all relatively similar: a host reads a series of questions (sometimes offering audio and visual clues), as teams write down answers to compete for a prize — say, a pitcher of beer, an appetizer or simply bragging rights.

Why trivia left the pub

In March 2020, when bars closed and we all became intimately familiar with the term “social distancing,” pub trivia outgrew the pub. Pettigrew, suddenly furloughed from his day job serving at Duke of York, sent an email to the “scattered nerds” of his mailing list promising the “first (and maybe last) Zoom trivia.”

“We were expecting it to run one week, and it ended up running 100 weeks,” Pettigrew told me over a recent lunch.

For me, and many other regulars, those nights on Zoom were a lifeline. With two different screens open — one where Pettigrew read the questions, and the other where I conferred with my Shut Up, Nerds! teammates — we played multiple rounds every week. Some of my teammates were already friends, some started out as friends of friends, but soon I knew their lives intimately and they knew mine. When one of us got engaged or pregnant, the team members were some of the first to know.

At a time of extreme isolation, seeing the same faces every Monday night, cracking jokes and identifying songs from three-second audio clips, was a much-needed shared experience. It was a sense of structure and community during a time when we were all longing for it.

There was no entrance fee, just pay-what-you-can donations through e-transfer. At first, Pettigrew kept some of it himself and gave the rest to laid-off bar staff. He later raised money for those in need, such as Black Lives Matter demonstrators who required bail funds after being arrested during George Floyd protests.

Weekly trivia helped many through a tough time, including Pettigrew, who underwent major surgery in October 2020. “There was a period of about a month when everybody thought I was going to die,” he said. “It really helped to be working away at trivia rounds rather than ruminating about my health.”

Eventually, when the world started opening up again and people got Zoom fatigue, virtual trivia fizzled, leading Pettigrew to announce a hiatus in May 2022.

He told me he felt guilty he didn’t reunite us sooner and paid for this live iteration out of his own pocket. He likened the in-person version to “a Scorsese ‘Last Waltz.’”

“Like, we’ve been seeing each other for 100 weeks on Zoom,” he said. “Let’s get the band back together one last time.”

The pub quiz returns

He had trivia booklets printed with the title “Zoom Trivia Live!” and A/V rounds included Pettigrew’s pandemic-perfected before-and-after marker drawings, which the community loved enough to demand they get their own You can play along there, guessing answers like “Juno Country for Old Men” and “Blade-y and the Tramp.”

Pettigrew’s Duke of York trivia is one of the longest-running pub quizzes in the city. I first stopped in as a UofT undergrad in 2006, after discovering the game in Oxford during a summer abroad. Back then, there were only a few pub quizzes in Toronto. At the time, the Duke of York’s questions were supplied by a company called Pub Stumpers, which also provided booklets to other pubs in the city, making it easy to put on quiz nights without much prep. Also included was a CD with song clips. But many of the songs were geared toward an older audience and, for veterans of the scene, the questions eventually started to repeat.

Over the years, Pettigrew replaced questions with ones he wrote himself, building elaborate recurring bits around “all-the-way homophones,” old almanacs he found on the street and “shouty-outy” bonuses for which he threw fun-sized candy bars as rewards. The game developed its own flavour to match Pettigrew’s self-deprecating humour and the collective knowledge set of the group, which includes scientists, journalists, film and TV workers, even other trivia hosts. He can’t make it too specialized — he wants everyone on a team to contribute — but he can’t make it too easy either, because the competition level is fierce.

“Sometimes I find myself giving people pep talks, like, ‘No, you guys are smart.’” he said. “There are ‘Jeopardy!’ winners (who play here) whose teams don’t finish in the top five.”

A new twist on trivia

Two members of one of the regular teams, — first at the Queen West queer hub the Beaver, which closed during the pandemic, and now at the Bloor West beer bar Tallboys every other Wednesday.

“When we first started, there were two kinds of pub quizzes in Toronto,” Lima said. “There was Pub Stumpers style — pretty standard history, geography, music questions — or theme nights like ‘Simpsons’ trivia. We wanted to do something a bit more weird or avant-garde.”

They began with quizzes based on “Friends” or “The Office” or “Rupaul’s Drag Race.” Now, the games are a bit more performative and eclectic — for instance, there’s a round that involves guessing the HBO show based on its gratuitous sex scene.

“We always make it queer, always a little bit vulgar,” Lima said. “We like to put in as much nudity as possible.”

It’s a good strategy. At bars in the early days of pc28����pub trivia, this was a low-key way to drum up business on an off night. Now, it seems as if every bar has its own dedicated game. Hemingway’s has rotating theme nights, including Taylor Swift, “Star Wars” and “Gilmore Girls.” Brass Facts trivia (whose host, Kirk Heron, has popped up occasionally at Pettigrew’s trivia), even outlived its former home at the Ossington and now has a following of its own at the Skyline.

Though Pettigrew’s recent quiz at the Duke of York was a one-off, his trivia nights could return more regularly, possibly in a new format or location. After so long apart but still connected, the nerds will surely follow him wherever he goes.

“Really,” he said. “I just wanted to see everybody again.”

Richard Trapunski was a culture editor at a few loved and lost alt-magazines. Now, he writes about culture for a variety of publications.