Winning for Dummies

I have a confession to make.

I cannot shout wooh!

It’s just something I’ve never been able to do. There are times when I want to cheer, but I just can’t make that noise. Wooh! WOOH! It eludes me. When I try it I sound utterly ridiculous. It comes from the back of my throat, like a seahorse trying to imitate a condor in a tunnel. I’ve practiced. I have a friend who tried to teach me once, we went to see a band and every time they finished a song I got to have one more go. I’m generally someone who has a pretty decent relationship with ridicule. I’m confident, I’m relaxed, I don’t mind it. On occasion I’ve even sought it out. But when the band themselves begin to break their pathetically morbid persona to laugh about the kaleidosquawk noises coming from the back row, it gets to you. I gave up that day, and ever since I’ve clapped just a little bit louder than everyone else, I think as a defence mechanism.

I’ve also tried to replace it with a loud, raspy “YEAH!”. I have a YEAH that can make a dog go ape shit. I have a YEAH that can wheel fog around like it’s a circus bear. But it’s not the same. I don’t kid myself.

WOOH! Is more versatile. It can mean so many different things, a cheer, a commendation, encouragement. YEAH isn’t good for any of those things. What it is good for though is celebration, and celebration is something I’m often criticised for. I was once in a sort of writing competition, where we were given a story, and then had 20 minutes to re-write the story in our own voice. I walked away that day with my first trophy for something I had written. That trophy was a book. This book.

And you can fucking bet I got it signed.

But as my name was called out, I jumped from my seat. I was happy! Hamster Rampage wasn’t much, but I wanted it. Luckily, my training to suppress the instinctual WOOH had not failed me here, but did I let out a yell? I most certainly did.

And I was mocked.

Not just by the others, but by the person running the competition. I laughed at it, and I didn’t care. But I did find it strange that it was frowned upon. I’d won things before and done the same thing. I won at a pub version of play your cards right. I won at a basketball shooting competition. But when I won for writing something, I was expected to celebrate with a degree of humility.

I’m reminded of this today because after watching a bunch of episodes of Only Connect, a ridiculously hard quiz show, I noticed that the winners never celebrate. They grin smugly, and they’re obviously happy about it, but nothing like the noises I’ll make when I destroy you at monopoly.

WHICH I WILL

I started looking around at other “smart” quiz shows. This is what I found.

Watch those videos closely. One of them shows a guy almost raising his arms and then there’d a really gratuitous cutaway. I’m sure it’s a coincidence but I couldn’t help but laugh at the idea that we weren’t allowed to see them celebrating.

In the eggheads one, the people in the background who aren’t playing jump up and down and hug each other. The three who answered the question? Composed, cool, smooth.

In one of them, a guy really goes for it and lets his feelings out… by patting his teammate on the shoulder. It doesn’t even look like a “well done” pat. It looks like the pat I give my grandma when she tells me that black people were invented by the government to give us cancer.

Even the overall super mega winner of University Challenge, when she was given her trophy, this was the face she pulled.

Yeah... This isnt bad I suppose.

In comparison, watch this video of someone winning at Deal Or No Deal. A show where the contestants have to choose boxes at random and see what happens, in which there is no strategy or intellect required whatsoever.

The screaming and jumping around goes on for so long the crowd themselved get bored and take a break from it, then start it up again. For this reason, I decided to speed up the video. Also it’s funnier.

And if you think that’s just because of the amount of money they got for winning, you’re wrong. Here’s a guy winning a million dollars on the American who wants to be a millionaire.

There’s an inverse correlation between the level of intellect required to win something, and the amount that the winner is allowed to celebrate. Is that because as a society we value luck more than we do intelligence? Possibly. But I think it ties in with something a bit more fundamental, and a lot more ridiculous. The idea that in order to be clever, one must be miserable.

This is something that’s always annoyed me. Brooding miserable people who think they’re cleverer than others simply because they’re brooding and miserable. The idea that if you enjoy life it’s only because you haven’t thought it through. It’s utterly ridiculous. There are things to be happy about, and things to be sad about, and neither response makes you any dumber or smarter than anyone else.

So why shouldn’t we celebrate? I’m not saying be obnoxious about it. In this matter, I’d perhaps even advice against being me. But there’s nothing wrong with enjoying yourself, or letting anyone else know you’re enjoying yourself.

In the past few weeks I’ve entered five different writing competitions, one of which I’ve already been shortlisted for, so my pledge as an upstanding member of society is this.

If by some luck I manage to win any of them, for each one my response will be as follows.

But I will not shout wooh.

Not ever.

UPDATE: In comparison, watch how people react when I completed this simple obstacle course years ago.

~ by Sandy Nicholson on March 27, 2011.