McLuhan: The programmes that were devised against the eggheads. All those various titles. The $64 Question was one of them, in which stumping the experts, that sort of thing. Stumping the experts was a normal activity of these old fun and games shows from the Hellenic times. This was where the Platonic dialogues began. They began as a way of putting down the highbrow. Now, that gimmick of putting down the highbrow, debunking the pretentious, comes right along through European tradition, out of the Orient, out of Hellenic times, and finally gets to forms we are familiar with, Don Quixote , Rabelais, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy . These are direct descendants of the old carnivalistic debunking of the institutions of society.
