Yesterday’s HQ Trivia Was Kind Of A Mess

John Mayer joined regular host Scott Rogowsky on HQ yesterday for a special Father’s Day game. Things got a little wild.

Photo: Complex

Over one million players tuned in to yesterday’s HQ, a live trivia game show app, for a shot at the $US25,000 ($33,563) prize and to see musician John Mayer just kind of shoot the shit with beloved host Scott Rogowsky. It was a Father’s Day bonanza (since it was Father’s Day in the US), with Rogowsky introducing Mayer as his actual biological father.

“I just wish you were more outgoing,” Mayer replied.

In between each question, the pair sang a riff on different Grateful Dead songs, given that Mayer is currently playing shows with the band. When it came time to read off the questions, things didn’t always go smoothly and the pair would sometimes stumble over each others’ lines. Notably, in a question about the definition of “onomatopoeia”, Mayer pronounced it as “onomato-paella”.

The game ended with Mayer and Rogowsky bringing out Scott’s actual father, Marty, and the three of them all sang “Old Man” by Neil Young. Though plenty of HQ players were starstruck by seeing Mayer on their favourite quiz app, and a few are still arguing about whether or not Greenland is a nation, some HQties on Reddit are just curious about whether or not Mayer and Rogowsky were lit AF for the show.

When one Reddit user posed that the two may have been “fried out of their minds” throughout the show, another replied, “This was totally my thought. Mayer just stared creepily right at the camera and into my soul for the entire round.” Mayer did indeed stare straight at the camera, unblinking, though he could also have been trying to read a teleprompter.

When I asked Rogowsky over email about the fans’ reactions to his performance on yesterday’s HQ, he said that while he doesn’t get stoned before HQ, he can’t speak for Mayer. “He did just come off two shows at CitiField with Dead & Co.,” Rogowsky said.

“In almost every game I’ve hosted, there is a stumble or two. It’s simply the nature of being HUMAN,” he said. “I think what endears HQ to our millions of viewers is that we’re not a slickly packaged Hollywood product. We’re an authentic, unfiltered live experience that can be slightly awkward or unpolished – but always entertaining.”

I was an early adopter of HQ, back when the $US500 ($671) jackpot seemed like a huge prize. Now that the game has celebrities such as Mayer to drop in and guest host, I feel like the game has kind of passed me by. One thing will never change, however: Stoned or not, Scott Rogowsky is always going to be endearingly awkward on camera.