A Behind the Scenes Look at “The Engagement Heard ‘Round the Nerd World”

Koob first came up to me a couple of months ago to throw it out there that he’d be up for dropping the question at Quizzo Bowl. I thought it was a terrific idea. After all, Kristy and Koob met at quizzo, they’ve hosted some quizzes themselves, and it’s no secret that Koob is part of the famous quizzo team in the country, Sofa Kingdom (aka Steak Em Up). So I was honored to be a part of the proceedings, and I quickly had a plan in place for how we could do it. Chip and I regularly host a game called the Beeramid at our comedy shows, which is a lot like the $25,000 Pyramid, except Chip is a dips*** who gives terrible clues. So I thought we could do that and then have Koob ask the last question.

But Quizzo Bowl is a beast to prepare for, especially now that I’ve started doing the celebrity round. Between that, shooting promo videos, writing questions, preparing an opening song…as the event got closer we still hadn’t done much with the engagement. Koob called me a week before, and said, “Maybe we should just call it off. I’m scared I’m going to get nervous and not be able to speak. Maybe I should just do something mellow, just me and her.” I told him we were doing it, no questions asked, and that he would be fine.

But as we got closer to the event, we still didn’t have much of a plan. I talked to Chip about how we could get “Yes” up on the screen as an answer. He said, “Let’s do all bands.” Brilliant. On Friday, I put the rest of the round in his hands. I contacted our buddy Carl (Specific Jawns), telling him we needed a slideshow of 4 different bands on the screen. He proved tough to get ahold of…on Saturday at 2 p.m. (less than 6 hours before kickoff) I finally got word that he could do it. At that point, I could only hope that a computer could be hooked into the World Cafe system. If not, the whole thing was down the drain. By the time Carl got to Quizzo Bowl, it was too late to test it. We were going to have to just hope that it would work.

Then there was the matter of the ticket. We were supposed to do a different signup for the game where people entered their names, so it would be easy to fix. But there was a mix up about what time to arrive (you may have seen me and lovely Cookie arguing about it shortly before the show began) so by the time Cookie arrived it was too late for that. We had to steal the ticket number off of Kristy’s orange ticket to fix the final game. Cookie had Sarah take Kristy to the bathroom and then stole her ticket number. Incredibly, when I announced the first winner of a raffle that evening, it randomly was Koob, whose ticket number was directly beside Kristy (545 to 546). When he got up on stage, he said, “I think this is a good sign.”

I hoped so. Like I said, we still hadn’t tested the computer and we had no backup plan. Finally, the 5th round wrapped up. I had Carl come downstairs from his team and fire up the computer. Thank God! It worked!

I called out Kristy’s number. She came up on stage. Chip started rattling off his inane hints, and Kristy (who had seen this skit before, though with different clues and answers) played along. I asked her afterwards if she knew what we were up to. “No, I had no idea until you took off the blindfold and there was Koob. Then I knew.”

Koob grabbed the mic, didn’t lose his voice as he had feared, the crowd started going nuts, and he popped the question. I don’t remember Kristy actually saying “Yes”, just nodding her head. (In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have given her the gift certificate to the Vous for winning.) Chip and I went nuts (“She’s going to the Locust Rendezvous!”), the crowd went crazy, and the confetti cannon (which was supposed to be used earlier in the show but hadn’t worked) went off, and the band played the theme to Love Boat. It’s hard to kick off a lifetime together with a bigger bang than that.

RELATED: In 2005, a couple got engaged via quizzo answers.

In 2009 another couple did the same.