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Digital EditionPerspective | Chock Full of Insurance Trivia? Now’s Your Time to Shine
Roger Crombie is a United Kingdom-based columnist for Risk & Insurance®. He can be reached at [email protected].
Here’s a quiz about insurance in popular culture. Like life, it gets harder as it goes along.
Good luck.
1) In which repetitive 1993 Bill Murray film does insurance agent Ned Ryerson say “I’ve got friends of mine who live and die by the actuarial tables, and I say ‘Hey, it’s all one big crapshoot anywho ?’ ”
2) In which 1960s TV show about bumbling spy Agent 86, played by Don Adams, does the Tarpaulin Insurance Company use the slogan “We cover everything?”
3) Which British singer, born Thomas John Woodward in 1940, thought it was not unusual to insure his chest hair for $7 million?
4) In which 1944 film noir classic, starring Fred MacMurray, does Edward G. Robinson’s character say: “I killed Dietrichson — me, Walter Neff, Insurance salesman?”
5) In the “Star Trek” episode “Return to Tomorrow,” which captain says: “Risk is our business”? What was his middle name?
6) In the 2002 movie “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” which star of the movie “Pretty Woman” says: “The insane asylums are filled with people who think they’re Jesus or Satan. Very few have delusions of being the guy down the block who works for an insurance company?”
7) In which TV series does the disheveled co-tenant of a New York apartment offer his neat co-tenant an insurance agent’s business card? Doubtful, the neat one asks, “What company is he from?” He reads the card. “Lloyds … of Lubbock.”
8) In which 2004 Pixar animated comedy does Elastigirl tell her husband, a claims manager at Insuricare in Metroville, to “go save the world, one policy at a time?”
9) Which New York-based comedian, born in 1935, said: “There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?”
10) Whose irreverent 1906 work “The Devil’s Dictionary” defined insurance as “n. ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table?”
11) Which American country music stage concert, held weekly in Nashville, Tennessee, first aired as the WSM Barn Dance on November 28, 1925, in the radio studio of the National Life & Accident Insurance Company?
12) In the last line of a 1998 monster movie, the hero, played by Matthew Broderick, describes a French Secret Service agent as, “er, just some insurance guy.” Which movie?
13) Which American singer, known as “the Songbird Supreme” and the “Queen of Christmas,” insured her legs for $1 billion?
14) In the 1971 movie “When Eight Bells Toll,” whom does Sir Arthur Artford Jones, played by Robert Morley, describe as “grubby little men with gabardine raincoats and dandruff?”
15) In which 2008 movie is Will Smith’s eponymous superhero told “You’re a hero, an insurance policy of the gods?”
16) In which Dickens novel, with a theme of selfishness, does The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance Company appear?
Answer Key:
1) Groundhog Day
2) Get Smart
3) Tom Jones
4) Double Indemnity
5) James Tiberius Kirk
6) Julia Roberts
7) The Odd Couple
8) The Incredibles
9) Woody Allen
10) Ambrose Bierce
11) The Grand Ole Opry
12) Godzilla
13) Mariah Carey
14) Insurance assessors
15) Hancock
16) Martin Chuzzlewit &
