A Chance to Prove Whether He Really Is Mr. Know It All

If you don’t know Ben Stein by name, you probably do know him by sight, or certainly by voice.

With his cropped gray hair, wire-rim specs, droll deadpan delivery and smug attitude, he’s the guy who looks and sounds like the teacher of your nightmares.

Of course, besides playing pedagogues (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “The Wonder Years”), he really is a college professor (at Pepperdine University Law School). But he’s also a former Richard Nixon speech writer, author of books (from fiction to self-help) and magazine articles (Barron’s, the American Spectator) and does commercials (Clear-Eyes).

With a Renaissance-man-like resume like that, it’s not surprising Stein has accumulated a head full of facts, both useful and useless, during his 53 years on Earth. And he gets a very public chance to show just how much he really knows on his newest assignment: hosting Comedy Central’s “Win Ben Stein’s Money” (weeknights at 7:30).

The game show is “Jeopardy!” with a twist. By correctly answering a series of questions, the contestants can knock off this know-it-all and take home $5,000 of Stein’s loot (which technically speaking doesn’t come out of his pockets--the show’s producers, a Disney subsidiary, have allotted him the entire pot of prize money budgeted for the show, but the more money the contestants win, the less money Stein gets to keep.)

Three contestants compete, with Stein as quizmaster. When two are eliminated, the finalist goes head to head with Stein, who moves into a soundproof chamber where he has 60 seconds to answer the 10 questions that have just been posed to the contestant.

With all 65 episodes now in the can, Stein says he won about 50 games. “How well I did was literally a function of how tired I was,” says Stein, his phone voice as droning as ever, but with more warmth than one might expect. “We’d do three to four a day and by the end of the day, I’d be a zombie.”

Sometimes, the egghead does get scrambled. On the pilot episode, he incorrectly answered the question, “In which F. Scott Fitzgerald novel does Nick Carraway appear?” responding with “Tender Is the Night,” rather than “The Great Gatsby.”

“I should have got that one,” Stein says. “I’ve written scholarly articles on Fitzgerald. I swear they asked me, ‘In what novel does Dick Diver appear?’ When they said they didn’t ask me that, I was floored.”

Stein’s mind has been accumulating facts since he was a child growing up in suburban Maryland, the son of economist Herbert Stein, who would go on to become Nixon’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.

“When I was my son’s age, I was a nerd,” Stein says. “But my son is the opposite of a nerd, very personable. He’s not a memorizer of facts. He doesn’t read much except for science fiction. He’s much more interested in the immediate--things like skateboarding or roller-blading. I think his way of life is preferable.”

In fact, Stein’s relationship with his son Tommy, now 12, and how it has changed from inattentive to totally doting, will be the subject of his next book. It’s one of two he’s working on (the other will chronicle his two decades in Hollywood).

Stein may seem like the consummate show-biz insider, but he actually began his career a long way from Los Angeles. After graduating from Yale Law School, he moved to Washington to work as a lawyer in a broom-closet-sized office for the Federal Trade Commission (among his tasks: analyzing whether the Veg-a-Matic actually sliced tomatoes, a joyless scene he memorably describes in his 1981 self-help manual, “Bunkhouse Logic,” which will be republished next year). From there, he became a low-level speech writer (on economic matters) in the final years of the Nixon White House before moving on to the Wall Street Journal as its pop culture columnist.

That gig landed him his first book, “The View From Sunset Boulevard” (1979), which showed how the then-current crop of TV writers shared a certain world-view that permeated prime-time programming. Stein says today that view--which, needless to say, didn’t jibe with Stein’s conservative-libertarian impulses--no longer drives TV. (“Today’s writers don’t feel angry at capitalists or anyone else,” he observes.)

But there’s no political agenda driving “Win Ben Stein’s Money.”

“I tell contestants that all the show does is demonstrate one’s ability to memorize facts and recall them quickly,” he says. “It really doesn’t measure how smart you are or whether you’re a good human being. It’s not a measure of intelligence or how well you can express yourself.”