RuPaul Is Coming for Steve Harvey’s Game Show Host Crown

RuPaul doesn’t make Lingo obscene or anything, but he makes it just dirty enough. Hosting CBS’s reboot of the classic game show, he mostly guides contestants through the competition, cheering them on as they decode words for increasing amounts of cash. But in between the nuts-and-bolts portions of the job, he injects sly jokes about sex and religion and a big tub of plastic balls that’s rolled on stage in the second round. That’s where the show gets its personality. Anyone can encourage two roommates from Chicago to realize they’re two vowels away from spelling “trigonometry.” It takes a special kind of TV star to make such a simple game feel edgy.

RuPaul’s been prepping for this job since the second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, when the Snatch Game challenge first appeared. Inspired by Match Game, the louche ’70s series that thrived on gently off-color humor, the Snatch Game is mostly a showcase for the queens’ celebrity impersonations, but it’s also an opportunity for Ru himself to wrangle a traditional game show format. Plus he got direct experience on that front in 2016, when he hosted Logo’s short-lived Gay for Play Game Show Starring RuPaul. That pop culture quizzer was chaotic and low-budget, but it was also minor-league training for the primetime gig he’s got now. And it worked. From the first moments, it’s clear he’s comfortable hosting Lingo, particularly when he uses jokes to cap an interview segment with a contestant or transition between rounds. It’s his way of adding sparkle and personality without pulling too much focus from the players.

And boy, does it help that his jokes are a little dirty. Games like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire don’t need risqué hosts, because the difficult questions are compelling on their own. Lingo, on the other hand, is basically just endless rounds of Wordle. It’s decently interesting to guess whether the word being decoded is “poker” or “joker,” but that format will never have pizzazz on its own. So when the answer is “glove,” and RuPaul jumps in to say “no glove, no love!” before moving to the next round, his reference to the safe-sex slogan is arguably the most important ingredient. It adds an air of wit and sophistication, and it assures the audience that the show will reward their attention.

These bits also highlight Ru’s particular brand of humor. When he reaches his hand in that vat of balls to draw one that reveals the amount of bonus cash a player will receive, he understands exactly why it’s lurid. His subversive self-awareness is part of the fun. He knows he’s being naughty, and the audience knows he’s being naughty, but by being a little coy, he lets them imagine they’re having a private joke with him.

That’s the opposite of Steve Harvey’s strategy on Family Feud, which is the dirtiest game show on TV right now. In its current form, Feud almost begs for inappropriate answers by asking players to name “a job that uses a whip” or “something you like your girlfriend to do to your face.” Harvey, however, always acts shocked when things get out of hand. He says he’s never heard of a dominatrix, or that everyone in the studio audience is going to hell because they’ve heard some wild answer or another. This flatters the audience, too, but unlike RuPaul’s strategy, it encourages them to think they’re smarter than the host instead of in a secret society with him. Either way, the end result is the same: A predictable game gets a jolt of excitement thanks to some light blue humor. This formula has helped Harvey’s version of Family Feud run for 10 years, and if Lingo catches on, then RuPaul might challenge him as the king of cheeky games.

Lingo airs Wednesdays at 9:00 PM ET on CBS.

Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.