Originally this was just a way to annoy my wife. But I had such fun annoying her in this way, I realized that it could work as an easy improvised game. "No, You Mean Don Ho!" could be the next Charades or the next Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or maybe I could turn it into a collectible card game and license it to Nintendo and Hasbro! Maybe not.

We were driving somewhere. Possibly eastbound on Packard. My wife said something about Don Johnson. I said, "Don Johnson? You mean that Hawaiian guy who sang Tiny Bubbles and happy songs like that, had his own tv show in the Seventies?"

She said,

"No, You Mean Don Ho!"

"Don Ho?" said I. "No, that's not Don Ho. You're thinking of that dude that was accused of being a Chinese spy, the guy who worked at Los Alamos Labs and he accidentally took home his hard drive with all the secrets on it?"

"No, that's Wen Ho Lee!"

The name rings a bell, but that's not the person I was thinking of. Then I remember. "Wen Ho Lee was the star of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy."

And so the game went, through Lee Majors, Christopher Lee, Kris Christopherson (stretching it a little bit), Peter Kriss, etc.

Take the first or last name of a celebrity, think of another celebrity with the same first or last name. Then broadly describe that new celebrity by their most famous starring roles, or anything that will help the other player identify them. Make sure you don't reveal the name of that new celebrity, and the resulting combination should sound idiotic.

"Peter Kriss? That's the guy who starred in all the Pink Panther movies, right?"

The other player responds, "No, you mean Peter Sellers!" Now this player thinks of another celebrity with either "Peter" or "Sellers" in his/her name. "Wait. Peter Sellers? That's the actress who played Steve Martin's love-interest in The Jerk, right?"

"No, you mean Bernadette Peters!" (Stretching it a bit, but Peter and Peters seem close enough.)

There's no winning or losing, no score unless you score laughter by the absurd contrasts that you'll run across. You could probably declare a winner if one player couldn't think of an actor with a similar name. But it's a Pyrrhic¹ victory, encouraging players to think of the most obscure or uniquely named celebrities, backing your opponent into a corner, and your opponent would get pissed and make you sleep on the couch, so what have you won really in the end?

Sometimes you come up against a tricky name and have to strain the rules to think up a response. "Bernadette Peters was the New York subway vigilante who shot a couple guys when they brandished a screwdriver at him, right?"

"No, you're thinking of Bernard Goetz!" That's probably stretching it a bit too far, but you can let it slide once or twice, or demand that your opponent back up and try a different approach if they keep missing like this. Or overshadow your opponent by delivering a better combination than they did.

"Bernadette Peters? Wasn't that the folk-singing trio who popularized Puff the Magic Dragon?"

"No, you mean Peter, Paul and Mary. Yeah, Peter, Paul and Mary sang Bridge Over Troubled Waters and You Can Call Me Al and The Sound of Silence..."

Share and enjoy.

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¹ Pyrrhic means "costly to the point of negating or outweighing expected benefits," alluding to Pyrrhus, king of Epirus who sustained heavy losses in defeating the Romans.