He’s been running a game night for 24 years

It’s seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening, and the regular crowd at a downtown Orlando pub is moving with purpose.

Reservation cards with names such as “It’s a Damn Shame” and “Get Schwifty” sit atop several tables surrounding the large bar in the center of Sideshow, a circus-themed pub on Orange Avenue.

The bar is betting on a pretty good crowd because people are coming to see Curtis Earth, the trivia man.

Earth, chrome-domed and sporting a black jacket, sets up his fan-made lectern on the stage and gets his questions in order.

The Orlando resident hands out answer sheets to the teams. At 7:30 p.m., he gets on the microphone.

“So glad you all could join us again tonight,” he says, “making trivia night a part of your routine.”

Born Curtis Fairhurst, Earth has been running a trivia game night for 24 years, 15 at this location. Earth Trivia, the New York native’s business, employs eight other hosts in what is Orlando’s first quiz empire.

According to Earth, 52, he may be the creator of the first recurring quiz night in the United States. Earth has always been interested in trivia. “When we were little, he used to play [a robot] and he would ask us questions,” said sister Kim Smith.

For prizes, he would give his siblings jewelry that he took from his mother.

Years later, after studying communications in college, Earth was working a weekly DJ gig at a hotel in Pennsylvania in 1993.

“I hate to be bored, and I was just getting so bored,” he said.

While looking through the cards of a Trivial Pursuit game one night, he decided to throw a question to the audience.

“I said I’d buy anyone a beer if they could figure [the answer] out,” he said. The bartender offered to pick up the tab of the winner, and the game was born.

After a few weeks of randomly throwing out questions, Earth formatted his show into a quiz game with three rounds of questions that can be anything from sports facts to science and word jumbles. “My format has been the same since 1993,” he said.

The game grew popular, and Earth began shopping it around to other venues. Within the next six years, he was performing five nights a week while also working for a car dealer.

“Even though I was successful, a voice kept repeating, ‘Don’t quit your day job,’ ” he said.

That changed in 1999 when he fell asleep at the wheel while driving back from a night of trivia. “I woke up in a cornfield,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m quitting tomorrow.’ ” That’s when he went to quizzes full-time. Earth arrived in Orlando in 2001 from Pennsylvania.

He started shopping his game around to bars immediately, but “I was told, ‘This is Orlando; no one is going to sit through a quiz,’ ” he said.

The Loaded Hog, now Sideshow, was the first to give Earth a shot in 2002.

tfraser@orlandosentinel.com