on the questionnaire's move from the parlour album to the broadcast studio to the magazine page
The confession album was a private object. It circulated among people who already knew one another, and its answers were read by an audience of a dozen, or a few dozen, who could weigh a joke against the person who made it. The questionnaire's twentieth-century afterlife changed that condition entirely, and it changed it by way of television.
For fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990, the French broadcaster Bernard Pivot closed episodes of his live literary talk show Apostrophes by putting a version of the old parlour questions to his guest. When that programme ended he carried the habit into its successor, Bouillon de Culture, which began on Antenne 2 in 1991 — the channel was renamed France 2 the following year — and ran until 2001. Over those decades Pivot pared the inherited list down into his own compact set — ten pointed questions rather than the sprawling Victorian original — asked, on air, of novelists, philosophers, and politicians, with a national audience listening to what they said back.
James Lipton had watched Pivot's programmes and, in building his own interview show for American drama students, adapted the same closing device. Inside the Actors Studio, which began airing in 1994, ended nearly every episode with Lipton's own ten-question descendant of Pivot's list — favorite word, least favorite word, a sound loved, a sound hated — put to the actor or director being interviewed, credited each time to its French source. It is largely through that programme, rather than through any French broadcast or French-language book, that English-speaking audiences met the form at all — most people who could name "the Proust Questionnaire" today learned the phrase from an American cable show borrowing a French television host's borrowing of a Victorian parlour game.
In 1993 Vanity Fair began running the Proust Questionnaire as a recurring feature on the last page of the magazine, putting the same set of questions to a different public figure each time it appeared. Unlike the broadcast versions, the magazine page is not spoken and does not need to survive live delivery; it is drafted, edited, and printed, and the answers collected over the years were substantial enough that a book of a hundred and one of them was eventually published as a volume in its own right.
A confession album answer was written for an audience of people who already had a stake in you — a schoolmate, a cousin, the friend whose book it was. A magazine or television answer is written, however casually, for strangers, and for a version of yourself you expect strangers to recognize. The questions have not changed very much across a century and a half; what changes is who is presumed to be listening, and that presumption reaches back into the answer itself. An answer composed for publication tends to arrive already smoothed toward an image — witty, becoming, consistent with whatever the respondent is known for — in a way a page meant only for a friend's private album rarely bothers to be.
That is the distinction this site keeps returning to, and the reason none of your responses here are collected into anything public. Read about the site's approach on the about page, or about the form's earlier, private history on the page about Victorian confession albums.