Sex & Relationships

New game show lets you hook up single friends

It’s a recent Sunday night at a hip Brooklyn venue and, like any typical evening, hormones are raging, and singles in their 20s and early 30s are on the prowl. After a few drinks and mood-setting music, flirtatious questions start to fly.

“List all of the sauces you’ve probably tried,” Jo Firestone requests of the people she’s assembled onstage, each of whom laughs in shock and goes into deep thought trying to come up with an answer. This is after Firestone has already pelted others onstage with strange and quirky inquiries ranging from the innocuous (“How cool do you look on social media?”) to the risqué (“Describe how you look naked”).

On the surface, the scene resembles a modern version of the classic ’60s-era “The Dating Game” — with one important, post-modern twist: The singles remain in the audience while friends do their bidding onstage.

The 3-month-old “Friends of Single People” dating show is the brainchild of Firestone. The monthly events are part roast, part game show, part social experiment. And for the 100 or so people who showed up last month at Littlefield in Gowanus, it’s better than revisiting the rote online-dating cabinet. The blind matching of two strangers adds excitement.

Jo Firestone founded the “Friends of Single People” dating event.Christian Johnston

“The chaos is a good thing,” says Andres Torres, a 30-year-old from Greenpoint, who had a pal rep him onstage. “When you have OkCupid, everybody’s a little strategic about it. It’s so utilitarian. You need that lively weirdness.”

Anyone can enter the game by showing up a half-hour early and putting his or her name in one of four buckets: men seeking women, women seeking men, men seeking men or women seeking women. (As at most Brooklyn singles events, the male/female split skews heavily toward women: about 30/70.)

Firestone selects names at random. On one side of the stage, three players each represent his or her single pal and answer Firestone’s strange questions in the first person — as they think their friend would answer. Meanwhile, the “chooser” sits on the other side of the stage and selects the winner, who they’ll go out with.

“I feel like it’s easier when you’re friends with someone to see how great they are,” says Firestone, 26.

After a match is made, the singles themselves step onstage, are blessed by a man dressed as an oversize baby Cupid and receive two drink tickets for the bar, where they exchange pleasantries — and numbers, if so moved.

A bit silly, yes, but the goofiness is meant to be disarming.

“My strategy is to make the show so uncomfortable to people that it isn’t their fault that it’s uncomfortable,” says Firestone.

The matches were, as contestants admitted, hit-or-miss. But most said the free booze and banter were better than trudging through an awkward first date.

Amy Gall of Crown Heights sought out the game show after breaking off a two-year relationship. The girl her friend paired her with was still hanging around at the end of the night.

Gall hinted that, unlike the endless back-and-forth messaging of online dating, their night might not be over: “At least this is an immediate thing.”