Turns out, it's a very challenging question
Jimmy Kimmel has been producing his show from the East Coast all week, specifically Brooklyn. The New York City borough is known for many things—good pizza, loud traffic, and apparently, retro facial hair—very retro.
“Brooklyn is home to some of the thickest and scraggliest beards this side of Fallujah,” quipped Kimmel. “Sometimes I’m not sure if we’re in Brooklyn or a Civil War reenactment.” To make that determination once and for all, during Thursday night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel challenged the audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he was filming to play a beard guessing game.
All they had to do was look at a close-up picture of a beard, and try to guess whether the facial hair in question was photographed in the modern-day hipster neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn or in Civil War-era Gettysburg, Virginia some 150 years ago—and it stumped a lot of people. Good thing they didn’t try this game in Portland, Oregon.