When I was working as a barista at Starbucks years ago—at a drive-thru one, mind you—a woman ordered a drink and at the window didn’t have enough money to pay for it. “You’re a few cents short,” I said to her. Instead of searching for change in her car, the woman just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Oh well,” before taking her drink and driving away.
This is kind of what happened with the “Jeopardy” boy that the Internet is in an outrage over. If you don’t know the story, Thomas Hurley III spelled “Emancipation Proclamation” wrong in the Final Jeopardy question (he spelled it ‘Emanciptation’), and people are losing their shit over it because they believe he should have still won, despite the spelling error. So he still should have been able to drive away with the drink, even if he fell a few cents short of paying for it.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSvl7uKysaE?feature=player_detailpage&w=580&h=360]
But it’s not just the technicality that’s got everyone angry. Apparently what people are most outraged about is the “smugness” of Alex Trebek.
This just goes to show what everyone already knew: No one but your grandparents is watching “Jeopardy.”
Anyone who’s caught an episode in the past 20-some years (and who was probably trapped with a septuagenarian at the time) knows host Trebek is the king of smugness. It’s expected at this point. The schadenfreude of him putting contestants down is highly enjoyable but unfortunately does not come with home edition of the game.
And frankly, everyone needs to admit that they kind of enjoyed seeing Thomas Hurley III get put down for not sounding out the word in his head before writing it out. Or better yet, if he didn’t know how to spell it, scribble like an intellectual schmuck like everyone else on the damn show.
In my opinion, Trebek could afford to be a little more haughty. Viewership would be up if he were kind of like the Simon Cowell of the trivia-game-show circuit. Just imagine what he could have said to this “Teen Jeopardy” contestant.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d0u-KiC2R4?feature=player_detailpage&w=580&h=360]
This poor kid is just aching for a Trebek knockdown.