A ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant Had A Hilariously Wrong Guess About A Very Hot Clue

Jeopardy! is often considered the brainier of the two syndicated game shows beloved by the evening television crowd. While Wheel of Fortune makes headlines for its blunders and letter follies, the quiz whizzes on Jeopardy! usually get clowned for not knowing sports questions and other stereotypical nerd stuff.

This is why a wrong answer on Thursday was particularly delightful because it had nothing to do with football or popular music. Instead, it was in the category of Hot Stuff and a contestant wildly misreading the temperature necessary to cook meats and cheeses.

Steve, who had control of the board, completely whiffed on the answer for the $1,000 question from yet another new guest host this week, Bill Whitaker. You really need to see it for yourself.

In hindsight this is a pretty easy answer. But Jeopardy! is a hurried game of racing to ring in on the signaling device before the other two contestants, often before you even really have a grasp on the answer yourself. And it seems like that’s exactly what happened here to poor Steve, who froze and then did his best Ben Wyatt impression on the stage by answering “calzone.”

This annotated version of the video is also delightful.

The reaction to this one was pretty swift online. The show’s Reddit board had a lot of fun with it and another answer, where a contestant guessed “filabuster” for a piece of furnature that’s also a congressional term. The answer was “table.” But “calzone” won the day for sure. A lot of people shared jokes on Twitter about the guess.

Interestingly, no one got that question right. So perhaps the lava calzone threw the room a bit and no one could quite grasp the concept that the device to cook the calzone was the answer, not the calzone itself. Still, a very memorable wrong answer is a great way to get yourself etched in Jeopardy! lore.