Look At This Damn Jeopardy Goober
I will start off this post by stating the obvious: Tom the Jeopardy Contestant is much smarter than I am, by virtue of having been on Jeopardy, while I, on the other hand, do... this. That’s good for Tom because, even as he stood on the set of Jeopardy, he looked way, way dumber than I do.
Above you see Tom’s answer to last night’s Final Jeopardy prompt, which stated, “Appropriately, this 1984 blockbuster was the first music CD mass-produced in the United States.” The correct question-response was “What is Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA?” Tom wrote “What,” which is neither correct nor a question, and then he lost all of his money.
But Tom’s brain is not the reason why we are here. (Is it ever?) Instead, the internet has been taken by his looks and everyman swagger. “Wow, How’d Your Ex-Boyfriend Tom Make It on to Jeopardy?” asked New York magazine’s The Cut. Our friends at Jezebel rightly note, “Last Night’s Episode of Jeopardy! Made a Hot and Confused Man Named Tom a Star.” For example, take his response to correctly answering a prompt about Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: he exaggeratedly smacks his lips like he just answered the first sports question at bar trivia, which is appropriate since on this episode of Jeopardy Tom made the bulk of his money on a category about reigning NBA MVP Stephen Curry.
[There was a video here]
Twitter loved Tom’s face, duh, but also the way he contorted it in a manner that signaled he was in a tussle with the board, as if it were a giant octopus. He had a habit of holding his buzzer as if it were a harpoon, but he wasn’t sure where to strike it.
When the second round ended with Tom down by $15,000, he could not hide his disgust with himself.
[There was a video here]
In the end, Tom walked away with $1,000. Do I have $1,000? That’s a secret.
