The Five Spot: Something Really Funny Happened On Celebrity Jeopardy

ALSO: Mysterious Australian balls and a show I am going to watch

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Neil deGrasse Tyson has disgraced the Muppets

World-famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was on Celebrity Jeopardy this week, which feels unfair. It’s not that celebrities can’t also be smart. Geena Davis is in Mensa. It’s just that it feels like cheating for Celebrity Jeopardy to have a contestant whose entire status as a celebrity stems from being smart. It’s like when Dancing With The Stars has a contestant with a background in music. Like, yeah, sure, I know that person has rhythm. It’s their whole deal. Show me Danny DeVito doing the cha-cha. Granted, this is my suggestion to improve every show, but the point stands.

Neil went up against two women on the show, both legitimate non-scientist contestants. To his left was Melissa Peterman from various Reba-affiliated sitcoms. To his right was Jackie Tohn from GLOW and The Boys and American Idol. They went into Final Jeopardy reasonably close, score-wise, with Neil actually $800 behind Peterman. The category, as you can see in the image at the top of this section, was The Muppets.

The clue was as follows…

Okay, admittedly a piece of movie trivia from 1981 does not give an astrophysicist any real advantage over two people who made a career in the arts, but it’s still something thTHE ANSWER IS GONZO

IT’S GONZO

COME ON

YOU KNOW THAT

EVEN IF YOU DIDN’T SEE THE MOVIE

GONZO IS ABSOLUTELY A WHATEVER

HERE

LOOK

I HAVE A SCREENCAP

I’m sorry for yelling. It’s not often something is so squarely inside my wheelhouse as “Celebrity Jeopardy does a final clue about a movie where The Muppets thwart Charles Grodin’s attempted diamond heist.” It’s all very exciting. Jackie went first and nailed it, referring to Gonzo as “my boy Gonzo,” which I respect deeply.

Let’s see what Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote on his scr-

FREAKING…

WHAT?

NEIL

FREAKING SNUFFLEUPAGUS???

WHICH HE ALSO SPELLED INCORRECTLY, FOR THE RECORD

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

COME ON

THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH THIS COUNTRY

WE’VE GIVEN UP ON THE ARTS

SURE, SCIENTISTS CAN TELL YOU ABOUT THE RINGS OF SATURN

BUT WHAT ABOUT CULTURE

OR WHATEVER EXACTLY GONZO IS

HOLD

WAIT

GONZO IS CULTURE

THANK YOU

Melissa got the answer wrong, too, by the way. She said Animal, which is a more defensible miss, but still a miss. And that means that Jackie Tohn won. And it means that Neil deGrasse Tyson, possibly the most famous intellectual in American society today (and a good sport who I am having fun with here) lost on America’s most famous quiz show because he could not properly identify a fuzzy blue Muppet with a big hooked nose. That’s kind of funny. It’s actually really funny the more you think about it.

It’s still not the funniest thing that’s ever happened on Celebrity Jeopardy, though. That honor goes to the time Wolf Blitzer showed up and got absolutely waxed by Andy Richter. That might be the funniest thing that’s happened on any television show ever. Look at this screencap and try not to laugh.

Dana Delaney would’ve gotten the Muppet question right. I’m 100 percent sure of that.

FOUR: Australia has a problem with mysterious ocean blobs