“Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings. ABC/Christopher Willard
Jeopardy! Contestant Heather Ryan is breaking her silence about a sexist clue she answered on the long-running trivia show.
When Ryan appeared on the October 28 episode, she encountered a clue in the “Complete the Rhyming Phrase” category that began with the expression, “Men seldom making passes… .”
Ryan completed the sentence, answering with “girls who wear glasses.”
Upon hearing the answer, Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings immediately apologized to Ryan, who was wearing glasses at the time. “A little problematic, sorry, Heather,” he said.
Ryan, who works as a health program director in Binghamton, New York, addressed the situation in an interview with Binghamton University’s student newspaper Pipe Dream that was published on Monday, November 4.
“It is definitely an odd choice,” Ryan said. “I think it made everybody in the audience and on stage, and Ken Jennings too, a little uncomfortable. It was like, ‘Oh, that was unexpected.’ Maybe we choose better rhyming phrases in 2024. Unfortunately, there are still girls who are [in] middle school and they don’t want to wear their glasses and they’re losing out on their education. So, I think it’s much better to be able to see than anything else.”
Ryan faced off against Ian Taylor, a food sales rep from Cleveland, and Austin-based video game designer Will Wallace. Taylor won the game while Ryan came in second, losing by just $1 in the Final Jeopardy round.
Despite her loss and that awkward clue, Ryan enjoyed her experience.
“I had a great time,” she told Pipe Dream. “Everybody there was very welcoming.”
Ryan entered the competition after taking an online quiz in early 2023. She auditioned that summer, and filmed her appearance in L.A. one year later.
“It’s such a part of American culture that I definitely wanted to go on when I got the call for it,” she said.
The mishap involving Ryan was just the latest in a series of Jeopardy! gaffes.
During his original run in 2004, Jennings, a former contestant who holds the show’s longest winning streak ever, was part of a risqué joke while answering a question in the “Tool Time” category.
“This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker,” read late host Alex Trebek. Jennings, who had a commanding lead at the time, rang in with the response, “What’s a hoe?” As the audience began to laugh, Trebek quipped, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! They teach you that in school in Utah, huh?”
The Planet Funny author, 50, later found himself at the center of controversy when some of his old tweets resurfaced just before he began his first stint as a guest host for the show following Trebek’s November 2020 death. “Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair,” read one tweet Jennings posted in 2014.
The former software engineer apologized for the posts, saying that they “worked as jokes” in his mind but didn’t read so well on screen. “Sometimes I said dumb things in a dumb way and I want to apologize to people who were (rightfully!) offended,” he tweeted in December 2020. “It wasn’t my intention to hurt anyone, but that doesn’t matter; I screwed up, and I’m truly sorry.”
