What Is Controversy? 9 ‘Jeopardy!’ Clues That Angered Fans

Ken Jennings for 'Jeopardy!'


ABC/Christopher Willard

When Jeopardy! writers and judges get it wrong, or when they don’t give contestants a fair shot, you can be sure they’ll hear about it on social media.

On social media, viewers live-tweet and dissect each episode of the beloved trivia game show. And clues that are inaccurate, confusingly worded, or downright misleading get armchair players up in arms.

Here are nine such clues, from one that got into the “Psyche” of fans to another that had bumps in the “Highway.”

“Um, what just happened?”

“This god of love hid Psyche & visited in secret until she found out who he was,” read the $400 “Mythology” clue on May 2, 2023.

Contestant Paul Guelpa responded with Eros, but competitor Amanda Hendrickson got the $400 after responding with Cupid. And it wasn’t until later in the game that Paul got $800 added to his score retroactively, since Eros is the Greek mythological counterpart of the Roman god Cupid.

 

“I feel like anytime an answer is a Greek or Roman mythological figure, they need to either carefully word it so that it only refers to one or the other, or know beforehand whether two names work as answers. It seems like a foreseeable issue,” a viewer wrote on Reddit. “Them not anticipating that Eros would work as an answer seems like a lack of foresight.”

An X user, meanwhile, simply wrote: “Um, what just happened?”

“They were setting her up for failure”

The $1,600 clue in the “Houseplants” category on October 20, 2023, seemed straightforward enough: “Though its name means ‘loving tree’, it’s very popular indoors as a houseplant.”

Trouble is, the photo that accompanied the clue showed a monstera, which is what contestant Kristin Hucek guessed, not a philodendron, the correct response.

 

Jeopardy! fans quickly planted criticism online. “That was monstera, not philodendron,” one wrote. “Get your s**t together, #Jeopardy.”

“Ooooh, Jeopardy! [is] gonna have to do a correction,” someone else commented.

And a third fan wrote, “The picture was a monstera, so I feel like they were setting her up for failure.”

“Either incompetent or intentionally malicious”

In the episode airing on November 16, 2023, a misleading clue in the “That’s Misleading” category angered viewers. Most of the correct responses were compound words or two-word phrases suggested by sequential synonyms: “Eyed an equine” translates to “sawhorse,” for example.

But contestant Scott Plummer lost $3,200 on a Daily Double wager on the last clue in the category: “Paintings seen along the sloping path for wheelchairs.” Scott didn’t get the correct response: “ramp art.”

 

“Literally every other clue in the ‘That’s Misleading’ category gave the two halves in the same order as the correct response compound word,” one fan pointed out on Reddit. “But then suddenly, for the DD, the clue gave the two halves in reverse order! … To have the first four clues follow a clear pattern, and then to have the bottom row clue be the DD and break that pattern — that’s either incompetent or intentionally malicious.”

“There is no correct reply to the clue”

In the episode airing on December 4, 2023, contestant Kristen Thomas-McGill lost $3,000 on a Daily Double in the “A Bird in the Hand” category after hearing this clue: “The type of hawk seen here is found in the name of this olden occupation of the guy holding it.”

Kristen answered, “What is a falcon?” but the judges needed the occupation — the correct response was, “What is a falconer?”

Fans called out the clue both for its confusing wording — exacerbated by the accompanying photo focusing on the falcon, not the falconer — but also its inaccuracy. “Poorly written or not, it was terrible because a falcon is not a type of hawk or vice versa,” one person wrote. “There is no correct reply to the clue.”

 

“No one on the planet has actually used that”

Contestant Erin Portman actually answered a controversial clue correctly in the episode airing January 19, 2024. The category was “Newer Words & Phrases,” and the clue read, “Similar to LOL, IJBOL is short for ‘I just’ did this.”

The correct response: “burst out laughing.”

 

That acronym has gotten coverage in the press recently, but viewers still thought the clue was malarkey.

“No one on the planet has actually used that,” one wrote.

“Seems to largely be a Gen Z thing,” another observed.

“IJBOL,” someone else rued. “I’ve never seen that in my life.”

“Single worst FJ I’ve ever seen”

Check out this Final Jeopardy! clue — in the category “Presidential Elections” — from the episode airing February 20, 2024: “He’s the most recent presidential candidate to have officially declared his opponent in that campaign the victor.”

Only contestant Jesse Matheny offered the correct response: Who is Al Gore? As both a presidential candidate and the sitting vice president at the time, Gore certified the Electoral College count and declared himself the loser and George W. Bush the winner of the 2000 election.

Jeopardy! buffs trashed that challenging clue on Reddit. “This is a horrendous question. It’s entirely about parsing the wording and not about knowing any information at all,” one wrote.

Another wrote, “It was the single worst FJ I’ve ever seen. What the hell does ‘officially declared’ mean in the context of this clue? I had assumed it meant declared on behalf of their campaign, which they all obviously have the official capacity to speak for. Nothing in the clue narrowed it down [to] mean officially declared on behalf of the United States. It wasn’t a tricky question, it was a trick question.”

“A poorly-done trick question”

Cris Pannullo suffered a surprise defeat in the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions episode airing on February 26, 2024, no thanks to a controversial “Memory” question.

That $1,000 clue read: “In comparing computer memory info, think before you give us this, the number of megabytes in a gigabyte.”

Cris guessed 1,000 and lost $1,000, while fellow contestant Jared Watson won that money by guessing 1,024.

But the clue didn’t account for the varying definitions of gigabyte, as Reddit users noted.

 

“Technically, they are both correct,” one said. “Units based on power of 10 (where 1,000 would be the correct response) are the standard per the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This is the standard for most storage capacity, including most hard drives and flash memory. MacOS and Ubuntu are common operating systems that use this definition. Units based on power of 2 (where 1,024 would be the correct response) are the standard for random access memory (RAM) and for the Windows operating system.”

Another viewer called it “a poorly-done trick question.”

“One of the most evil FJs”

Show #9098 on May 8, 2024, had a Final Jeopardy! stumper, with “Rhyme Time: Opera Version” as the category.

“Telling the story of a duke, a jester & the jester’s daughter, it was written by poet Francesco Maria Piave,” the clue read. Correct response: What is the Rigoletto libretto?

On Reddit, one fan said that clue “may be one of the most evil FJs I’ve seen in years,” and another called it a “horrendous, horrendous clue.” Not everyone agreed, though, with someone else declaring it was “not at all an unreasonably difficult clue.”

“Very offensive”

Unlike other clues presented here, the $400 “Songs in the Key of Life” question of the episode airing on May 30, 2024, wasn’t misleading, confusingly worded, or inaccurate. It just didn’t give credit where credit was due, viewers said.

The clue: “In the title of a Rascal Flatts song, ‘Life Is’ this type of road” (Correct response, offered by contestant Adriana Harmeyer: “What is a highway?”)

 

Viewers took umbrage at Jeopardy! attributing the song “Life Is a Highway” to Rascal Flatts, though, and not Canadian musician Tom Cochrane, who recorded it a decade and a half earlier.

“Why has #Jeopardy decided ‘Life Is a Highway’ is a Rascal Flatts song, when they just produced an inferior cover?” wrote on X user.

“Very offensive to Tom Cochrane to call ‘Life Is a Highway’ a Rascal Flatts song,” said another.