‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant’s Excruciating Intro Story Turns Into a TV Classic

Jeopardy! has a long-standing tradition of awkward moments. Easy clues that are left unanswered by the contestants, causing the unmistakable sound of simultaneous eye rolls from viewers nationwide. Final clue answers that look like a preschool child trying to spell “supercalifragilisticexpialodocious” with crayon. Cringey attempts by hosts to use authentic accents with foreign words. But few things are as awkward as the contestant interview segment, where contestants recount “amusing” (yes, the quotation marks are intentional) anecdotes about themselves.

It can be painful to watch, especially when the contestant looks like they’d rather crawl under their stand and die than speak on camera about themselves. Or, as in the case of PhD student and Boston native Dan Tran, it’s painful to watch and listen to, a monumentally boring, god-awful interview that makes one want to pull out their ears and knock themselves on the head with a baseball bat just to let the memory of it go away.

The Worst Story in ‘Jeopardy!’ History is a Masterpiece of Tangential Tedium

Tran’s story has been hailed as the “worst story ever” in Jeopardy!‘s long history, but is it a fair statement? You be the judge:

“So when I was a senior in high school—I took French in high school—we went on an exchange trip and we arrived incredibly jet-lagged. No cappuccino could really save us in that regard. And during an open air tour bus tour in Paris, I looked up and said to my friends, ‘Hey, you know, the moon looks pretty bright tonig—today.’ And um, they just turned to me like ‘Dan, that’s not the moon, that’s the sun.’ It’s like, ‘No guys, it’s it’s the sun.’ But, but it turned out it was actually the sun and not the moon. And I still confuse it nowadays.”

If Tran’s story isn’t the worst, then it’s only because whatever tops it has been stricken from all historical records, a blight on the game show that’s long since been sent to “sleep with the fishes.”

Dissecting Dan’s Tedious Tale from ‘Jeopardy!’

I mean, where do you even begin? It starts off alright, or at least as alright as these stories go, and then falls apart as he quips about being jet-lagged, and how even cappuccino wouldn’t be enough to overcome it. It doesn’t even fit in with the rest of the story. Maybe if it went from there to “we were so tired we fell asleep at the top of the Eiffel Tower.” Was it an attempt at humor? “We were so jet-lagged… (how jet-lagged were you?) that even cappuccino couldn’t save us. Bazinga!” There’s little doubt in my mind that he would have added a “Bazinga” if it was, so scratch that.

Then, just when you think Tran has course-corrected and started to talk about seeing the wonders of Paris from an open-air tour bus, he paints himself as a complete moron. Harsh? Um, no. Maybe not harsh enough. It’s bad enough that he confused the sun with the moon, but even after his friends corrected him, instead of saying, “oh golly, am I ever silly,” he chooses to correct them. “Um, I think I know the moon when I see it, guys. Seriously.” No, no you don’t, Mr. Tran. Then he drops the punchline about how it was, in fact, the sun, and not the moon after all. Ba-dum-dum-crash. “Thank you, thank you, you’ve been a great audience. I’ll be here every night this week! Or is it day? Every day this week!” Then, if you’re still awake at this point, he admits to still getting the two confused to this day. Man, I feel ya – I hate it when I get a moonburn while reading about how the Apollo sun-landing was filmed by Ed Wood.

Tran would go on to win the game that day, maybe by having put everyone else to sleep, which meant – horror of horrors – he would be prompted to tell another tale the next day. Fortunately, it didn’t prove as controversial as his first attempt, which Fox News declared as the “worst Jeopardy! story ever,” while Gawker published an article titled “This Is the Lamest Contestant Story Ever Told on Jeopardy!” The 2014 debacle didn’t kill the segment, however, much to the chagrin of current Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings, who is on record as saying he laments the mid-show interviews, calling them “a little cringey.” Jeopardy! is available to stream in the U.S. on YouTube TV