Ken Jennings has opened up about the one mistake on Jeopardy! that still haunts him to this day, as well as what the hardest part of the show is. Talking about his new book The Complete Kennections with Mental Floss, the Jeopardy! host discussed many aspects of the game show and how his perspective has changed from contestant to host.
Ken Jennings admitted to the outlet that he still feels he will never be as good a host as Alex Trebek. “He was just so perfect for that job. Like he’d been engineered in an Ontario lab for it. We miss Alex every day,” he said. “But the one thing I can bring to the table is that I remember what it was like to be a contestant. So a lot of that is just remembering the panic. There’s a lot of big feelings when you’re a Jeopardy! player. And so every morning I come out and I try to chat with the players, I try to talk them down. I convey to them, if possible, that I’m on their side and everybody on the show is on their side, and we just want to see three people play well.”
Jennings also can’t help but reminisce about how his life changed after he walked onto that set in 2004. One moment that will live with him forever, though, is getting the Final Jeopardy on his last game wrong. “For me, that was H&R Block, the final question I got wrong, which means pretty much every time I drive past a strip mall, I get to remember my failing. So that’s nice,” he said.
The clue in “Business and Industry” was “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only 4 months a year.” The correct response was H&R Block, which Jennings’ opponent answered. He said FedEx, ultimately losing the game.
Although Jennings came up with 500 Kennection Questions, he does not have any part in writing the clues for Jeopardy! “The writers are great at it. They do not need my help,” he said. However, the Jeopardy! G.O.A.T. said that, like Trebek, he might bring a fact or two back from vacation that he learned and suggest it to the writer’s room. “Sometimes they humor me and I see them on the show,” Jennings shared.
He might be constantly thinking of puzzles, but do not ask Ken Jennings to come up with another anecdote. “That has got to be the hardest part of being on that show 75 times. Answering the clues is hard enough, but then they make you have a funny story every half an hour,” he said.
“Nobody has 75 funny stories. If you watch Jeopardy!, you know that some people don’t even have one funny story. I sure ran out very quickly. But I have been traveling a lot lately, and that’s a very safe area for Jeopardy! stories. So if I had to do this again, I could say that a llama spit on me in Peru or something.” Jennings shared that he could be lying about the llama because the game show does not fact-check stories like they do their clues.
Jeopardy!, Season 42 premiere, September 8, check local listings