Celebrity Jeopardy! (Saturday Night Live)

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Will Ferrell (as Alex Trebek) and Darrell Hammond (as Sean Connery).
Will Ferrell (as Alex Trebek) and Darrell Hammond (as Sean Connery).

Celebrity Jeopardy! was one of the most popular recurring sketches on Saturday Night Live. It parodies the television game show Jeopardy!, specifically its Celebrity Jeopardy! edition, where celebrities compete and the game's level of difficulty is significantly reduced. Thirteen sketches have been aired to date, two each season from 1996 to 2002, and one in 2005.

Will Ferrell appeared as host Alex Trebek in all 13 of the sketches. Darrell Hammond appeared in all sketches as well, 11 of them as Sean Connery. Norm MacDonald appeared in four sketches, all as Burt Reynolds. Also, Jimmy Fallon appeared in six sketches (including five consecutively), and Dean Edwards appeared in two, but as different characters.

Contents

[edit] The sketch

Under the guise of a run-of-the-mill celebrity game show wherein celebrity contestants appear and donate their winnings to charity, the sketches usually begin at the start of the second round of Jeopardy!. The host, Alex Trebek, welcomes the audience and introduces the celebrity contestants. Both the host and contestants are played as caricatures of their real-life personalities. Trebek, known to strictly enforce the rules, is the beleaguered straight man. He is generally the only person on stage interested in engaging in a game of Jeopardy! The contestants, who often appear either unaware of what the game is or uninterested in playing it, either ramble incoherently, deliver irrelevant monologues, or, in the case of Connery, openly antagonize the host. In the instances where a contestant takes the game seriously, he or she proves utterly incapable of answering any of the questions correctly. In thirteen episodes, no contestant ever buzzes in and gives a correct response. Meanwhile, Trebek makes little or no effort to hide his contempt for the celebrities’ stupidity, and in return he is bombarded with sophomoric insults from Connery, who alleges that he has engaged in sexual acts with Trebek’s mother and implies that Trebek is a homosexual.

In order for a game of Jeopardy! to progress, the contestants select questions, arranged in a grid by category and point value, so Trebek can ask them. Many times, the celebrities refuse or fail to select a question, grinding the pace of the game to a halt. Often, Trebek violates the rules and selects the category himself. At first, the show employed reasonable categories such as "Movies" and "Popular Music," but as the celebrities’ ineptitude came into focus, the categories became more and more childish. Many category names, such as "Colors that end in urple,'" suggest that the contestants could infer the correct responses before hearing the questions. Jeopardy! standby "Potent Potables," a category about alcoholic beverages, is always offered but never selected by Trebek or a contestant. Categories that do not fit this profile are often misunderstood by the celebrities and transformed by one of the contestants—almost always Sean Connery—into sexually suggestive phrases. For example, he misreads "Therapists" as "The Rapists" and "The Pen Is Mightier", a category about quotes from famous authors, as “The Penis Mightier," which Connery and Nicolas Cage believe is a product designed for enhancing the male sexual organ. On two occasions, Connery uses a marker pen to modify the board, transforming seemingly innocent category names into vulgarities.

Trebek eventually grows exasperated with his inability to conduct the show and cuts it short by moving to the Final Jeopardy! round. Often, he discards the scripted category and question in favor of something much easier, such as asking the contestants to write down the current year or make any mark whatsoever to earn a correct answer. Sometimes, the show itself delivers a childishly simple category such as "First Grade Math" or "Horsies". Despite constructing scenarios wherein it appears impossible for the celebrities to fail, they invariably do. On rare occasions, contestants answer Final Jeopardy! correctly, but such success is never accompanied by an appropriate wager, rendering the whole effort pointless.

Connery occasionally gets the Final Jeopardy! question correct, but uses his wager to transform the response into something rude. For example, when Trebek celebrated Connery’s answer of "indoors" to the question "Where are you right now?", the usual state of disappointment returned when Connery's wager revealed that his screen actually read "I ♥ BOOBS". Later on, Trebek became aware of this strategy, and after Connery wrote "0+0-0=0" as his response to "Write a math problem a first grader would know", Trebek sought to ignore the wager in order to end the show with, at long last, a winner. Connery convinced him otherwise, and Trebek again left dejected, as Connery’s screen read "POOP". These instances and others indicate a shift in Connery’s character: first portrayed as stupid and clueless, Connery eventually demonstrated that he is aware of the nature of the show and capable of answering the questions, but he simply enjoys making rude jokes and frustrating Trebek more than attempting to win the game.

Initially, Burt Reynolds had been the celebrity who appeared on each episode, and there are some indications that he was to develop an antagonistic relationship with the host as well. When Reynolds appears for the last time on the sketch, he misreads categories much in the way Connery does and at one point frustrates Trebek by insisting that he be addressed as "Turd Ferguson" because "it's a funny name".

[edit] Misunderstood, Misrepresented, and Transformed Categories

  • "S" Words/"Swords"
  • Therapists/"The Rapists"
  • Famous Titles/"Famous Titties"
  • The Pen Is Mightier/"The Penis Mightier"
  • Condiments/"The Condom Thing"
  • A Petit Déjeuner/"Ape Tit"
  • Foreign Flicks/"Foreign Fucks" (implied, but not said outright)
  • An Album Cover/"Anal Bum Cover"
  • Richard Nixon/"---Hard ---On"
  • Famous Horsemen/"Whore Semen"
  • I Have a Chardonnay/"I Have a -Hard On---"
  • Japan US Relations/"Jap-Anus Relations"

[edit] Final Jeopardy Round

  • Bodies of Water
  • "Write down the current year."
  • Your Favorite Food
  • Letters of the Alphabet
  • Where Are You Right Now?
  • The Federalist Papers (discarded by Trebek) / Horsies (replacement)
  • "Just write a number."
  • Famous Mothers (discarded by Trebek)
  • Anything
  • "Ask your own question, and then answer it."
  • Things You Like
  • Would You Like A Cookie?
  • First Grade Math

[edit] End of the sketch

The sketch was initially retired on Will Ferrell’s departure from the SNL cast in 2002, but it returned for another appearance on May 14, 2005, when Ferrell hosted for the first time since leaving as a regular. The second-to-last sketch featured the real Alex Trebek in a cameo appearance.

See also Jeopardy! in popular culture

[edit] Relationship with the real Jeopardy!

  • On the September 5, 2001 episode of Jeopardy!, all the Double Jeopardy! categories were inspired by the sketch. They were “Sean Connery,” “Surprise Me, Trebek!”, “Therapists,” “Things You Shouldn’t Put in Your Mouth,” “The Number After 2,” and “Rhymes With ‘Dog’”.[1]
  • On the June 27, 2006 episode of Jeopardy!, the first category of the second round was “Japan-U.S. Relations,” one of the many categories misunderstood or misrepresented by the Connery character (he cited it as "Jap Anus Relations").[2]
  • In the 2006 Celebrity Jeopardy! tournament, categories included "Surprise Me, Trebek!" and "Months That Begin With 'Feb'", which both reference the sketch.[3][4]
  • When the real-life Alex Trebek shaved his moustache in 2001, Ferrell’s Trebek character retained it.

[edit] Episodes

(Original airdate, celebrity contestants)

  1. December 7, 1996 - Sean Connery, Burt Reynolds, Jerry Lewis
  2. May 10, 1997 - Phil Donahue, Burt Reynolds, Marlon Brando
  3. October 4, 1997 - John Travolta, Burt Reynolds, Michael Keaton
  4. May 9, 1998 - Sean Connery, Minnie Driver, Jeff Goldblum
  5. October 24, 1998 - Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, Sean Connery
  6. March 20, 1999 - Nicolas Cage, Calista Flockhart, Sean Connery
  7. October 23, 1999 - French Stewart, Burt Reynolds , Sean Connery
  8. April 15, 2000 - Sean Connery, Keanu Reeves, Hilary Swank
  9. December 16, 2000 - Robin Williams, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Sean Connery
  10. February 8, 2001 - Ozzy Osbourne, Martha Stewart, Sean Connery (SNL Prime-time extra II)
  11. September 29, 2001 - Chris Tucker, Anne Heche, Sean Connery
  12. May 18, 2002 - Dave Matthews, Björk, Sean Connery
  13. May 14, 2005 - Bill Cosby, Sharon Osbourne, Sean Connery

[edit] Cast

[edit] SNL cast members

A typical Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch featured three cast members, two as contestants and Will Ferrell as Trebek, and that week’s host as a third contestant. The thirteenth edition of the sketch (Cosby/S. Osbourne/Connery) featured three members of the SNL cast as the three contestants and Ferrell, now hosting, reprising his role as Trebek. The Connery/O. Osbourne/M. Stewart episode featured cast members in all four of the roles.

[edit] SNL hosts

Twelve of the thirteen sketches included the episode’s host, usually as a contestant. Celebrity Jeopardy number 10 is the only one not feature a host in it as it was part of a SNL primetime special that did not feature a guest host. Both Will Ferrell and Norm MacDonald were previous cast members that reprised their Celebrity Jeopardy! role upon their return.

[edit] Other appearances

Chris Kattan played singer Ricky Martin, who gives a Video Daily Double Clue in the Connery/Swank/Reeves episode.

In the same sketch, Chris Parnell played Hilary Swank’s then-husband Chad Lowe. He was seen crying in the audience while Swank gave an acceptance speech, a parody of her speech at the 72nd Academy Awards, where she famously forgot to mention him.

In the Connery/Matthews/Bjork episode, Dean Edwards played Boyd Tinsley, the violinist for Dave Matthews Band. He spontaneously appeared to accompany Matthews when he buzzed in and performed “Ants Marching” as his response to one of the show’s questions.

Alex Trebek appeared as himself in that same episode. He came out at the conclusion of the sketch and gave the Trebek character a send-off on Ferrell’s last show as a cast member.

[edit] See also

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