Who’s the smartest celebrity? We’ll get an answer, kind of, with Thursday night’s Celebrity Jeopardy! finale.
Host Mayim Bialik tells ABC Audio that finalists Wil Wheaton, Ike Barinholtz, and Patton Oswalt are “three very, very, very smart people and three very funny people and three very competitive people who are taking this very seriously” — for the most part, anyway.
“When you’re at this level, it’s definitely, it’s competitive as it feels like when we do syndicated Jeopardy!. It honestly didn’t really feel that different,” she says, except that she “got to laugh a lot more” and had to work harder to keep them in line, because “sometimes they kind of go off on riffs and they played off each other in ways that even funny Jeopardy! contestants who are not celebrities don’t necessarily like keep the jokes going.”
“…It kind of feels like you get to know them, you know, in a different way,” she adds. “I guess that’s why people feel like they know celebrities because here I am feeling like I know all of these people.”
While she’s settled quite nicely into her role as Jeopardy! host, Bialik — who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience — was never a Celebrity Jeopardy! contestant and doesn’t think she’d have been good anyway.
“I do absolutely have a general knowledge, you know, particularly in science and Jewish history, you know, Bible, like those are things that I feel comfortable with, but I’m a very nervous performer in general and very nervous even at kind of like being myself,” she shares. “I did Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, for example, for charity, and I cried just before anything started happening, just from anticipation. So I’m not like your best contestant.”
Celebrity Jeopardy! airs Thursday, February 2 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
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