Bloopers and blunders are part of the fun of game shows.
This was the mother of all gaffes.
And one Wheel of Fortune contestant’s answer caused Pat Sajak to blush.
Contestant’s risqué answer stuns Pat Sajak and Vanna White
On the episode of Wheel of Fortune that aired on May 23, contestant Tavaris Williams faced a puzzle board that read “_ _ _ _ /I _ /T _ E /B _ _ T!”
Williams buzzed in with an answer he instantly regretted.
“Right in the butt,” Williams stated.
“No,” host Pat Sajak deadpanned.
The clip of Williams not safe for work attempt to solve the puzzle quickly went viral on social media.
Williams later explained to Fox News Digital that all he cared about was buzzing in first to solve the puzzle and hadn’t actually given any thought to arrive at an answer.
“I tried to just beat my contestants by buzzing in first and letting my brain catch up,” Williams stated.
Williams said upon seeing the letters on the board he blurted out the first thing that came into his mind.
“And when my brain was ready to speak, I saw the R, I saw the B, I saw the T. I went for ‘Right in the butt’ . . . And once [host Pat Sajak] said ‘no,’ oh, it was the worst feeling,” Williams added.
Williams admitted being on the big stage of national television overwhelmed him and never gave one second of thought to the idea that a show like Wheel of Fortune wouldn’t use a sexual phrase as the answer to a puzzle.
“None of those common sense [thoughts like], ‘Well, there wasn’t enough letters for the word “right”’ [or] ‘This is a family show.’ None of that is going through your head when you have 50 monitors above you, the lights are extra bright, there are 100 stagehands, there’s producers, there’s sound guys,” Williams continued.
“And I was standing next to Pat, so I had to say something. I wasn’t going to get buzzed without saying something. And the rest is history,” Williams added.
What happened after the answer
Williams lauded Sajak, Vanna White, and the producers for all being gracious to him and trying to lessen any feeling of embarrassment.
“So right then and there he tried to make me feel better and move on, but they immediately cut to break. And in the break, Pat was very gracious and he was very supportive and said, ‘Oh, you made a name for yourself. We’re going to see how we can edit that tastefully. I don’t know how, but we’ll figure it out.’ He was very accommodating, and he made me feel great throughout the process after that. He’s truly amazing,” Williams explained.
“They are consummate professionals. I may have exchanged a couple of glances, and I got a ‘He’s going to make us work today’ look. But they were great. They were gracious. They’ve seen it all before. They may not have been expecting that. But, you know, they allowed me to continue with the show and, hopefully, everybody got a kick out of it,” Williams remarked.
Williams said he taped the show in early April, knowing it wouldn’t air until May.
He told Fox News that he didn’t dwell on the answer because he had no idea what the producers would edit out or what they would leave in.
“You can’t share the results of your episode until it airs. I shot in early April, it aired late May, so I literally just had to sit on the entire show and that answer and then not knowing how or what would be edited for almost a month. So, out of sight, out of mind,” Williams concluded.
