Talia Lavin, a fact-checker at The New Yorker and a 2012 Harvard graduate, finished last night’s episode of Jeopardy! with $0. But she managed to get affable Canadian host Alex Trebek to say “Turd Ferguson” on air, a feat money can’t buy.
For Final Jeopardy, contestants were asked a question from the category “Oscar-Nominated Songs”: “This song from a 1999 animated film about censorship had a word censored from its Oscar performance.”
The answer is “Blame Canada,” an original song by South Park creators (and Deflategate mockers) Trey Parker and Matt Stone from the film South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.
Lavin entered Final Jeopardy with $600, making it impossible for her to catch first and second place contestants Audrey Watkins-Fox and Kevin Butterfield unless both of them acted like Cliff Clavin on the Boston Jeopardy episode of Cheers.
Instead, Lavin went with a reference to another fictional episode of Jeopardy!, answering:
“What is the love ballad of Turd Ferguson? P.S. Hi, Mom.”
For those who don’t get the reference, Lavin is referring to Norm Macdonald’s classic Burt Reynolds impersonation on Saturday Night Live‘s Celebrity Jeopardy sketch.
As for Lavin, she told The Huffington Post that she isn’t too broken up about her performance.
“I won the Internet, which is way better than many thousands of dollars.”
