Viral 'Wheel of Fortune' Contestant Gets Shot At Redemption On 'Jimmy Kimmel: Live'

By Andrew Sanford | TV | May 30, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | TV | May 30, 2024 |

Wheel of Fortune is not aired live. It’s recorded well in advance, chopped up, and presented to you while you’re eating dinner and trying to avoid talking to your family. The show is a well-oiled machine at this point, but recording it ahead of time allows for the removal of anything unseemly. It’s a bit of a bummer. You want the flubs! Audiences crave cringy, embarrassing moments like Vannah White craves a letter to flip (why do you think she’s stuck around Pat so long? It’s an addiction to flipping).

Sometimes, a moment may slip through the editors and the network executives. Something will happen that is so absurd it must make it to air. A contestant may do or say something that has to be shared with the general public. Allowing moments like these to grace our television screens is a public service. It gives a needed distraction to the end-times-like horrors we face every day. Recently, the folks at Wheel Of Fortune did just that with the help of contestant Tavaris Williams.

Williams was a guest on the show and did quite nicely for himself. He won a little over $9000. He didn’t win the whole game, but he didn’t walk away with zero, which feels like the kind of embarrassment one can curse several generations with. No, Tavaris Williams didn’t go home empty-handed. He got on TV, he won some money, and he said the phrase “Right in the butt” on national television.

The answer was not “Right in the butt,” as Williams would soon learn. Someone at ABC has a sense of humor, so his answer made it onto TV screens and into the hearts of fans, old and new. A clip of Tavaris’s answer went viral, awarding the human race with a distraction from all the terribleness. A brief distraction? Yes. But not for Tavaris, whose sudden viral fame took him from early-night TV programming to late-night.

Jimmy Kimmel invited Tavaris onto his show to discuss his answer. Williams is friendly, humble, and pretty funny. When asked if “Right in the butt” is a phrase he says often, he quickly clarified that he “has never used those words in sequential order a day in [his] life.” After a nice chat, Jimmy gives Tavaris a chance to solve another potentially inappropriate puzzle on television.

It’s a wonderful follow-up to what could have been a strictly embarrassing moment. Instead, Tavaris gets to have a laugh, appear on TV again, and show what a wonderful human he is. Everybody wins. The video below is cued up to Jimmy’s chat with Tavaris. If you want to continue being inundated with coverage of Trump’s trial, you can start from the beginning.