Pat Sajak Makes Fun Of Wheel Of Fortune Contestant’s Intense Fear
Pat Sajak teased a Wheel of Fortune contestant who has a fish phobia.
Pat Sajak has been hosting Wheel of Fortune since 1982, and he has interacted with more than a few (hundred) interesting contestants in that time. This month, the veteran game show host went viral for his interaction with one of those contestants: a woman who is terrified of fish. According to People magazine, Ashley Lamb wants “nothing to do with [fish] at all,” but that didn’t stop the host from joking about Ashley’s phobia.
So, naturally, Pat Sajak asked the Wheel of Fortune contestant for more details. He asked if she just didn’t like fish when they were alive or when they were on her plate, and discovered that she doesn’t like them any way at all. “If they’re on a plate or in the water, I’m not going to be anywhere near it,” she told him.
Curious, Pat Sajak asked if this was a phobia that began during her childhood or if she had had some sort of bad experience with fish, and she responded that the story was too long to recount on a half-hour episode of Wheel of Fortune.
She laughed then, but it was Pat Sajak who had the last laugh when he later told another Wheel of Fortune contestant to “Just hold on to” what turned out to be a fake fish while he went to congratulate Lamb. Lamb then hid her face in her hands, and the audience cracked up.
Pat Sajak then told her that she won $7,500 that round and asked if she could forgive him, which she said she “might” do. The Wheel of Fortune contestant took a lot of good-natured teasing over the course of the episode, but in the end, she was the biggest winner, taking home a whopping $63,000. Hopefully, that will be enough to make her forget her traumatic experience!
This isn’t the first time Pat Sajak has gone viral for his Wheel of Fortune hosting in recent years, however. In 2021, he accidentally gave the contestants the answer to a puzzle… even if none of them noticed. When 12 letters of the puzzle were revealed, he joked, “Yikes. Well, I’d rather be standing here than there, quite frankly.” Which sounds like a normal phrase, right? Because he didn’t want to be in their shoes, guessing the answer?
Well, it turned out that “quite frankly” was actually the answer to the puzzle. According to a video aired after the show in which Pat Sajak was chatting with his long-time Wheel of Fortune co-host Vanna White, he realized right away that he had messed up, but he had to pretend like he didn’t say anything out of the ordinary.
Luckily for Pat Sajak, though, the Wheel of Fortune contestants were “not paying any attention” to him because they were so focused on solving the puzzle, so it just became a funny joke to tell later on.
And we must say that, for someone who has been hosting the game show for almost half a century, the fact that Pat Sajak hasn’t made more mistakes or viral incidents on Wheel of Fortune is, quite frankly, nothing short of a miracle.
