Jeopardy! Host Ken Jennings Trolls Contestant with Waluigi Joke

The most recent episode of Jeopardy! sent some fans (and more specifically, some Nintendo fans) into a bit of an uproar online this week when host Ken Jennings dropped an unexpected reference to one of Nintendo's fan-favorite Super Mario characters: Waluigi. Despite being excluded often from the mainline Mario games, Waluigi's fame has persisted due to his meme-level status, so Jeopardy! viewers were pleased to hear him namedropped during the latest episode.

During the Jeopardy! segment that aired this week, host Ken Jennings was bantering a bit with Luigi de Guzman, a contestant who's no stranger to winning Jeopardy! bouts by now. Despite his past successes, de Guzman's competition, Emmett Stanton, had quite the lead at one point. Jennings pointed that out and couldn't help but drop a Waluigi reference in the process. He and the rest of the Jeopardy! team were apparently pretty happy with that joke, too, seeing how it was one of the spinout clips the show's social accounts highlighted afterwards.

Fans were similarly pleased with the reference – at least for the most part. Some thought it was low-hanging fruit given that the Luigi reference was already there while others praised Jennings for incorporating that sort of reference that probably wouldn't have been heard on Jeopardy! had this situation come about years ago.

Was Jennings' Waluigi reference timed well, or was it too easy? Let us know in the comments while you check out some of the other reactions to this Super Mario reference: