Pat Sajak calls ‘Wheel of Fortune’ contestant a ‘downer’
Something fishy is going on.
Pat Sajak sunk an aquarium owner’s morale Wednesday after he jokingly called her a “downer” when she revealed that two of her fish had killed her other aquatic pets.
The revelation came at the top of the show when contestant Mariah Feliciano told Sajak, 77, that she recently “started partaking in aquarium life.”
“What do you have in there?” Sajak asked.
All too thrilled to talk about her fishy friends, Feliciano told the game show host that she had “some shrimp, snails and guppies.”
“And then I got two other fish I wasn’t familiar with and I named Piranha and Predator because they killed my other fish,” Feliciano continued, eliciting a slight chuckle from the audience but causing Sajak to look startled.
“Really a downer,” Sajak mumbled. “I don’t wanna go on.”
Feliciano insisted that the other fish were “still alive.” Sajak then interjected: “Let’s go on.”
Sajak, who is leaving the show at the end of this current season, is no stranger to controversy when it comes to being blunt to competitors.
Last month, he gave one contestant a stern warning after he began to feel upstaged.
“He came up to me and just told me, ‘Hey, Michael, you know, this is my show, right,’” contestant Michael Colen recalled to Fox News Digital. “And I politely said, ‘Yes, sir, it is your show for 41 years.’”
“But it was stern,” Colen, 48, claimed. “There was a stern drop of sternness to it.”
“It was two alphas going at it,” he went on. “I’m an acquired taste. And … I’ve been putting out music for 30 years, so I have to say I’m an acquired taste.”
Colen later told The Post that he believed Sajak wanted him to “tone it down a bit” but ultimately “ended up enjoying himself.”
“I believe he wanted me to succeed and have a good show, so he was giving me a little direction,” he said. “The interaction was not ill-toned.”
In May, the outgoing host also awkwardly teased a contestant who guessed the wrong answer three times in a row.
“Why are you bothering?” Sajak sneered at the time.
In another episode, Sajak bluntly told a 22-year-old fan-favorite “don’t ever do that again” after the contestant handed him the bonus round clue.
He immediately corrected himself, however, saying: “In fairness, we used to do it that way; the player would pick up the thing.”
“American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest will be taking over hosting duties from Sajak while Vanna White remains at her trusty letter board.
“I’m truly humbled to be stepping into the footsteps of the legendary Pat Sajak,” Seacrest, 48, said in a statement in June. “I can say, along with the rest of America, that it’s been a privilege and pure joy to watch Pat and Vanna on our television screens for an unprecedented 40 years, making us smile every night and feel right at home with them.”
“Pat, I love the way you’ve always celebrated the contestants and made viewers at home feel at ease,” he added. “I look forward to learning everything I can from you during this transition.”
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