New 'Jeopardy!' Host Mike Richards Taking Fire for Jokes He Made on a Podcast 8 Years Ago

Daytime Emmy Awards 2021. Getty Images.

What do we do when someone lands one of the most coveted jobs in all the world? When they're handed the opportunity and even the sacred responsibility of replacing a universally beloved, irreplaceable legend? Congratulate that person? Wish them well? Respect the solemn duty they have been charged with and hope they're up to the task? 

Please. That's such 2010 thinking. This is the 2020s. Here the first thing we do is root around in that person's past, as deep and as long as we have to in order find something, anything, they've done, said, written, commented on, liked, laughed at or joked about that offends our modern sensibilities. Only then can we truly be free. Or something.

Case in point, Mike Richards hasn't even settled into Alex Trebek's storied "Jeopardy!" host podium, then someone went through hours of a long forgotten podcast he was on to dig up something that will offend the easily offended:

Source - Newly appointed Jeopardy! host Mike Richards made several disparaging comments about women in newly resurfaced podcast episodes.

The iconic game show host’s executive producer — who was controversially named its permanent syndicated daytime show host last week — was recorded mocking women’s weight, calling one model a “booth slut” and repeatedly praising “the average white-guy host.”

As first reported by The Ringer, Richards hosted a podcast from 2013 to 2014 called The Randumb Show, billed as a behind-the-scenes look at The Price Is Right, on which he previously served as executive producer. During one segment, his cohost and former assistant Beth Triffon discussed working as a model at the CES and he dubbed her a “booth ho,” “booth slut” and “boothstitute.”

In another episode, Richards discusses a photo of Triffon and her friends, calling her friends “really frumpy and overweight” and said “they all look terrible in the picture…they look fat and not good in the picture.”

The comments seemingly echo the attitudes Richards was accused of having by former models on The Price Is Right in bias lawsuits, accusations he recently dismissed by saying “these complaints [do] not reflect the reality of who I am.”

During the podcast, Richards also reportedly used the derogatory word for little people and a derogatory term for the mentally disabled.

Twice during the podcast he also singled out white male hosts for praise seemingly only because they were white and male and assumed therefore that he could get a hosting job, too.

“Jeff Probst had a daytime talk show, which I was cheering for because I like, you know, the average white-guy host,” he said “I cheer for him to succeed because I feel like through his success I could have some success hosting.” Then later, when discussing former American Idol host Ryan Seacrest: “I think he’s actually made the world a safer place for what I like to call the skinny white host, like George [Gray] and I.”

Imagine the audacity of this man. Joking with his long time associate Beth Triffon using hateful slurs like "booth ho," "booth slut" and "boothstitute." It's appalling. Sure there's no word on whether Beth Triffon thought it was funny. They didn't mention her shouting, "How dare you!" throwing off her headphones and storming out of the studio in a huff. But just because she wasn't offended doesn't mean that the rest of us can't be retroactively offended for Past Beth Triffon. So let's project our awful, dystopian reality back onto hers and Mike Richards' from eight years ago.

And what about that "average white guy host" slur, hmm? What do we do about that? On behalf of average and skinny white guys everywhere, I'm shocked and outraged by such hate speech. The nerve of the man, cracking wise about Jeff Probst and Ryan Seacrest getting hosting gigs because then maybe he can too. Do you even hear yourself, man??? Once I get off my fainting couch and unclutch my pearls, I'm getting counseling for the PTSD this is causing. 

So yes, let's all join in the outrage. Clearly, this expose' about Mike Richards is the worst news we've had this week. Him judging the appearance of women in swimsuits in 2014 is the most horrible thing women of the world are being confronted with right now. And if those skinny white male Americans stuck under Taliban rule right now ever make it home alive, the shock of knowing the new "Jeopardy!" host once used derogatory terms that were in common usage back then, might make them hop the next jet back to Kabul. 

Thanks for the journalism. We'll all be looking forward to the next nontroversy to get faux outraged about. Mike Richards should apologize for nothing.