In recent weeks, there’s been a “Wheel of Fortune” puzzle that may’t be solved by buying a vowel or guessing one other consonant: What on the earth is happening with host Pat Sajak?
The 76-year-old game show legend has been acting quite bizarrely.
Within the last month or so, Sajak has put a contestant in a chokehold; claimed he hides in letter-turner Vanna White’s garden; asked a contestant to remove his shirt and tugged on a contestant’s beard.
On this past Monday night’s show, he even scolded a contestant who grabbed the envelope within the show’s bonus round: “Don’t ever do it again!”
One can’t help but wonder if America’s longest-running game show host has finally had enough — or possibly he was all the time this strange and grumpy.
Getting bored with the wordplay grind can be comprehensible.
He’s been hosting “Wheel” for 4 a long time, since 1981. The fashions have modified, however the game has remained very much the identical.
By comparison, Johnny Carson’s seemingly never-ending reign on “The Tonight Show” was just 30 years — and the King of Late Night took 15 weeks of vacation at the tip of his run.
Sajak’s recent hijinks aren’t the primary time he’s exhibited strange behavior.
In the autumn of 2020, in a span of 10 days, there have been quite a few incidents.
He snapped at a contestant for “interrupting” him while he read a industrial promo on one show.
On one other, he told a competitor to “stop making sound effects” after they let loose a celebratory yelp. “Ungrateful players! I’ve had it!” he said to a different player after they questioned a solution as “redundant.”
In 2021, he even mocked a young man’s speech impediment on air.
The next 12 months, he made viewers cringe when he asked longtime letter-turner Vanna White, “Have you ever ever watched opera within the buff? I’m just curious.”
Such moments reportedly put Sajak on thin ice along with his bosses.
“Pat has put his foot in it one too again and again and offended people along with his off-color humor and temperamental behavior,” an insider told OK! last September. “Network brass and top-level producers have come down hard on him and skim him the riot act.”
(Representatives for “Wheel of Fortune” and Sajak didn’t reply to repeated requests for comment.)
Off-camera, Sajak’s behavior can be edgy.
Like his “Wheel of Fortune” predecessor Chuck Woolery, he’s known for publicly expressing his conservative views on a number of topics, comparable to COVID vaccines and climate change.
He once tweeted, “Global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their very own ends” — only to later apologize and delete the missive.
Politics aside, Sajak is understood for his cutting humorousness.
Perhaps he’s attempted some bad jokes of late, but many say he’s a pleasure to be around.
“Pat was wonderful to work with … and I actually have nothing but good things to say about him. He couldn’t have been nicer,” an industry insider who worked with Sajak for several years on “Wheel” told The Post.
A female contestant on the show in 2019 had similarly positive things to say.
“He was actually super funny and sharp. I didn’t get the ick,” she told The Post.
Viewers and advertisers seem, for essentially the most part, comfortable.
“Wheel” stays at the highest of the syndicated heap with its sister show “Jeopardy!” — which can be produced by Sony Pictures Television.
Within the week ending April 17, it pulled in over 8 million viewers each weeknight — and it’s showing no signs of slowing down even amid its host’s outbursts.
Sponsors will not be pulling ads, nor are they threatening to accomplish that — all the time an indication of trouble in TV land.
There’s an off likelihood that Sajak’s recent behavior is expounded to some health issue unknown to most of the people.
In 2019, he revealed that he’d almost died after suffering an intestinal blockage that required emergency surgery.
“I remember pondering, not in a morbid way, ‘I feel this should be death. This should be what death is like,’” he told Good Morning America.
Seemingly more likely is the chance that Sajak’s acting-out is a contract ploy.
He and White, 66, with whom he reportedly gets on famously, are each signed through 2024.
Sajak earns an estimated $15 million a 12 months and added a lucrative executive producer credit to his hosting duties in his last deal.
He’s estimated to be price between $65 million and $75 million and owns each a sprawling hilltop home in Los Angeles and a brick mansion in Severna Park, Maryland.
He and his wife — Maryland native Lesly-Brown Sajak — divide their time between the 2.
Their children — son Patrick, 32, and daughter Maggie, 28 — are grown, but Maggie is moving into the family business, in addition to carving her own path as a rustic singer.
She’s been the show’s “Social Correspondent” since 2021 — shooting behind-the-scenes clips and interviews with the show’s staff and contestants and sharing them online.
Once in a while, Maggie has even stepped in for White because the show’s letter-turner — though neither she nor show officials have said anything publicly about what that would mean when each her father and White eventually leave the show.
Sajak has acknowledged that his final puzzle is coming fairly soon.
In 2021, he told “Entertainment Tonight” that he and White are “definitely closer to the tip than the start” and that “I’d like to depart before people tune in and have a look at me and say, ‘Ooh, what happened to him?’”
Indeed, that point could also be now.
