Jeopardy! hid a deep-cut Bluesky joke about "the slut gnomes of false Berlin" in today's episode

This is going to take some explaining: Back in 2023, a Bluesky user going by lowbeetle (who’s since apparently deleted their account, meaning this joke exists only in the screenshots and memories of others) made a post that quickly went viral, imagining the world’s weirdest Jeopardy! answer/question dyad: “Feel free to ask these diminutive spirits for sexual favors, but don’t say ‘guten Tag’—they’re not actually German!” (The response being, of course, “Who are the slut gnomes of false Berlin?”) It’s the kind of deliberately absurdist, hyper-specific online language—including an imaginary Alex Trebek calling said gnomes “bizarre little men,” in a parody of one of his classic, bemused asides—that you’d be forgiven for letting it lodge in your brain permanently. Which still makes it incredibly weird to see, on today’s episode of the series, the following pair of categories pop up in the game’s first round: “False Berlin,” followed immediately by “Bizarre Little Men.”

The culprit, it turns out, was host Ken Jennings, who is clearly a big fan of the concept of sexually available but diminutive pseudo-Teutons: Jennings wrote in his own Bluesky post today that “I don’t usually meddle on the writing side of Jeopardy!, but tonight I called in a favor for our Bluesky viewers.” So, there you have it: Online has finally, and fully, broken containment, in the most drastic way possible. The slut gnomes are free on the airwaves. All, we reckon, is lost.