Until you’re actually staring at Tim Meadows under the bright lights of a TV studio, trying to think of the right words to say in order to solve some silly puzzle, none of us can truly say how we’d react on a game show. We may think we’d be all cool and collected, dropping all of the right answers and impressing Tim Meadows with our conversation skills, but until you actually get in the shit, there’s no way to know how well you’d handle it. At the very least, though, we can all hope that we’d do better than a man named Evan Kaufman, who is now destined to have the most hilariously embarrassing moment of his life preserved for an eternity in compilations of legendary game show fuck-ups.
Kaufman appeared on a recent episode of ABC’s $100,000 Pyramid revival and, well, the clip speaks for itself:
All Kaufman had to do was get Tim Meadows to guess the clue, which was “people whose last name is Obama.” After a dramatic pause with the perfect amount of build-up, Kaufman said “Bin Laden,” a man whose last name is definitely not Obama. It’s a truly brilliant clip, mostly because the editing is so tight, but it turns out there’s a story behind Kaufman’s monumental mistake. In a thread on his own account, Kaufman explains that his son was just born two weeks before the taping and that the producers make a very big show of reminding contestants to read the clues carefully because it can be easy to misinterpret them sometimes. In the brief moments he had to plan, though, Kaufman blanked on all of the famous Obamas and landed on a famous person with a name that sounds like Obama.
He says he quickly corrected himself on the show and Meadows got the answer, but it was already too late. He already said the bad thing, and a room had already been reserved for him in viral video hell. Sorry, Evan Kaufman. You seem like a good person, but now you’re the guy who said “Bin Laden” on Pyramid.