Ken Jennings Hires Comedy Coach to Help ‘Focus on His Comedic Skills’ on ‘Jeopardy!’

Ken Jennings is committed to Jeopardy! in the long run, but he’s getting slammed online left and right for being awkward and unfunny. He’s currently working on fixing the problem by hiring his own comedy coach.

“How to be genuinely funny is one of the things that hinders him,” an insider exclusively tells Closer of his latest venture. “People on the show know it, Ken knows it deep down. He’s an awkward character and can’t make people laugh unlike his contemporaries, Steve Harvey and Drew Carey, and it bothers him. His delivery and timing have got to be improved if he’s to win over audiences.”

“He’s only got four days of shooting a month, so he has the downtime. He wants to hone his craft and be funny,” the source adds. “He needs to focus on his comedic skills now, get some lessons and have people come on over to help him, give him some pointers. He wants to nail this thing and bosses are backing him.”

Ken, 50, first assumed the Jeopardy! hosting role after the death of Alex Trebek in November 2020 from pancreatic cancer. Up until the spring of 2023, Ken shared hosting duties with Mayim Bialik. Once she departed the show, he became the official sole host of Jeopardy! in season 40.

While Ken has faced some criticism online for his hosting abilities in recent months, a source previously told Closer that Ken is “desperate to make it work and has no intention of leaving of his own accord” and making an attempt to turn things around.

Just recently, it was announced that Colin Jost would be hosting Pop Culture Jeopardy!

“Colin’s sharp wit and intelligence epitomize Pop Culture Jeopardy!,” Suzanne Prete, the president of game shows at Sony Pictures Television, said in a statement. “He’s smart and quick, like our contestants, and we know he’ll be able to keep up with them while making this new series his own. We could not be happier that he is joining us for this new journey.”

As for how the announcement impacted Ken, the second source told us earlier this month that “Ken’s well aware of the noise and tittle-tattle, and privately he would acknowledge these are tough times — especially with Colin Jost coming on to host Pop Culture Jeopardy! and fans calling him awkward, which is hard to take.”

In the past, Ken has spoken out about how much pressure he felt to step into Alex’s shoes after his death.

“Just to be frank, nobody wants me there,” the former software engineer said in a January 2021 interview with E! News. “I don’t want me there. We all want to see Alex there for 100 years in a perfect world and, you know, I really just wanted to do the best I could so as not to let him down and Jeopardy! viewers down, so I felt a lot of pressure.”

Ken shared that he spoke to Alex on the phone the weekend before his death.

“I actually talked to him on the phone the same weekend he passed,” he recalled. “We had talked about the possibility of me guest hosting for him at some point and he was so sweet. He was thanking me very genuinely for helping out and I was like, ‘Alex, you gave us 37 years. We should be thanking you. It’s the least I could do.'”