A whole bunch of people sent this clip in to us. When I first saw it, I wondered why they replaced Trebek with some old guy who doesn’t even have a mustache. I guess that’s a fail on my part.

There have been some questions about why the Trebek would choose to use a fake Russian accent when saying the name of the category. I have two theories about this:

1. Russian, along with many other Slavic languages doesn’t have any definite or indefinite articles, so many Russian speakers who go on to learn English have trouble with them. It’s easy to imagine a movie where the Soviet double agent says to the spy in a thick accent, “Get in car. I take you to embassy”. Missing articles have become a sort of linguistic shorthand for “I’m from Eastern Europe”. As the phrase “I can has cheezburger?” is missing an indefinite article, Alex Trebek misinterpreted the LOLspeak for a vague inference to a native Russian speaker struggling with English grammar.

2. The picture used in the original I Can Has Cheezburger lol was from an ad for a Russian brand of cat food. Alex Trebek must know this because he’s such a huge fan of the site and he used the accent to give an oblique shout-out to his fellow hardcore fans who also know the history behind the original image.

The second theory is obviously more likely. Way to go Alex! Almost makes up for losing the ‘stache.