What Everyone Assumed About MythBusters' Adam Savage And Jamie Hyneman

In the classic TV sitcom The Odd Couple, Felix Unger rages in court against the perils of making assumptions. Shmoop quotes him berating a witness who is unsure of what she saw: "You should never assume, because when you assume, you make an ass of 'u' and 'me'!" It's an adequate adage to live by, but not always easy to follow. Case in point: the nerdy pair of bespectacled tinkerers who hosted the wildly popular Discovery Channel show MythBusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman.

That odd couple spent their afternoons shopping for berets in Bay Area surplus stores and bickering like they'd been married for years over the best way to blow things up. So we can all be forgiven if certain assumptions were made about the two of them. And, as Adam told The Sneeze back in 2005, the show's producers also had the same idea. When they saw Adam and Jamie's demo tapes, the folks from Discovery said they had found "just the geeks [they] were looking for," but there was just one catch. Or so they thought. Adam said that "apparently among themselves they wondered if they could do a show with a couple of homosexuals from San Francisco." As it turned out, neither Jamie nor Adam is gay.

It wasn't just the producers who assumed that the MythBusters hosts were gay. In that interview with The Sneeze, Savage said that when the show first aired, he and Jamie would get lots of fan mail from gay admirers, some of it quite spicy.

The gay speculation and fantasies even extended beyond the show's bearded hosts. As Wired reported in 2006, users on the blogging social network LiveJournal had started writing slash fiction — fan fiction that puts characters (usually imagined, not real people) in sexual relationships — about fellow mythbusters Tory Belleci and Grand Imahara. The Slashing the Mythbusters LiveJournal thread appears to have been dead since 2012.

According to Savage, Hyneman's wife, Eileen Walsh, helped Jamie get over his initial discomfort with the assumptions. "Jamie, take the compliment," she reportedly told her husband. "Someone thinks you're really hot! It's okay if it's a man." Jamie no longer had a problem with the misguided attention after that piece of advice.

This will most likely come as no surprise, but Jamie met his wife while sailing the Caribbean Sea as a boat captain in the 1980s. Can't you just see Jamie at the helm of a sailboat, barking orders to fire on enemy ships? Okay, so he wasn't that kind of boat captain. "I was diving and sailing every day," he told Mental Floss in 2013. But he still saw his fair share of action. "I've been through two hurricanes down there, both of them on the boat," he said. And he also made a generator out of old parts he found on a shipwreck when he was stranded. Clearly the guy was destined to host MythBusters.

Destiny also apparently had love in store for Jamie. According to Wikidaddy, the nerdy couple met in 1984 while he was sailing around the Caribbean. They're a terrific match — they both have a deep love for science. Eileen is actually a math teacher and a member of the California Science Teachers Association.

Jamie Hyneman isn't gay. He's just a nerdy guy who likes to wear berets while he blows things up with his nerdy friends. Also, Jamie Hyneman isn't dead. That question seems to get asked a lot on the internet, and we really can't blame fans for making that assumption. After seeing some of the most dangerous myths busted on the show, it's a logical question to ask.