diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst
index 17894914b44d1..8a0b53d8ea0d7 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.1.0.rst
@@ -827,6 +827,7 @@ Other
 - Bug in :func:`api.interchange.from_dataframe` when converting an empty DataFrame object (:issue:`53155`)
 - Bug in :func:`assert_almost_equal` now throwing assertion error for two unequal sets (:issue:`51727`)
 - Bug in :func:`assert_frame_equal` checks category dtypes even when asked not to check index type (:issue:`52126`)
+- Bug in :func:`c_is_list_like` now returns ``False`` when a ``__iter__`` function throws an exception(:issue:`54176`)
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.pivot_table` with casting the mean of ints back to an int (:issue:`16676`)
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.reindex` with a ``fill_value`` that should be inferred with a :class:`ExtensionDtype` incorrectly inferring ``object`` dtype (:issue:`52586`)
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.shift` and :meth:`Series.shift` and :meth:`DataFrameGroupBy.shift` when passing both "freq" and "fill_value" silently ignoring "fill_value" instead of raising ``ValueError`` (:issue:`53832`)
diff --git a/pandas/_libs/lib.pyx b/pandas/_libs/lib.pyx
index c3fbd3ee4853e..3037fc7fd8feb 100644
--- a/pandas/_libs/lib.pyx
+++ b/pandas/_libs/lib.pyx
@@ -1206,6 +1206,12 @@ cdef bint c_is_list_like(object obj, bint allow_sets) except -1:
     elif isinstance(obj, list):
         return True
     # then the generic implementation
+    try:
+        iter(obj)
+    except TypeError:
+        pass
+    except Exception:
+        return False
     return (
         # equiv: `isinstance(obj, abc.Iterable)`
         getattr(obj, "__iter__", None) is not None and not isinstance(obj, type)