Rick Rosner's IQ is usually given as 192, from Ronald Hoeflin's Mega Test, with similar results on the Titan and Cooijmans tests. These are high-ceiling tests with self-selected norms — a ranking among extreme scorers, not a clinical figure.
Graduated — then kept going back
Born in Albuquerque in 1960 and raised in Boulder, Rosner graduated in 1978. Through his twenties and thirties he re-enrolled in high schools across several states, sometimes under other names, to relive an experience he felt he had missed.
He worked as a bouncer in Albuquerque, a nude model for art classes and a stripper in Colorado and Texas. The mix of extreme scores and unconventional choices is at the centre of every profile written about him.
The Mega Test and the Mega Society
In the late 1980s Rosner scored at or near the top of Hoeflin's Mega Test — 192 is the figure he cites most — and posted comparable results on the Titan Test, the Cooijmans Intelligence Test and others.
Like Christopher Langan, he belongs to the Mega Society, which admits only one-in-a-million scorers; the two are often named as its highest-scoring members, and his results are tabulated alongside Langan's and Katsioulis's in WIN records.
He is more open than most members about his numbers — including the caveats that come with them.
Two very different intelligence tests
Rosner joined Jimmy Kimmel Live! when it launched in 2003 and has spent more than two decades there. He likes to point out that the job and the Mega Test measure different things.
Rosner was eliminated from the show on a question whose wording he disputed, and sued, arguing it had more than one defensible answer. The litigation ran for several years and became a fixture of every profile.
He cites it as the clearest example of a trait that helps in a writers' room and hurts on game shows: fighting to get an answer exactly right, even when little is at stake.
The credits, and everything else
Nearly 30 years of network TV writing, plus a long side career of appearances, arguments and one unfinished cosmology.
Wrote for MTV's game show hosted by Ken Ober — his first network writing job.
Writer on Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla's Comedy Central series.
Writer on the puppet prank-call show from the same team.
Staff writer since the show launched on ABC.
Writing on awards-show broadcasts.
One win, plus an Emmy nomination.
Profiled in an episode of the director's interview series.
Starred in a commercial pulled after Subway sent a cease-and-desist letter.
A long-running interview series with Scott Douglas Jacobsen — well over 1,500 instalments.
His self-described long-term project: a cosmology in which the universe is not changing with time in the usual sense. Unpublished in scientific journals.
“I have an exceedingly high IQ. So what? It's made some things easier and a lot of things much harder.”
“I'm the worst kind of person to play game shows with, because I'll fight about a question for years.”
“The Mega Test doesn't measure late-night writing, and the writers' room doesn't measure the Mega Test.”
Timeline
Reading the 192
Verified through Hoeflin's process, but calibrated on small self-selected samples. Read it as a ranking within the high-ceiling population, not a WAIS-IV equivalent.
Sources
- Hoeflin, R. — Mega Test and Titan Test scoring archives
- Esquire (1999). Rick Rosner profile
- ABC — Jimmy Kimmel Live! writing credits
- Primetime Emmy Awards records
- Mega Society membership records
- Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? episode logs and litigation records