December 8, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck both started in Good Will Hunting.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Time out. So, I want to talk about his celebrity wife. He had a quote about her. It’s one paragraph. So he goes, “We ended up at a bar where my wife was the bartender. I literally saw her across a crowded room and eight years and four kids later, that’s my life. I don’t know how else our paths would have crossed if that didn’t happen. The moral is that when you’re tired, suck it up and go to the bar because you might meet your wife.”
Rosner: I think because his wife is lovely. I wasn’t meaning to insult Matt Damon’s wife, daring to compare my wife to his wife. He just happened to be having to go pee at the same time that my wife did. I just didn’t want him to get hit by the shrapnel of me comparing like my wife to his celebrity wife. I mean, I don’t see how he would have been reasonably insulted, but I didn’t like the situation.
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s not like he’s famous…
Rosner: One time, I got caught saying shit about Robert Redford by Robert Redford. What happened was back in the 80s, I worked in a hotel. I was a bouncer in a bar disco that was in a hotel in Boulder, Colorado.
Redford’s kid, his daughter went to the University of Colorado. It was well known at the university that his daughter lived at Spanish Towers, which was one of the fancier apartments for students in Boulder.
Some shit happened where her roommate or her boyfriend was murdered. This other bouncer and I, it was late at night. The bar, it was hit. The bar had gotten slow and whenever it got slow. We would sometimes go to the kitchen, the hotel kitchen and see what food was available to be pilfered.
Like the bread things, those bread-ready things that go along with beef wellington. We would get those. So anyway, we’re walking through the hotel. We’re discussing that we’ve heard that Redford is staying at the hotel and we’re talking.
We’re like, “Why would he stay at this shitty hotel? This hotel is a shithole where he could stay at his daughter’s place, which is very nice. It’s Spanish Towers.” Just as we were walking down, we walked through the lobby.
Now, we’re walking down a hall to the kitchen and behind us somebody yells at us, “How does it feel? Caught you red handed!” We look back. We walk by a guy, just a regular guy wearing glasses. Now, the guy has opened up the doorway, stuck his head in, and is now making fun of us.
We realize; we just walked past Robert Redford while talking about Robert Redford, which made him very amused. He is like busting our balls about it. Oh, it’s hysterical. So, I have several dumb stories about saying dumb shit around celebrities.
Okay, so, we were talking about Good Will Hunting.
So, I like Good Will Hunting because Matt Damon, his character Will Hunting, is a world class smart guy, a native genius who’s a janitor at Harvard because he’s from South Boston, which is just this fucked up part of Boston.
Somehow, he uses his genius. He’s just so fucking smart that he uses it to get Minnie Driver, whom I love. She’s really cute. She’s got those super wide set of jaw bones. If Batman were a girl, she’d make a great Batman.
It’s one of the things that can make that during her era, could make you a star. This giant jaw line reads really well on camera. I think she’s super cute. Matt Damon got to get with her in the movie just from being smart.
There’s another movie, Real Genius, where geniuses at MIT and Caltech, some of them get to get with really cute girls or ladies just for being smart. I like that. Even though, it doesn’t really line up much with my experience.
I’ve got you with, maybe, one cute lady from being smart. Maybe, but she was also a lunatic, she was a runner. She would go running for about five miles. She’d come back all sweaty where I’d be waiting for her. She liked having sex all sweaty. I was okay with this because it was sex, but it was weird.
She got in a fight with my ex-stepsister, this girl, the sweaty girl. She wasn’t always sweaty. She was like 5’11”. My sisters is like 5’2”, but my sister’s like really good at fighting. So, eventually, there was a fight that ensued. They were roommates, I think. Anyway, the cops came.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with anything except that I don’t think Minnie Driver would get in a fight with my sister and the cops would have to be called. Nor would Minnie Driver want to have sex while covered with cold, cold sweat.
Anyway, my experience being really smart and getting with girls is that it’s just not as if I never got to get with Minnie Driver. So, I don’t find the movies that realistic. But I like them because I’d like to get all sorts of shit because I’m really smart.
But really smart, just doesn’t get you that much; unless, you do a lot of work to go with the really smart. Really smart, the applicability of my really smartness is limited in what I’ve done with it. For 12 years, I wrote jokes for Jimmy Kimmel, where everybody else was also really smart and funny.
My being the very smartest person at Jimmy Kimmel in terms of IQ did not translate into me being the very funniest person among the writers, say there are 12 writers. I’m about in the 35th percentile on a comedy writing standard, which still makes me world class in terms of being funny.
Because you have to be really fucking good to get one of those staff positions. But I know one of the things that probably pissed off my boss is that I described my skill level on a writing staff is equivalent to, maybe, Manu Ginóbili, who was a pretty, I think, durable sixth man in the NBA.
The sixth man is the guy who doesn’t start the game, but comes off the bench and gets you, maybe, 12 points, who isn’t the best, but is a reliable performer. But I don’t know basketball. So, I may have been overrating myself because the man had a long career.
Maybe, he was better than I thought he was. So, if my boss read that he would have been like, “Fuck you.” You’re more like a Kiki Vandeweghe. But who knows? But anyway, I was reliable, but not the very best. Not good for fucking Kobe or Michael Jordan or LeBron. When it comes to jokes.
So, I don’t know. I mean, it’s like in some ways being really smart is like being really pretty, and then going to Hollywood to try to build a career out of being really pretty. You find out that when everybody who’s really pretty comes to one town to make a career out of it.
That you’re fucking really pretty. You better have some other shit going on besides just that. I had just enough comedy shit going on in addition to the really smart and also just working really hard.
I’m not letting myself go home for the night until I turned in ten pages of material, which is an insane amount of fucking writing. You’re a fucking machine cranking out material. So, anyway, the end.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal (ISSN 2369-6885). Jacobsen works for science and human rights, especially women’s and children’s rights. He considers the modern scientific and technological world the foundation for the provision of the basics of human life throughout the world and the advancement of human rights as the universal movement among peoples everywhere.
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 