Main menu

Did Watching Meet the Spartans Make You Dumber?


In case you weren't one of the millions—seriously—of people that went to see it this weekend, Meet the Spartans is another in the long line of horrifyingly stupid parody flicks along the lines of Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, and every other hour-and-a-half-long idiot magnet to hit the theaters over the past few years. Despite our reputation, this isn't the kind of flick that most of the staffers are attracted to, but six of the bravest gave up their lunch breaks to take IQ tests, watch the movie, and find out if this kind of prolonged exposure to some of the worst comedy writing ever could actually lower their ability to function.

Six staffers were presented with an IQ test from the High IQ Society on Wednesday afternoon. On Friday, they attended a 2:10 PM screening of the movie at the AMC Empire 25 theater on 42nd Street in New York City. The subjects then returned to work immediately, and spent more company time taking the IQ test over again.

We picked everyone unimportant enough that they could be out of the office for two hours in the middle of the workday. The sample group includes two females and four males in their 20s, which is the prime demographic for Spartans.

Gerry: 138
Heather: 129
Stan: 129
Melissa: 118
Jimmy: 113
Adam: 106

Melissa: "The only humorous part of Meet the Spartans was realizing that other people in the audience actually thought it was funny. And why did we have to sit in the front row?"
Jimmy: "’Oh my God, they done put like 10,000 cheap-ass pop culture references and Internet phenomena in this movie! Consider my mind officially blown.’ That's what the dude said who sat behind me."
Adam: "If I had paid to see this movie, I would be pretty upset with myself. I can only imagine how our boss feels for treating six of us!"
Heather: "I voluntarily got dumber at work today. So I don't know what that really says about my initial smartness."
Gerry: "I'm Greek, so no one cares what I think. But if they did, I would give it two souvlakis down."
Stan: “Come on, Method Man. You're better than that.”

Gerry: 135 (-3)
Heather: 119 (-10)
Stan: 127 (-2)
Melissa: 103 (-15)
Jimmy: 118 (+5)
Adam: 99 (-7)

We've broken them up into easy to ignore charts, in case your brain has been rendered useless by unrelenting Paris Hilton humor.


As you can plainly see from the graphs, five out of the six people's scores dropped after having seen the movie. The females seemed to be more affected than the males, dropping an average of 11.5 points. Jimmy, the only subject to get smarter during the movie, later claimed that he was too amused by the rest of the people in the audience to pay attention to the movie, which may have given him an advantage over the rest of the subjects, who remained attentive.

The average loss was 2.5 points, which means that the roughly 2 million people that went to see it over the weekend may have dropped a collective 5 million IQ points. Of course, the methods behind our experiment are about as good as the writing for Meet the Spartans, but that's not going to stop us from believing the results 100 percent.

Meet the Spartans is a very stupid movie. Thus, we suggest there be a government warning on each ticket warning patrons about the irreparable harm they're about to do to their own intelligence and sense of humor. It won't stop people from seeing it, but it will make the rest of us feel just a little better about ourselves.

We recommend watching Spaceballs on repeat until normal brain function returns.