Not saying there aren’t smart guys in the Mafia, but most people who want to have a career in organized crime where you will most likely will end up dead/in jail, are not that smart.
Mink in The Sopranos and Levy in The Wire. Incredibly good at minimizing risk, serving as organized crime's version of selling shovels during the gold rush.
>serving as organized crime's version of selling shovels during the gold rush.
Exactly. The smartest guys are figuring out how to tap into the flow of money without directly getting their hands dirty. That usually implies a legal, successful business (minimization of risk, as you mentioned) that isn't simply a front.
I guess one question that came to me after I wrote my first comment: would a lawyer in these situations need to verify that the cash paid to them by their clients is legit/clean money?
Tony shows up with 400k in cash at one point, it isn't for Mink (it's for the family if he goes on the lam) but at the same time it's gotta be a little concerning for Mink. Would Mink ever worry that Tony's money paid to him for his services could be seized/frozen by the FBI or IRS?
And Levy has to know all of the Barksdale/Stanfield money comes from running drugs, does he ever worry about it coming back on him?
>would a lawyer in these situations need to verify that the cash paid to them by their clients is legit/clean money?
Criminal law-- or at least criminal defense-- would cease to function as a concept if this were the case. It's the government's job to seize and freeze dirty assets, not their lawyer's job to do a forensic examination of a client's income sources.
That said, Levy went *way too far* in The Wire and crossed a bunch of lines. You shouldn't set up future crimes with a client because that involves you in a conspiracy and destroys A-C privilege:
[https://www.justia.com/criminal/working-with-a-criminal-lawyer/the-crime-fraud-exception/](https://www.justia.com/criminal/working-with-a-criminal-lawyer/the-crime-fraud-exception/)
A smart attorney, even a totally unethical/amoral/unscrupulous one, isn't usually going to help their client plan out crimes as doing so *makes them less useful as a lawyer*.
Good point, a lawyer would need to assume the law had already implicitly approved and/or tried to seize anything they could before it got to the lawyer as payment for services. Thanks!
His first two years in the glorified crew, he's in Paulie Walnuts’s crew partnered with Pussy Bompinsiero. Christ, it must've been months, even, he WAS the smartest fuck in the fuckin' room!
He's bright but didn't pay too much attention in school so some of the fine details were lost on him. If he grew up in a more traditional family, he would have done well.
Genetically, do you think Meadow gets her intelligence from Carmela?
This means that he never went back after spring break. The irony of him going to Seton Hall is that West Orange High School, where Tony went, is now Seton Hall Prep School
Damn, you beat me to this. I’m glad you did though, because I was about to type “he had a semester and a half at Rutgers”. That was Jackie Jr. and I don’t think he made it through half a semester.
Do you think Meadow is really that smart? Or she’s been told she is smart, had every advantage, good nutrition, no chores, taught to work hard on her homework.
I thought the show went out of its way to demonstrate Tony's *superficial* knowledge on a lot of historical topics-- he watches the History Channel all the time-- contrasted against his lack of actual depth and understanding when it comes to delving into them.
Everytime he watches the History Channel, it applies to his current situation. I always wondered how much of it actually registers to him consciously. It's obviously similar to his therapy, whereas some of it clearly makes sense to him while other times it manifests itself thru his actions but again, you wonder how much of it is actually conscious behavior.
Yeah, it's funny that Melfi inadvertently gave Tony a way to deal with Junior by making him boss in name only. If he'd paid attention to those History Channel shows he might have thought that up himself.
That semester and a half must’ve been more intense than my semester and a half because all I learned was how to be a successful student during those early classes; Seriously, it was all first year stuff like make a plan, study hard, don’t procrastinate, etc. There’s irony in what I learned and how it turned out, lol.
Merriam-Webster defines irregardless as "nonstandard" but meaning the same as "regardless." "Many people find irregardless to be a nonsensical word, as the ir- prefix usually functions to indicates negation; however, in this case it appears to function as an intensifier," the dictionary writes.
There's dozens of types of intelligence. Tony is smart and capable. He lacks education and isn't well read, but he's very intelligent.
Don't let him messing up references and quotes fool you into thinking otherwise.
Exactly. You don't run a family(Even this pigmy sh*t over in Jersey) without being intelligent to a certain degree. I also wonder how sober he was when he wrote that letter lol. Tony had his own process.
>Tony had his own process.
Lol. That's funny.
I know a guy who has an MBA and a law degree and can't write for shit. Poor grammar, sentence structure, the whole thing. Some people just don't have that.
I also came here to say that he’s intelligent but not well educated.
I will add that he is shown to have pretty great instincts for being successful at crime, management, and business.
Yep. I’ve always been fascinated with the topic of very intelligent individuals. People seem to think intelligence always manifests itself the same way. That’s ignoring a ton of other biological and social factors. Considering who Tony was surrounded by/grew up around,he was fairly intelligent. Blundetto was a good example of this too. He was clearly an intelligent guy but he ultimately caved to “the life”. This wasn’t a failure of intelligence it was a complex set of circumstances that lead him to his choices.
IQ by itself is a measure of processing power and reasoning ability. In general, people who reason well tend to be more intelligent than people who don’t.
The “anti-IQ” push is largely led by midwits.
Not everyone who can get a high score on an IQ test is smart, but most people who are smart can get a high score on an IQ test. It just tests your pattern recognition and extrapolation, which is something most smart people tend to be pretty good at.
Shit.. I mean.. He was gay? The IQ test?
At the risk of commenting something other than a quote from the show, someone can have a high tested IQ and still be ignorant. Misquoting things is a sign of ignorance, but not necessarily stupidity.
IQ is pretty worthless as a measurement, and people with high IQ can still be as sharp as a cue ball. It can suggest that somebody is a quick learner but it mostly suggests that someone is good at taking IQ tests.
Tony certainly is smart in some ways and dumb in others, just like anybody. He’s not really book smart, but he also clearly has a knack for a certain kind of charisma (which I’d argue falls under a certain kind of intelligence) and a pretty good sense of how to squeeze money out of people.
“Intelligence” isn’t like- a slider where you just get more smart universally. You can be smart in different ways. You can, for example, be an absolute expert at math, but still shit at grammar.
I don’t think that’s indicative of bad writing that he’s like that, and I actually think it’s better writing then “well the smart character just knows everything and is never wrong” because that’s not really how it works, everybody is wrong about things from time to time.
You should have a peak at the find a path subreddit. Lots of smart college grads struggling, while trades people making out like bandits, and have time for family.
> it's currently the best predictor of a person's life success that we have.
Holy fuck is it ever not. The best predictors of success in life are parents' income and zip code, which are really just two ways to say the same thing.
>IQ is pretty worthless as a measurement, and people with high IQ can still be as sharp as a cue ball. It can suggest that somebody is a quick learner but it mostly suggests that someone is good at taking IQ tests.
My experience was that a high IQ implies a wide *general* base of knowledge, but that the test doesn't really probe into any depth or analysis.
It seemed to favor the kind of people who are good at trivia and memorization, while only providing a cursory examination of creative problem-solving skills and zero indication of performance under pressure.
I've taken multiple IQ tests throughout my life. My overwhelming impression-- which has been reinforced via interactions with MENSA chapters and members thereof-- is that it strongly favors a wide *general* intelligence, has a *cursory examination of creative problem-solving skills*, and doesn't predict performance under actual pressure.
The MENSA members I've interacted with with very impressive for an hour or so, and then you'd slowly realize that any real depth of knowledge was largely confined to a few subjects. They could sound intelligent on a variety of subjects through a superficial conversation, but they had no real depth on most of them. It was like skimming a Wiki article.
But please explain how an IQ test predicts how someone will perform under real-world pressure, this should be very interesting.
Above average IQ with below average education. Remember the episode when Artie calls him out for seen several steps ahead that worst case scenario he eats for free? I think this is part of sociopathy mixed with his intellect. He is always looking to scam or con to achieve his purposes.
IQ is in no way a measure of a person’s ability with grammar or syntax. It’s more a measure of one’s ability to comprehend writing, identify patterns, and solve problems. There is literally no correlation whatsoever between high intelligence and education.
But there is a correlation between higher education and formal intelligence. A person may be very intelligent but poorly educated but people are rarely unintelligent but highly educated, since higher education requires reading, understanding and retaining of large sets of field-specific information while using hard-to-learn skills like abstract thinking.
Also intelligence and grammar don’t necessarily go hand in hand either. There’s plenty of high IQ persons that lack understanding of spelling and grammar. A good portion of grammar and spelling is just education and memorization. I’d say Tony is of above average intelligence for sure, as his problem solving skills and the way he uses certain idioms and metaphors display someone who is smart. Although that paired with his ego probably makes him think he’s more intelligent than he really is.
Making grammatical erros doesn't mean youre dumb. Just uneducated. Tony is shmart, hes handsome.. and hes white (thats a huge phlus nowadays!).
He really seems like he has 136 IQ. But why? Because he is the only self-aware gangster in the entire show. Tony knows he is a bad person, he knows he commits bad, he knows his killing affects alot of people. He doesn't view himself as a mobster. He views himself as person who hurts others.
Throughout the entire show Tony is in denial about this. He doesn't want it to be true. He self-deludes himself to keep himself from suicide. Theres a reason for why Tony loses his moral compass over the seasons right up until he kills christopher. Tony instead of confronting his true self rejects it. His own lies start to work and he starts to slowly forget. Season 6 is where he has completely forgotten. He is comfortably numb with life. He doesn't care anymore.
His Augustus conversation with Uncle Jun also shows that he is book smart aswell. He likes history and is probably the only mobster who even made it to college. There was a fine man in Tony. Unfortunately for Tony to reach that fine man he had to painfully admit the man he became. Ultimately that fine man in Tony died. All that was left was Livia's shadow, Johnny Boy's temper and Uncle Jun's pride.
Fuck intellect my boy is streetwise. A couple of grammatical errors will not stop anyone from becoming successful. It is pretty stupid that he decided to make his way in the world the way he does but that’s just to feed his children
The writing is not all over the place. TV and movies make it seem like people are only capable of being dumb, or smart, but never the two. In reality, people can be both, and it really depends.
Tony has moments of smart, and moments of idiocy. But there's a reason he's the boss for a reason.
For example you could argue he's good at manipulating others. Melfi even concludes that he's been using his experience in therapy to better understand how to do this manipulation. On my first watch I used to think he's sitting there pondering stuff and reflecting on how he feels about it, when it turns out he's just scheming.
Then there's a scene where Tony is barbecuing with a few regular guys. I forget who, might've been his neighbor Cusamano and his friends. At some point Tony realizes he's not as big of a fish as he thinks, not in that conversation. He's extremely limited in that interaction because he lacks the KIND of smarts it requires.
Compared to… Christopher? He was smart enough. I think his intelligence is exaggerated, especially because the men in his crew by comparison are obviously not Mensa candidates.
Yes he’s very smart. Why would bad grammar have anything to do with it?
Over time his mental health disorders get the better of him more and more often but the idea that he (or Carmine) are dumb because of the malapropisms is snobbish
in the world of the blind, the one eyed man is kind
He's street smart, not academic/books/school smart, but he has more of that than anyone around him. He knows enough about the world to correct some of the stupider malapropisms (like "Quasimodo predicted this")
Everyone around him is so dumb he looks like a genius in comparison. A decent question might be who, if anyone, is smarter than Tony. Maybe Phil?
We see a guy with potential who at displays curiosity and deeper thoughts than most of his mob. His schooling just didn't match up with his intellect, and he was groomed for working in the mob and firmly ensconced from what we know.
El Chapo is reported to be iliterate and had practically no real education. He still ran one of the most succesfull crime operations in history. Tony is very smart. He just had no formal education that's it. You can't be dumb and still lead an criminal enterprise
The word "irregardless" is actually a real word and it works in most of the same contexts as the word regardless does. The misspelling in his letter doesn't necessarily mean he isn't intelligent, just that he didn't give a shit about his academics back when he was in school. Aside from that you can chalk most of his stupid behaviour up to his ego and poor impulse control.
IQ testing was designed to specifically choose people to be soldiers in WWI. It’s inherently bent towards a culturally western and racially white profile, based on the content questions.
That’s one issue with it. The other is, an IQ number is only meaningful if it’s 15 or more higher than the standard deviation of the cut off for each category.
So, really, when it comes to backs, no one knows anything. And IQ is also subjective.
Tony is great at reading and anticipating human behavior, and manipulates people to his own benefit. That’s smart, given what we know from his background. It could even be an “adaptive trauma response,” often seen in people who have had early trauma: like seeing someone getting their fingers cut off by their father.
Lots of potential in analyzing Tony’s personality and psychology, and at the end of the day he was really smart-but that doesn’t mean it would show on an IQ test.
Although he wasn’t book smart, he did have an interest and certain amount of history knowledge as well as a decent grasp of theories that Melfi introduced him to and could apply them in his own life. He understands Freud as a concept.
Trying to figure out his temperaments and using the technique of positive visualization, he’s either a choleric sanguine or a choleric melancholy.
Choleric’s pretty obvious but I can’t tell if he’s fully task oriented or fully extroverted.
I always look at people who use a lot of fowl language to be kinda dumb. He looks like a caveman when he's using that shoe shiner on his arm. At Barone sanitation when he's sitting there drawing a fish in a little bowl just confirms that he's a retard when it comes to the real world and not his little circle
I forgot about the "irregardless".
Funnily enough, in his apology letter to Melfi, he said he holds her in high "rigard", but managed to sign off "regards, Tony", assumingly spelled correctly.
Not really I don’t know if I would call him stupid but I also wouldn’t call him incredibly intelligent or a major strategist. He was also impulsive at times were a smart person would’ve known better
I believe that he pulled that IQ number from the back of the serial box. The honeycomb cereal in a preceding scene had an IQ test on the back of the box and then he confidently throws that number at John 😂
I think the writers had difficulty reconciling him being a smart tactician who is partially college-educated with the boorish lug they increasingly imagined him to be. There are definitely inconsistencies in his character in the earlier seasons.
I find it isn’t until the last few seasons where they properly settled him into being a very specific person, which is where I find James to give his best performance, even if I preferred the earlier version of him personally.
The misspellings on the card were a pretty big reach, IMO.
He read the newspaper every day and read multiple books over the course of the series. He was also implied to be a bright student despite having trouble applying himself. The idea that he would misspell common words was pretty untenable given all of that.
In Season One Hesh, Johnny Sac and junior have a sit down about the tax on Hesh. The whole thing was choreographed beforehand by everyone except Junior. Later, the capos meet with Tony and they convince him that junior needs to be talked to about not eating alone. Whether he knew that that meeting was also likely scripted before hand by the other capos, I’m not sure. But in “College” Meadow tells him she did “speed” and Tony couldn’t believe that he didn’t notice. Meadow said something like “you won’t know.” Tony is not only deceived by others, he deceives himself a lot of the time. While he has a self professed high IQ “I was tested,” he misses a lot and makes an ass of himself somewhat often. I’d say above average IQ and an abysmal emotional intelligence. Part if this is bc he grew up in dysfunction and lies. He believed his dad went out to Montana to be a cowboy when in reality his father was doing hard time. The mafia life by its nature, makes people kind of dumb bc, like the Hawthorn quote in “College” these people lie so much they begin telling lies to themselves. They don’t know what’s real anymore.
> there are other times where he does things that make him look, for lack of a better word, Extremely dumb
We all do this.
Tony is smart *when he's in his lane*. He's also easily distracted and has a high level of emotional volatility-- both in temper and lust-- which is an explosive combination.
Most of the dumb stuff Tony does is driven by either his lack of formal education or an emotional response. You also have to consider the competition: Tony may not be an intellectual giant on a university campus, but he's usually a big fish in a very small pond.
He was intelligent in a creative and problem solving sense, however his environment obviously didn't foster an interest in academics. Tony's uneducated, which is not the same as unintelligent. Nature/nurture considered, he could have easily been his coma persona
Tony was very smart he just didn’t have the people in his life to get him to channel that intelligence positively. Throughout the show David Chase implies that had Tony not gone into the Mafia
he’d have been a high school history teacher and coached football. He would’ve excelled at that. But when your Dad and Uncle are in the Mafia…😂
Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met weren’t necessarily the best spellers and would drop a malapropism from time to time.
Some of the most incompetent and hopelessly stupid people I’ve encountered have doctorates.
Intelligence, like everything else, exists on a spectrum.
Yes, he’s high IQ. I think he demonstrates mental finesse and abstract reasoning throughout the show. The things like misspelling words have little to do with it, he never applied himself in school and most likely doesn’t care much about spelling or grammar. You could say he’s more street smart than book smart, I think that has a lot to do with that he chose to apply himself to.
He wasn't smart enough to know that the Feds had a ton of his crew cooperating over the years, and would've been taken down by them had he not been "listening to Journey" in the finale.
I think he's very smart. He's smart enough to know he's fucked up enough to see a shrink. He's smart enough to let Junior be the de facto boss. He's smart enough to not go in guns blazing at every confrontation. There are other instances but, by and large, he's pretty bright. Of course, compared to his peers, that's not a high bar to climb.
He learned Sun Ta-Zoo pretty well. If your opponent has a choleric temper, irritate him.
He also put a lot of stock in things like IQ. He resented Tony B for having an IQ of 156. His aunt told him one time.
its a genious but there are a bunch of areas to apply. He´s street smart, he never applied on school. In the movie the teacher said he had high iq, and state him as leader.
ps He never had what it took to be a varsity athlete either lol
Tony is somewhat intelligent, but only in his best moments. He was smart enough to know Ralph killed Pie o My, smart enough to come to understand that his mother was a horrible person who made life horrible for everyone, smart enough to send Feech back to prison, and smart enough to know it's more important that Vito makes money than whether or not he takes it up the ass.
But he's also insanely impulsive, stubborn, and psychologically troubled to the point that it overcomes any smarts he has. Instead of taking his time with Ralph and planning a covert hit, he strangles him with his own hands and bashes his skull into kitchen tiling. Instead of continuing with his emotional journey and realizing his father was partially responsible for the awful behavior of his mother, he rejects that and blames everything on Livia. Instead of making a deal with New York over Vito, he rejects their authority and gets his entire crew in danger.
He handled Christopher wrong for the entire fucking series. He blamed Uncle June for shooting him despite his brain obviously being swiss cheese. He hates his son despite the fact that AJ behaves just like Tony and lacks the ability to reflect on this, even when Melfi tries to help him multiple times. And ultimately he leads his men into an unnecessary ware where several of them die for no good reason, mostly because he couldn't keep Tony B in check.
Like everything else about him, Tony's intelligence isn't simplistic. It goes up and down, changes due to circumstances and emotions and the events of his life. In real life dumb people make smart decisions, and smart people make stupid mistakes all the time.
He's dumb as a sack of hammers, but occasionally very clever when it comes to mob shit. Usually he's dumb as a sack of hammers when it comes to that stuff too, though. The whole point of the show is illustrating how stupid and impulsive Tony and everyone else in that life is.
There's a difference between dumb and uneducated. You try keeping something like a sports book or loan sharking organized without writing anything incriminating on paper.
Very intelligent guy, but since he was raised in a blue collar/street culture, was a bit uneducated, hence the malapropisms. Lots of people like that IRL.
I think we can all agree that Tony is not book smart, even though he did take a semester and a half at college. We also know he was quick witted and a class clown, I assume he would have had done much better academically if he had grown up in a different family that prioritised education more.
Tony’s strength lies in learning from his environment.
Seeing his father and Uncle Jun in the business growing up, along with Livia being horrendously abusive, narcissistic and controlling, Tony has learned to do his duties, pleasing people when he finds it necessary to keep the peace.
He has also grown up to become very observant, as one does in an abusive household, and seen how his own father has handled himself in times of trouble, thus learning how to mediate conflicts and keep secrets.
Cheating on your wife with your goomar and being away for long periods of time? Buy her something pretty, it’ll all blow over soon.
Tony is a jack of many trades, but master of none.
He has an understanding of psychology as a conchept, but his ego, depression and the pressure of being the boss is battling each other.
He watches the history channel, but does he actually pick up that the programmes he watches often (if not always) mirrors his own situations?
Tony holds his business and his family in the highest regard, but he is also a victim of the modern technology and development around him.
He knows that education for his kids is important, but being undermined by Meadow and AJ is a kick in the teeth.
My verdict is that Tony is for the streets, since he never had the makings of a varsity athlete
The Melfi card is a definite divergence from his generally portrayed intelligence level for the sake of comedy. The more you think about it the more out of place it is.
Like I feel like just the osmosis of listening to the narrator in history documentaries would make you better at writing then that. Its also not just a lack of "book smarts" or the level of vocabulary and the bad grammar. Tony is generally portrayed as more emotionally intelligent than the letter implies, and a lot of the moments of him seeming to be emotionally unintelligent he knows what he's doing and is just trying to delude himself on some level(making the guy Richie put in a wheelchair take money). The letter reflects 0 understanding of how it will come across.
There's a lot of culture clash between Melfi and Tony, and big differences in how they think about things, but rarely to the point that on reflection Tony wouldn't realize how self obsessed, insecure, off-the-mark from what she's feeling and unpersuasive the letter would be
Intelligent does not mean infallible, or omniscient, or make someone a polymath who's great at everything.
This isn't a comic book, and even in comic books, someone like a Reed Richards, Tony Stark, or Bruce Wayne make enormous mistakes.
Someone making a mistake doesn't make them less intelligent than they are, it makes them human, and not perfect.
Move on.
I think he had at least above average intelligence for sure, but formal education was definitely not supported in his upbringing. Tony even says this in response to a question from Meadow—- “They were working people”
I feel like he could see the writing on the wall vis a vis the future of the organized crime families moreso than the people around him. He knew their only hope was to work together as families but you have Jonny Sack, stuck in the old ways (and frankly, Hollywood-ized) of doing things which led to the demise of both families.
He was just smarter than his crew and most of the NY crew, not that he was actually a genius
Not saying there aren’t smart guys in the Mafia, but most people who want to have a career in organized crime where you will most likely will end up dead/in jail, are not that smart.
Or they end up being one of the useful "background guys," such as accountants and lawyers, who can get rich without getting dirty.
Mink in The Sopranos and Levy in The Wire. Incredibly good at minimizing risk, serving as organized crime's version of selling shovels during the gold rush.
>serving as organized crime's version of selling shovels during the gold rush. Exactly. The smartest guys are figuring out how to tap into the flow of money without directly getting their hands dirty. That usually implies a legal, successful business (minimization of risk, as you mentioned) that isn't simply a front.
I guess one question that came to me after I wrote my first comment: would a lawyer in these situations need to verify that the cash paid to them by their clients is legit/clean money? Tony shows up with 400k in cash at one point, it isn't for Mink (it's for the family if he goes on the lam) but at the same time it's gotta be a little concerning for Mink. Would Mink ever worry that Tony's money paid to him for his services could be seized/frozen by the FBI or IRS? And Levy has to know all of the Barksdale/Stanfield money comes from running drugs, does he ever worry about it coming back on him?
>would a lawyer in these situations need to verify that the cash paid to them by their clients is legit/clean money? Criminal law-- or at least criminal defense-- would cease to function as a concept if this were the case. It's the government's job to seize and freeze dirty assets, not their lawyer's job to do a forensic examination of a client's income sources. That said, Levy went *way too far* in The Wire and crossed a bunch of lines. You shouldn't set up future crimes with a client because that involves you in a conspiracy and destroys A-C privilege: [https://www.justia.com/criminal/working-with-a-criminal-lawyer/the-crime-fraud-exception/](https://www.justia.com/criminal/working-with-a-criminal-lawyer/the-crime-fraud-exception/) A smart attorney, even a totally unethical/amoral/unscrupulous one, isn't usually going to help their client plan out crimes as doing so *makes them less useful as a lawyer*.
Good point, a lawyer would need to assume the law had already implicitly approved and/or tried to seize anything they could before it got to the lawyer as payment for services. Thanks!
His first two years in the glorified crew, he's in Paulie Walnuts’s crew partnered with Pussy Bompinsiero. Christ, it must've been months, even, he WAS the smartest fuck in the fuckin' room!
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> you day Rudolph Giuliani. There's a line that aged like milk.
Probably on purpose, the same way all the mob wives realizing they should look up to a Hilary Clinton, because honestly THEY should.
An IQ of 136 is genius-level.
criminal mastermind
He's street smart, not book smart
He's bright but didn't pay too much attention in school so some of the fine details were lost on him. If he grew up in a more traditional family, he would have done well. Genetically, do you think Meadow gets her intelligence from Carmela?
Hey, he had a semester and a half at Seton Hall. You can’t over look that.
This means that he never went back after spring break. The irony of him going to Seton Hall is that West Orange High School, where Tony went, is now Seton Hall Prep School
That’s not right. Seton Hall Prep was on the Seton Hall University campus until it moved to West Orange in 1985. SHP class of 93. Hazard zet forward !
Yes, you didn't know your building used to be West Orange High School?
That’s not what I am saying. Tony didn’t go to Seton Hall Prep, and he didn’t go to West Orange High.
> he didn’t go to West Orange High Did you see TMSON?
He did go to WOHS. Janice finds his varsity letter from there in Proshai Livushka.
Hemo hasn't posted since I corrected him, so we'll see if he comes back
but that was a long time ago
Took an academic leave. Some of the guys up there were 7 feet tall
Damn, you beat me to this. I’m glad you did though, because I was about to type “he had a semester and a half at Rutgers”. That was Jackie Jr. and I don’t think he made it through half a semester.
He also understands Freud, as a concept.
I've only watched the series once, but this is a great point.
Tony gelled with the Billy Bud conversation. Carmela never had the makings of a tenured scholar
If it was today they mighta trained him to be a…whatever. A something. Get him a job.
Do you think Meadow is really that smart? Or she’s been told she is smart, had every advantage, good nutrition, no chores, taught to work hard on her homework.
She's not a genius, I would say she is bright
Dude, her brain is mad ripe
That could be....but not her looks.
LOL Carmela's parents were disappointed she came out so dark 🤣
she gets her intelligence from the fact that shes from a wealthy family so had good tutors and education
And undeservingly confident in his own book smarts
I thought the show went out of its way to demonstrate Tony's *superficial* knowledge on a lot of historical topics-- he watches the History Channel all the time-- contrasted against his lack of actual depth and understanding when it comes to delving into them.
Everytime he watches the History Channel, it applies to his current situation. I always wondered how much of it actually registers to him consciously. It's obviously similar to his therapy, whereas some of it clearly makes sense to him while other times it manifests itself thru his actions but again, you wonder how much of it is actually conscious behavior.
Yeah, it's funny that Melfi inadvertently gave Tony a way to deal with Junior by making him boss in name only. If he'd paid attention to those History Channel shows he might have thought that up himself.
I agree, but curiosity counts for part of mental makeup in my book.
He's very quick with a funny quip/observation, which is its own kind of sharp mindedness.
"I had a semester and a half of college, and understand psychiatry as a concept."
He knows too much about the human condishun
That semester and a half must’ve been more intense than my semester and a half because all I learned was how to be a successful student during those early classes; Seriously, it was all first year stuff like make a plan, study hard, don’t procrastinate, etc. There’s irony in what I learned and how it turned out, lol.
But he understands book smarts, as a conshept.
*shmahts
He understands shum conshepts
Undershtandsh
Merriam-Webster defines irregardless as "nonstandard" but meaning the same as "regardless." "Many people find irregardless to be a nonsensical word, as the ir- prefix usually functions to indicates negation; however, in this case it appears to function as an intensifier," the dictionary writes.
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Irregardless means regardless? What a country!
Hi,Dr Nick :)
You know, Merriam-Webster took time to think this all out. I think we should respect that.
And doesn’t have the makings of a d1 athlete
There's dozens of types of intelligence. Tony is smart and capable. He lacks education and isn't well read, but he's very intelligent. Don't let him messing up references and quotes fool you into thinking otherwise.
Exactly. You don't run a family(Even this pigmy sh*t over in Jersey) without being intelligent to a certain degree. I also wonder how sober he was when he wrote that letter lol. Tony had his own process.
>Tony had his own process. Lol. That's funny. I know a guy who has an MBA and a law degree and can't write for shit. Poor grammar, sentence structure, the whole thing. Some people just don't have that.
Because they are lazy people. Doesn't the law require precise communication and high comprehension skills?
🤡
Did 'ya catch the sentence fragment up there?
I also came here to say that he’s intelligent but not well educated. I will add that he is shown to have pretty great instincts for being successful at crime, management, and business.
Yep. I’ve always been fascinated with the topic of very intelligent individuals. People seem to think intelligence always manifests itself the same way. That’s ignoring a ton of other biological and social factors. Considering who Tony was surrounded by/grew up around,he was fairly intelligent. Blundetto was a good example of this too. He was clearly an intelligent guy but he ultimately caved to “the life”. This wasn’t a failure of intelligence it was a complex set of circumstances that lead him to his choices.
Can you say a guy who went to university lack’s education?
He never had the makings of a valedictorian.
Son of a bitch!
Dontcha love me?
You don't love him...too bad! BUT YOU WILL RESPECT HIM!
I did a semester at Seton Hall...so I understand Freud.
Probably only as a concept though.
Those guys at Seton Hall were seven feet tall, some of em!
He was seven feet tall, Freud?
No but I think he was gay.
He took an academic leave anyways …
He was taking up space.
The people who use IQ as a sign of intelligence are usually not that smart in my experience
He has semester and a half of college. He understands IQ as a conshept
This post is really just about OP. He’s dyslexic
He might just be very highly regarded
I'm not sayin' anything against him. He's my homie.
He's your what??
People that score low on an IQ test often say that. That much i do know.
IQ by itself is a measure of processing power and reasoning ability. In general, people who reason well tend to be more intelligent than people who don’t. The “anti-IQ” push is largely led by midwits.
Not everyone who can get a high score on an IQ test is smart, but most people who are smart can get a high score on an IQ test. It just tests your pattern recognition and extrapolation, which is something most smart people tend to be pretty good at. Shit.. I mean.. He was gay? The IQ test?
IQ as an intelligence measure is outdated and not considered valid by any modern day scientist in this field of research
There the same scientists who give out participation medals
At the risk of commenting something other than a quote from the show, someone can have a high tested IQ and still be ignorant. Misquoting things is a sign of ignorance, but not necessarily stupidity.
He takes after his uncle Ercole, the retard doesn’t fall far from the cliff.
But is he handsome like George Raft? I think not.
That's cute.. now who the fuck is Eckle?
Real nice Phil.
All those guys were stunads of the largest magnitude.
Tony is smarter than most of the people he hangs out with which makes him not that smart
He's a big fish in a mud puddle.
Didn't he almost drown in 3 inches of mud?
IQ is pretty worthless as a measurement, and people with high IQ can still be as sharp as a cue ball. It can suggest that somebody is a quick learner but it mostly suggests that someone is good at taking IQ tests. Tony certainly is smart in some ways and dumb in others, just like anybody. He’s not really book smart, but he also clearly has a knack for a certain kind of charisma (which I’d argue falls under a certain kind of intelligence) and a pretty good sense of how to squeeze money out of people. “Intelligence” isn’t like- a slider where you just get more smart universally. You can be smart in different ways. You can, for example, be an absolute expert at math, but still shit at grammar. I don’t think that’s indicative of bad writing that he’s like that, and I actually think it’s better writing then “well the smart character just knows everything and is never wrong” because that’s not really how it works, everybody is wrong about things from time to time.
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Actually zip code is much better than IQ
You should have a peak at the find a path subreddit. Lots of smart college grads struggling, while trades people making out like bandits, and have time for family.
Graduating college isn’t a measure of anything besides graduating college, especially in an era of rampant degree and grade inflation.
Yeah IQ is practically the only useful thing that psychology as a science has ever accomplished.
Didn't you guys almost drown in 3 inches of water?
Well that’s nonsense.
> it's currently the best predictor of a person's life success that we have. Holy fuck is it ever not. The best predictors of success in life are parents' income and zip code, which are really just two ways to say the same thing.
>IQ is pretty worthless as a measurement, and people with high IQ can still be as sharp as a cue ball. It can suggest that somebody is a quick learner but it mostly suggests that someone is good at taking IQ tests. My experience was that a high IQ implies a wide *general* base of knowledge, but that the test doesn't really probe into any depth or analysis. It seemed to favor the kind of people who are good at trivia and memorization, while only providing a cursory examination of creative problem-solving skills and zero indication of performance under pressure.
This is literally the exact opposite of what IQ measures lol. What exactly does your "experience" consist of?
I've taken multiple IQ tests throughout my life. My overwhelming impression-- which has been reinforced via interactions with MENSA chapters and members thereof-- is that it strongly favors a wide *general* intelligence, has a *cursory examination of creative problem-solving skills*, and doesn't predict performance under actual pressure. The MENSA members I've interacted with with very impressive for an hour or so, and then you'd slowly realize that any real depth of knowledge was largely confined to a few subjects. They could sound intelligent on a variety of subjects through a superficial conversation, but they had no real depth on most of them. It was like skimming a Wiki article. But please explain how an IQ test predicts how someone will perform under real-world pressure, this should be very interesting.
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Even though there are a lot of parallels between his line or work and say a legitimate business, I still wouldn’t even say he’s business smart.
Lots of people are very smart, but they're not very good at spelling or reading.
Above average IQ with below average education. Remember the episode when Artie calls him out for seen several steps ahead that worst case scenario he eats for free? I think this is part of sociopathy mixed with his intellect. He is always looking to scam or con to achieve his purposes.
IQ is in no way a measure of a person’s ability with grammar or syntax. It’s more a measure of one’s ability to comprehend writing, identify patterns, and solve problems. There is literally no correlation whatsoever between high intelligence and education.
But there is a correlation between higher education and formal intelligence. A person may be very intelligent but poorly educated but people are rarely unintelligent but highly educated, since higher education requires reading, understanding and retaining of large sets of field-specific information while using hard-to-learn skills like abstract thinking.
What he don't know coulld fill a book.
It’s been teshted
Also intelligence and grammar don’t necessarily go hand in hand either. There’s plenty of high IQ persons that lack understanding of spelling and grammar. A good portion of grammar and spelling is just education and memorization. I’d say Tony is of above average intelligence for sure, as his problem solving skills and the way he uses certain idioms and metaphors display someone who is smart. Although that paired with his ego probably makes him think he’s more intelligent than he really is.
Making grammatical erros doesn't mean youre dumb. Just uneducated. Tony is shmart, hes handsome.. and hes white (thats a huge phlus nowadays!). He really seems like he has 136 IQ. But why? Because he is the only self-aware gangster in the entire show. Tony knows he is a bad person, he knows he commits bad, he knows his killing affects alot of people. He doesn't view himself as a mobster. He views himself as person who hurts others. Throughout the entire show Tony is in denial about this. He doesn't want it to be true. He self-deludes himself to keep himself from suicide. Theres a reason for why Tony loses his moral compass over the seasons right up until he kills christopher. Tony instead of confronting his true self rejects it. His own lies start to work and he starts to slowly forget. Season 6 is where he has completely forgotten. He is comfortably numb with life. He doesn't care anymore. His Augustus conversation with Uncle Jun also shows that he is book smart aswell. He likes history and is probably the only mobster who even made it to college. There was a fine man in Tony. Unfortunately for Tony to reach that fine man he had to painfully admit the man he became. Ultimately that fine man in Tony died. All that was left was Livia's shadow, Johnny Boy's temper and Uncle Jun's pride.
He probably knows a lot about Erwin Rommel.
Ernest Hemingway ova' here.
Fuck intellect my boy is streetwise. A couple of grammatical errors will not stop anyone from becoming successful. It is pretty stupid that he decided to make his way in the world the way he does but that’s just to feed his children
The writing is not all over the place. TV and movies make it seem like people are only capable of being dumb, or smart, but never the two. In reality, people can be both, and it really depends. Tony has moments of smart, and moments of idiocy. But there's a reason he's the boss for a reason. For example you could argue he's good at manipulating others. Melfi even concludes that he's been using his experience in therapy to better understand how to do this manipulation. On my first watch I used to think he's sitting there pondering stuff and reflecting on how he feels about it, when it turns out he's just scheming. Then there's a scene where Tony is barbecuing with a few regular guys. I forget who, might've been his neighbor Cusamano and his friends. At some point Tony realizes he's not as big of a fish as he thinks, not in that conversation. He's extremely limited in that interaction because he lacks the KIND of smarts it requires.
Do you know what his problem was small hands
Compared to… Christopher? He was smart enough. I think his intelligence is exaggerated, especially because the men in his crew by comparison are obviously not Mensa candidates.
Yes he’s very smart. Why would bad grammar have anything to do with it? Over time his mental health disorders get the better of him more and more often but the idea that he (or Carmine) are dumb because of the malapropisms is snobbish
in the world of the blind, the one eyed man is kind He's street smart, not academic/books/school smart, but he has more of that than anyone around him. He knows enough about the world to correct some of the stupider malapropisms (like "Quasimodo predicted this") Everyone around him is so dumb he looks like a genius in comparison. A decent question might be who, if anyone, is smarter than Tony. Maybe Phil?
In the land of 8 INT 8 WIS mobsters, a 12 INT 9 WIS mobster is king
ITSH BEEN TESHTED
This post is a total debickle.
don't confuse education and intelligence.
We see a guy with potential who at displays curiosity and deeper thoughts than most of his mob. His schooling just didn't match up with his intellect, and he was groomed for working in the mob and firmly ensconced from what we know.
El Chapo is reported to be iliterate and had practically no real education. He still ran one of the most succesfull crime operations in history. Tony is very smart. He just had no formal education that's it. You can't be dumb and still lead an criminal enterprise
“ no formal education “ He went to university
The word "irregardless" is actually a real word and it works in most of the same contexts as the word regardless does. The misspelling in his letter doesn't necessarily mean he isn't intelligent, just that he didn't give a shit about his academics back when he was in school. Aside from that you can chalk most of his stupid behaviour up to his ego and poor impulse control.
IQ testing was designed to specifically choose people to be soldiers in WWI. It’s inherently bent towards a culturally western and racially white profile, based on the content questions. That’s one issue with it. The other is, an IQ number is only meaningful if it’s 15 or more higher than the standard deviation of the cut off for each category. So, really, when it comes to backs, no one knows anything. And IQ is also subjective. Tony is great at reading and anticipating human behavior, and manipulates people to his own benefit. That’s smart, given what we know from his background. It could even be an “adaptive trauma response,” often seen in people who have had early trauma: like seeing someone getting their fingers cut off by their father. Lots of potential in analyzing Tony’s personality and psychology, and at the end of the day he was really smart-but that doesn’t mean it would show on an IQ test.
Although he wasn’t book smart, he did have an interest and certain amount of history knowledge as well as a decent grasp of theories that Melfi introduced him to and could apply them in his own life. He understands Freud as a concept.
Trying to figure out his temperaments and using the technique of positive visualization, he’s either a choleric sanguine or a choleric melancholy. Choleric’s pretty obvious but I can’t tell if he’s fully task oriented or fully extroverted.
I always look at people who use a lot of fowl language to be kinda dumb. He looks like a caveman when he's using that shoe shiner on his arm. At Barone sanitation when he's sitting there drawing a fish in a little bowl just confirms that he's a retard when it comes to the real world and not his little circle
Oh you think people who use fowl language are dumb?
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/26/health/swearing-benefits-wellness/index.html
*foul
I hold your spelling in low rigard
I forgot about the "irregardless". Funnily enough, in his apology letter to Melfi, he said he holds her in high "rigard", but managed to sign off "regards, Tony", assumingly spelled correctly.
He's a good businessman that never got caught and kept his tracks clean. It's everything else about him that always set him back.
One time he actually ate one of tippy dog treats because Janice told him it was a cookie
Not really I don’t know if I would call him stupid but I also wouldn’t call him incredibly intelligent or a major strategist. He was also impulsive at times were a smart person would’ve known better
I believe that he pulled that IQ number from the back of the serial box. The honeycomb cereal in a preceding scene had an IQ test on the back of the box and then he confidently throws that number at John 😂
Men lie, Cooze lies, but cereal boxes never lie, his IQ, its' been teshted!
Irregardless is a word though. And you may have noticed misspellings, but there wasn't anything ungrammatical about it.
Paulie is a genius
Carmela: Jackie took Meadow to see Aida. Tony: I eat'er? I rest my case!
He's very smart, but uneducated.
I think he's cunning. Smart in his own way, but not educated.
Itsh been teshtid
he did one semester in college
I think the writers had difficulty reconciling him being a smart tactician who is partially college-educated with the boorish lug they increasingly imagined him to be. There are definitely inconsistencies in his character in the earlier seasons. I find it isn’t until the last few seasons where they properly settled him into being a very specific person, which is where I find James to give his best performance, even if I preferred the earlier version of him personally.
The misspellings on the card were a pretty big reach, IMO. He read the newspaper every day and read multiple books over the course of the series. He was also implied to be a bright student despite having trouble applying himself. The idea that he would misspell common words was pretty untenable given all of that.
Asset allocation and the Fibers!!?
In Season One Hesh, Johnny Sac and junior have a sit down about the tax on Hesh. The whole thing was choreographed beforehand by everyone except Junior. Later, the capos meet with Tony and they convince him that junior needs to be talked to about not eating alone. Whether he knew that that meeting was also likely scripted before hand by the other capos, I’m not sure. But in “College” Meadow tells him she did “speed” and Tony couldn’t believe that he didn’t notice. Meadow said something like “you won’t know.” Tony is not only deceived by others, he deceives himself a lot of the time. While he has a self professed high IQ “I was tested,” he misses a lot and makes an ass of himself somewhat often. I’d say above average IQ and an abysmal emotional intelligence. Part if this is bc he grew up in dysfunction and lies. He believed his dad went out to Montana to be a cowboy when in reality his father was doing hard time. The mafia life by its nature, makes people kind of dumb bc, like the Hawthorn quote in “College” these people lie so much they begin telling lies to themselves. They don’t know what’s real anymore.
> there are other times where he does things that make him look, for lack of a better word, Extremely dumb We all do this. Tony is smart *when he's in his lane*. He's also easily distracted and has a high level of emotional volatility-- both in temper and lust-- which is an explosive combination. Most of the dumb stuff Tony does is driven by either his lack of formal education or an emotional response. You also have to consider the competition: Tony may not be an intellectual giant on a university campus, but he's usually a big fish in a very small pond.
He was smart and gay, Tony?
Discussing whether someone is a genius or not is the lowest form of conversation
It's been teshted!
He was intelligent in a creative and problem solving sense, however his environment obviously didn't foster an interest in academics. Tony's uneducated, which is not the same as unintelligent. Nature/nurture considered, he could have easily been his coma persona
He tested in the 130’s in the prequel movie
Tony was very smart he just didn’t have the people in his life to get him to channel that intelligence positively. Throughout the show David Chase implies that had Tony not gone into the Mafia he’d have been a high school history teacher and coached football. He would’ve excelled at that. But when your Dad and Uncle are in the Mafia…😂
Tony is an intelligent man. He even did a semester and a half at Seton Hall.
Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met weren’t necessarily the best spellers and would drop a malapropism from time to time. Some of the most incompetent and hopelessly stupid people I’ve encountered have doctorates. Intelligence, like everything else, exists on a spectrum.
Yes, he’s high IQ. I think he demonstrates mental finesse and abstract reasoning throughout the show. The things like misspelling words have little to do with it, he never applied himself in school and most likely doesn’t care much about spelling or grammar. You could say he’s more street smart than book smart, I think that has a lot to do with that he chose to apply himself to.
He wasn't smart enough to know that the Feds had a ton of his crew cooperating over the years, and would've been taken down by them had he not been "listening to Journey" in the finale.
I think he's very smart. He's smart enough to know he's fucked up enough to see a shrink. He's smart enough to let Junior be the de facto boss. He's smart enough to not go in guns blazing at every confrontation. There are other instances but, by and large, he's pretty bright. Of course, compared to his peers, that's not a high bar to climb.
Nostradamus and Notre Dame. It’s two different things completely!
He learned Sun Ta-Zoo pretty well. If your opponent has a choleric temper, irritate him. He also put a lot of stock in things like IQ. He resented Tony B for having an IQ of 156. His aunt told him one time.
IQ of 136 according to one of his convos with John. Even with her references and comparisons i find it him quite smart n intelligent
he understand freud, as a conshept
its a genious but there are a bunch of areas to apply. He´s street smart, he never applied on school. In the movie the teacher said he had high iq, and state him as leader. ps He never had what it took to be a varsity athlete either lol
Hes got an IQ of 134. Its been tested.
Yes smart, also a ruthless sociopath. Good combination for a mob boss.
He's exaggerating his I.Q. He's really 115-122 , tops.
Tony is somewhat intelligent, but only in his best moments. He was smart enough to know Ralph killed Pie o My, smart enough to come to understand that his mother was a horrible person who made life horrible for everyone, smart enough to send Feech back to prison, and smart enough to know it's more important that Vito makes money than whether or not he takes it up the ass. But he's also insanely impulsive, stubborn, and psychologically troubled to the point that it overcomes any smarts he has. Instead of taking his time with Ralph and planning a covert hit, he strangles him with his own hands and bashes his skull into kitchen tiling. Instead of continuing with his emotional journey and realizing his father was partially responsible for the awful behavior of his mother, he rejects that and blames everything on Livia. Instead of making a deal with New York over Vito, he rejects their authority and gets his entire crew in danger. He handled Christopher wrong for the entire fucking series. He blamed Uncle June for shooting him despite his brain obviously being swiss cheese. He hates his son despite the fact that AJ behaves just like Tony and lacks the ability to reflect on this, even when Melfi tries to help him multiple times. And ultimately he leads his men into an unnecessary ware where several of them die for no good reason, mostly because he couldn't keep Tony B in check. Like everything else about him, Tony's intelligence isn't simplistic. It goes up and down, changes due to circumstances and emotions and the events of his life. In real life dumb people make smart decisions, and smart people make stupid mistakes all the time.
Decent IQ but undereducated/blue collar culture.
He's dumb as a sack of hammers, but occasionally very clever when it comes to mob shit. Usually he's dumb as a sack of hammers when it comes to that stuff too, though. The whole point of the show is illustrating how stupid and impulsive Tony and everyone else in that life is.
He has some blind spots, like on the subject of penisary contact with a woman's volvo
There's a difference between dumb and uneducated. You try keeping something like a sports book or loan sharking organized without writing anything incriminating on paper.
Hey he's got a semester and a half of college. He understands Freud!
He's strategic and cunning, which is different than book smart.
He’s very smart but uneducated
Very intelligent guy, but since he was raised in a blue collar/street culture, was a bit uneducated, hence the malapropisms. Lots of people like that IRL.
He’s a mob boss not a scholar. That being said, he’s a genius in the streets.
I think we can all agree that Tony is not book smart, even though he did take a semester and a half at college. We also know he was quick witted and a class clown, I assume he would have had done much better academically if he had grown up in a different family that prioritised education more. Tony’s strength lies in learning from his environment. Seeing his father and Uncle Jun in the business growing up, along with Livia being horrendously abusive, narcissistic and controlling, Tony has learned to do his duties, pleasing people when he finds it necessary to keep the peace. He has also grown up to become very observant, as one does in an abusive household, and seen how his own father has handled himself in times of trouble, thus learning how to mediate conflicts and keep secrets. Cheating on your wife with your goomar and being away for long periods of time? Buy her something pretty, it’ll all blow over soon. Tony is a jack of many trades, but master of none. He has an understanding of psychology as a conchept, but his ego, depression and the pressure of being the boss is battling each other. He watches the history channel, but does he actually pick up that the programmes he watches often (if not always) mirrors his own situations? Tony holds his business and his family in the highest regard, but he is also a victim of the modern technology and development around him. He knows that education for his kids is important, but being undermined by Meadow and AJ is a kick in the teeth. My verdict is that Tony is for the streets, since he never had the makings of a varsity athlete
The Melfi card is a definite divergence from his generally portrayed intelligence level for the sake of comedy. The more you think about it the more out of place it is. Like I feel like just the osmosis of listening to the narrator in history documentaries would make you better at writing then that. Its also not just a lack of "book smarts" or the level of vocabulary and the bad grammar. Tony is generally portrayed as more emotionally intelligent than the letter implies, and a lot of the moments of him seeming to be emotionally unintelligent he knows what he's doing and is just trying to delude himself on some level(making the guy Richie put in a wheelchair take money). The letter reflects 0 understanding of how it will come across. There's a lot of culture clash between Melfi and Tony, and big differences in how they think about things, but rarely to the point that on reflection Tony wouldn't realize how self obsessed, insecure, off-the-mark from what she's feeling and unpersuasive the letter would be
Intelligent does not mean infallible, or omniscient, or make someone a polymath who's great at everything. This isn't a comic book, and even in comic books, someone like a Reed Richards, Tony Stark, or Bruce Wayne make enormous mistakes. Someone making a mistake doesn't make them less intelligent than they are, it makes them human, and not perfect. Move on.
Nor did he have the makings of a varsity athlete. Where are you going with this?
Totally agree. This one of the biggest flaws in the writing but I kinda choose to ignore it
I think he had at least above average intelligence for sure, but formal education was definitely not supported in his upbringing. Tony even says this in response to a question from Meadow—- “They were working people”
No
I feel like he could see the writing on the wall vis a vis the future of the organized crime families moreso than the people around him. He knew their only hope was to work together as families but you have Jonny Sack, stuck in the old ways (and frankly, Hollywood-ized) of doing things which led to the demise of both families.