Midwit Meme Explained: The IQ Bell Curve, Its Origin and the Real Numbers

The IQ bell curve meme, also called the midwit meme, shows a bell curve with IQ scores along the bottom and three cartoon figures on it. The figure at the far left and the figure at the far right hold the same short, simple opinion; the figure in the hump between them, the "midwit", holds a longer and more complicated one and is crying about it. The joke borrows a real shape, because IQ scores are built to follow a bell curve with an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, but the claim that the two thin ends know something the wide middle does not is a joke format, not a finding. This guide explains where the meme came from (the word in 2012, the chart on 4chan in 2017, the three-figure version in July 2020, according to Know Your Meme), what it is meant to say, the real numbers behind the curve (68.3% of people in the hump, about 1 in 741 at each tail) and what is wrong with each part of the joke.

What is the midwit meme?

In the version most people know, a "brainlet" figure sits at the low end, a crying Wojak (a cartoon face used across meme culture) in the hump, and a monk-like figure in a cloak at the high end; the Daily Dot describes the last one in Jedi robes. Know Your Meme sums up the joke as the monk and the brainlet agreeing with one another while the midwit "offers an unnecessarily complicated analysis". The idea underneath is the "horseshoe theory", the notion that opposite ends of a spectrum meet. "Midwit" itself is slang for a person of middling intellect, a mildly derogatory term according to Wiktionary. The meme is one of the few IQ jokes built on a real chart, which makes it easy to check.

Where does the midwit meme come from?

The word came first, and it meant something different. On 17 February 2012 the writer Vox Day published a blog post titled "The tragedy of the mid-witted", which, as The Spectator quotes it, was about people of above-average intelligence who tend to be "under the erroneous impression that they possess superlative intelligence". He had in mind IQs one to two standard deviations above the norm, not the middle. Know Your Meme says the term was popularized by that post and that 4chan users were using the shortened "midwit" from late 2013. The chart came separately, in the steps below. Where sources disagree, we say "earliest found", not "first".

• 17 February 2012: "The tragedy of the mid-witted" blog post (Know Your Meme, The Spectator)
• Late 2013: "midwit" appears on 4chan (Know Your Meme)
• 1 January 2017: the earliest found 4chan post that uses an IQ bell curve, a political joke with Democrats in the middle and Republicans at both ends, per the Daily Dot
• December 2018 to 2019: after a gap, the format returns on 4chan's /pol/ board and is reposted through 2019 (Know Your Meme)
• March 2020: the format goes viral on /pol/ (Know Your Meme prints the year as 2010, an evident typo, so 2020 is our inference)
• 11 July 2020: the earliest found three-figure version, posted by the X account @owenbroadcast (Know Your Meme)
• 30 October 2020: Know Your Meme adds its entry; versions reach Reddit communities in 2021 and 2022
• 20 July 2024: Elon Musk posts a version about his endorsement of Donald Trump, reported by the Daily Dot

Mainstream coverage followed: The Spectator ran an essay on "mid" as an online insult on 17 July 2023, the Daily Dot published an explainer on 23 July 2024, and Know Your Meme added a guide on 17 February 2025. The Daily Dot notes that the figures are sometimes replaced with characters or public figures, and that people across the political spectrum use the format to stand for attitudes that have nothing to do with intelligence. Know Your Meme's guide says it is used heavily to express political, religious and other controversial opinions, which is a rhetorical use, not a statistical one.

What does the IQ bell curve in the meme really say?

Modern IQ scores, such as those from the Wechsler tests, are reported as deviation IQs. A person's raw score is compared with the scores of others of the same age in the test's norm sample, then converted so that the norm sample has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation (SD, a measure of how spread out scores are) of 15. Our explainer on deviation IQ versus ratio IQ covers why the older formula was dropped. Two things follow. The bell shape is largely built into the scoring rather than discovered afterwards, and the shape fixes the proportions of people at each score, which anyone can check.

• IQ below 55 (more than 3 standard deviations below the mean): 0.135%, about 1 in 741
• IQ 55 to 70: 2.14% of people
• IQ 70 to 85: 13.59% of people
• IQ 85 to 115 (within one standard deviation of 100): 68.27% of people, the hump the meme labels midwit
• IQ 115 to 130: 13.59% of people
• IQ 130 to 145: 2.14% of people
• IQ above 145 (more than 3 standard deviations above the mean): 0.135%, about 1 in 741

Read narrowly, the "middle" is smaller: IQ 90 to 110 holds 49.5% of people, and IQ 70 to 130, within two standard deviations, holds 95.45%. So the meme is right about the shape. The extremes are rare and the middle is the crowd. The two tails it draws hold about 0.27% of people between them, roughly 1 in 370, while the hump it labels "midwit" holds about 250 times as many. An IQ of 145 is the 99.87th percentile on this scale, which our percentile calculator returns for any score you type in, and our piece on how rare a high IQ score is shows how fast the numbers fall away past two standard deviations. These are the theoretical proportions of the normal curve, not counts of measured people.

One caution about the curve itself. The bell is partly a scoring choice. Raw scores are converted to a normal curve when a test is normed, and a 1989 review of 440 large-sample achievement and psychometric measures found every one significantly non-normal in its raw form (Micceri, Psychological Bulletin). That finding is not specific to IQ, but it is a reason to read the bell as a convention that makes scores comparable, not a law of nature.

Who is the midwit? Why the meme gets the middle wrong

IQ 100 is not a place people fall short of. It is the middle of the norm sample by construction, so about half of all people score between 90 and 110. Calling the middle of a curve "mid" is a tautology, not an insult with data behind it. The word has also drifted. In the 2012 post it meant people somewhat above average; one 2019 Urban Dictionary entry puts the midwit "in the 105-120 range", while a 2025 entry calls the midwit "a person of average intelligence, that thinks they are smarter". The meme puts the figure at the centre of the curve. The standard labels read the same numbers more calmly: our guide to what an IQ of 110 means shows where average ends and high average begins, and the IQ classification table lists every band.

Do the two ends of the IQ curve really agree?

The joke needs the two ends to say the same thing. On an IQ test that cannot happen, because the score is a count of correct answers compared with everyone else's counts. The groups the meme places at the two tails are, by construction, the groups whose scores differ most. Whatever the meme is about, it is not about performance on the test that draws the curve. We found no study in which people at both ends of the IQ range give the same answer while the middle differs, and the earliest documented use of the chart format is a political joke.

The meme also borrows a chart it does not own. Its curve is a distribution of scores, while the Dunning-Kruger plot it is sometimes pasted beside shows self-rated ability against measured ability, and neither Know Your Meme nor the Daily Dot ties the meme to it. In a 2020 study of 929 adults tested on the Advanced Raven's matrices, analyses built to avoid the statistical trap behind the usual chart found the link between self-rating and tested ability to be "essentially entirely linear" (Gignac and Zajenkowski, Intelligence, 2020; we read the abstract only). Self-estimates do track tested scores, modestly: r = .33 across 41 studies (Freund and Kasten, Psychological Bulletin, 2012). Our article on whether the Dunning-Kruger effect is real goes through what the IQ data show.

Are the tails a punchline?

An IQ of 55 is three SD below the mean, a range in which a clinical evaluation, not a meme, is the right tool; the rules that apply to such scores are set out in our piece on low IQ and disability benefits. At the other end, an IQ of 145 is not a magic setting either. Tests stop reporting reliably somewhere near 160, as our article on the ceiling on an IQ test explains, and a single score is a range, not a point, as the piece on the margin of error shows.

Where a real U-shape does exist

One well-studied U-shape in psychology lives in development, not in IQ groups. Children learning English often use an irregular past tense such as "came" correctly, then say "comed", then return to "came". The 1992 monograph by Marcus and colleagues, which analysed 11,521 irregular past-tense utterances from 83 children, found that overregularization is relatively rare (a median of 2.5% of irregular past tenses), but that "an extended period of correct performance precedes the first error" (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). That is one person passing through stages, not two groups at opposite ends of a distribution agreeing.

How to use the curve instead of the meme

Two checks take a minute. Type your own score into the percentile calculator to see which slice of the curve you sit in, then look at the full IQ bell curve to see how wide each band is. If a claim about "the midwit" cannot survive the fact that the band it names holds two people in three, it was never about IQ. Our explainer on IQ z-scores shows how to turn any score into standard units and compare it with any other test.

The meme survives because it flatters whoever shares it: the left figure looks carefree, the right figure looks wise and the middle is where the reader assumes someone else stands. The curve underneath is a better story. It says most people are close to average, that the extremes are rare on both sides, and that a single score is a measurement with a margin, not a verdict. The IQ Metrics test reports the score and the percentile together for that reason. Self-rated IQ is a loose guide, and so are the type-by-IQ charts covered in our guide to MBTI type and IQ.

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