Okay, you’ve brought me back full circle. I agree with you.

You kind of reminded me of that awful Barry Levinson/Robin Williams abortion, Man of the Year, where Levinson spends more time letting the side characters tell the camera how funny Robin Williams’ character is supposed to be than he allows Williams’ character to speak.

“Hey, this guy is really funny!” They all say. But when the camera shows Williams, he’s just doing his standard Robin Williams improv bit. And not even very well (I like the guy, even after all these years, but he’s got his good days and his bad days).

So the Dos Equis commercials tout Mr. Suatz’s supposed “interestingness” by proclaiming his multitude of accomplishments. On the radio, it almost works, but on the radio, he sounds more like Chuck Norris than on TV, where you actually get to the see the man through effective use of stock-style footage.

On TV, it’s not nearly enough just to hear an announcer talking about these accomplishments; he could easily say the same stuff about Glenn Beck and it would be laughably transparent, but they’ve created a persona for Mr. Suatz which is mostly consistent unto itself. And that gives it an air of plausibility. I’m still never going to drink Dos Equis, but the craft behind this ad hoc mythos is increasingly evident.

You point out, of course, that the TV must actually show us the interesting things that Suatz does, that we may also be interested ourselves. Therefore, it’s not enough to see or hear about people being interested in him within his own world. He has to reach out to you and me. And you’re clearly not interested by the same things as are the people Mr. Suatz spends most of his time with.

So yeah, If he’s going to be the most interesting man in the world, he needs to be interesting to as wide a range of people as possible. Inter- and intra-personal intelligence will get you so far only with the people susceptible to that kind of charm (admittedly, a comfortable majority). But what about the astrophysicists of the world, who aren’t impressed until Mr. Suatz can actually prove or discover something about the Universe that we didn’t previously know (or even suspect)? What about the novelists of the world who won’t be impressed until Suatz writes a sonnet that can make them cry? What about the musicians of the world who won’t be impressed until Suatz can outshred the reincarnations of George Harrison and Jimi Hendrix simultaneously?

Lawski, you’re right. Until he can broaden his horizons, Suatz will still risk leaving a broad swath of the population unimpressed, and therefore uninterested.

I actually think the ad is encouraging us to be uninteresting ourselves. It is harping on the sheep impulse we all have somewhere inside to do as others do instead of marching to the beat of our own drum and thinking for ourselves. Suatz is “interesting” because he does the latter, and by following his example and drinking Dos Equis *because* it’s his example, we’re copying him and following *his* drum.

That is, if we drink it at all. I myself prefer anything with Kahlúa to beer. So nyaaaaaaaa, Mr. Suatz!

I don’t know. My one counterargument against your claims that only the intra- and inter-personal intelligences matter hinges on the commercials themselves. The producers of these commercials knew that they couldn’t just show other people being interested in Mr. Suatz. That wouldn’t be enough. They had to show him practicing kendo, parachuting in from space, bringing a piano into the desert, and so on. They had to prove to us, the viewers, that Mr. Suatz was legitimately interesting in many different ways, not just interesting by hearsay. That’s why I personally think Mr. Suatz is a better candidate for “Most Interesting Man in the World” than Chuck Norris, a man who is said to be more interesting than he actually is.

Also of note: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MemeticBadass

“Interesting,” in 99.9% of all possible contexts (this one included), means interesting to other people. He can be great at everything, but it won’t matter at all if no one knows it.

Given that the definition of “Interesting” hinges on being thought of as interesting by other people, doesn’t that mean that inter- and intrapersonal intelligence should be weighed significantly more heavily in your average? To take it to a further extreme, one could even argue that by the definition of “Interesting,” interpersonal & intrapersonal intelligence should be the only two that count at all.

Many of the “facts” about this supposedly Most Interesting Man in the World are simply reappropriated Chuck Norris Facts, some of which have been circulating on the Internet for half a decade already. As the campaign has “matured” and Mr. Suatz’s persona become more concrete, they’ve relied a bit less on the old Chuck Norris jokes, but most of them still work if you replace “he” or “him” with “Chuck Norris.”

Examples.
“[Chuck Norris] is the only man to ever ace a Rorschach test.”
“[Chuck Norris] can speak French in Russian.”
“[Chuck Norris'] beard alone has experienced more than a lesser man’s entire body.”
One that wasn’t in the Youtube video, but I’ve heard on the radio was “If [Chuck Norris] disagrees with you, it is because you are wrong.”

The very first time I heard a Dos Equis radio ad with The Most Interesting Man in the World, I actually thought they were advertising some kind of Chuck Norris campaign.

So.

It seems like, at the very least, Mr. Suatz’s creators used Chuck Norris as a rough template when they were first developing him. So how can a dude who’s based on another dude even be in the running for “Most Interesting Man in the World,” huh?

Another penalty against his logical mathematical intelligence (or against his team of city builders).

Totally disagree. It will be difficult to find consensus on what the most interesting man in the world means. But you conflate a Nobel laureate’s intelligence (and achievements) with interesting and run with it.

Are they interesting because they have proven proficiency or is it because of what they accomplished?

Chris Bliss does a wonderfully entertaining juggling act to the Beatles ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8f8drk5Urw ). We’ve juggled before, not like that, but most of us have. It is interesting, it piques our interest, it is entertaining.

Unlike juggling, Mr. Suatz has played jai lai, been an astronaut, and has a sexy shaggy beard. These things are hard to pull off, unique, they give him appeal and interest for their uniqueness. Most of us can’t even grow a beard like him, even less know what jai lai is, and even less could actually be an astronaut.

Mr. Suatz is interesting because he has done things that we can barely grasp. He is obviously the Chuck Norris of the Dos Equis beer campaign ( http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/ ).

I may someday win the Nobel prize or be a world class something or another, but Mr. Suatz is interesting because he has done things we can barely grasp.

What’s also interesting about these ads is the man who plays TMIMITW, “Jonathan Goldsmith.” He’s had a *long* TV career since the 1970s scraping by on bit parts in network dramas (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0326091/), but has never done anything substantial… until now. Heard an interview with him recently about the fact that with a few of these ads, he’s now been seen by more people (and, conveniently, is better paid) than in his previous 35 years of work.

Also, I believe you’re only going off of the TV commercials… but there are also a TON of unique radio ads that have cropped up in the last year or so for Dos Equis. I wonder if someone has a list of all the other things TMIMITW has mastered — they tend to be even sillier than you see on TV (they just ran a Halloween-themed one over the last two or three weeks that was pretty ridiculous, even for the campaign).