(photo courtesy Why, That’s Delightful!)

Last week Graham Linehan (above), writer and creator of the nerd-friendly British sitcom The IT Crowd, was pleased to announce that he had made it onto a list of the “Top 100 living geniuses,” landing at number 83. Not surprisingly, Linehan’s writings about the list are hilarious.

I’m fascinated by the fact that people actually think they can rate things like who’s the biggest genius, so I decided to look into this list a bit more. Linehan provided a link to an article about the list in the British Newspaper the Telegraph. The few sentences explaining the creation of the list are maddeningly simplistic. The main thrust seems to be to point out that Britain has the highest per capita representation on the list, but then goes on to explain, “The top 100 living geniuses was compiled by a panel of six experts in creativity … The company emailed 4,000 Britons this summer and asked them to nominate up to 10 living people who they considered geniuses.” Gee, I wonder why these “4,000 Britons” picked a disproportionate number of British geniuses? Unabashed nationalism aside, I was curious to see which other geniuses of film and television made the list.

More after the jump (hint: “Cowabunga”):

As I’m sure you guessed, the foremost genius of the entertainment industry is none other than Simpsons creator Matt Groening at number 4, right ahead of former South African President/freer of millions of oppressed people, Nelson Mandela. The top three included LSD inventor Albert Hoffman, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee (a Briton!), and investor and philanthropist George Soros.

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what the top five geniuses of our time have to say about the world of 2007. Our priorities are thus: first, drugs, then the Internet, then money, then the Simpsons, then the abolition of racist regimes. Yeah, that about sums it up.

But what about other film and television geniuses? There aren’t many. The next one on the list is Steven Spielberg, sharing a five-way tie for number 26. Next up is Maryl Streep, George Lucas, Ken Russell, and finally, at number 100, Quentin Tarantino.

Scorsese? Coppola? Lynch? Herzog? Apparently they don’t hold a candle to the genius of Tarantino, not to mention other list-makers Dolly Parton, Stan Lee, Osama Bin Laden, and Prince. Oh, and none of those people are British, as long as we’re keeping score.