In her podcast “My Year in Mensa,” Jamie Loftus explores how the geeky group became a forum for the far-right. Photograph by Callie Biggerstaff

On a Monday evening in February, Jamie Loftus, enemy No. 1 of the high-I.Q. society American Mensa, arrived at a sports bar in the East Village. A twenty-seven-year-old comedian, Loftus is six feet tall, and wore a Harvard sweatshirt with a sketch of the Unabomber displayed under the proud lettering. She settled into a booth, ordered a beer and half-price pizza, and began reminiscing about her time among the so-called geniuses. “I have too much empathy for them, and it will be my downfall,” Loftus said. “I will let one of them kill me.”

Loftus performs standup, has written for television shows such as “Robot Chicken,” and co-hosts a feminist-film podcast called “The Bechdel Cast.” But, in the past few years, she has become best known for her comedic stunts. In 2018, Loftus took Mensa’s I.Q. exam while hungover on shandies, scored in the ninety-eighth percentile, and celebrated her admission with a triumphant blog post titled “Good News, They Let Dumb Sluts into Mensa Now.” Soon after, a Mensa member contacted her to warn that the group is not all “silly fun, board games . . . and happy nerds” but has a “nasty alt-right undercurrent.” She then discovered a reactionary, proudly unmoderated official Facebook group of American Mensans called Firehouse, in which, according to its description, subjects range from “Fluffy Kittens to items that will make you wish you could bleach your brain.” Typical content includes crude memes mocking Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, bad-faith anti-trans bathroom opinions, and support for building a border wall. One post argues that black people have benefitted from slavery and women from human trafficking because “their children enjoy a better life than in ‘shitholes.’ ” Loftus’s desire to understand this “living, breathing hostile comments section” culminated in her attendance at the 2019 American Mensa Gathering, in Phoenix, Arizona. Last month, she released a four-episode podcast miniseries about the experience called “My Year in Mensa.” The show uses first-person reporting to offer insight into how the geeky group became a forum for the far right.

The Mensa saga is more straight-faced than Loftus’s usual comedy, much of which replicates the frenzied pace of the Internet and is disturbing and nonsensical to the point of chaos. Like the prankish Nathan Fielder or the strangely sexual Megan Amram, she does elaborately dumb things to make fairly smart points. In 2015, Loftus sold “Shrek nudes,” naked photos of her body painted green, to raise funds for Planned Parenthood. That same year, she started eating David Foster Wallace’s thousand-plus-page novel “Infinite Jest.” In the video she made documenting the process, she pops a page into her mouth like a potato chip and slurps up a ribbon of the book with spaghetti. At some point, she began putting pages into a blender with apples and using a turkey baster to butt-chug the mixture. The sheer grotesqueness of her comedy often obscures its implicit social critique. Last year, the cultural critic Andrea Long Chu, in her spiky gender manifesto “Females,”mentioned #EatInfiniteJest as a curious form of female resistance and a “tremendous self-own.” Pretentious men are constantly trying to shove the book down women’s throats; Loftus just made their fantasy literal. She conceived both of these stunts while working as a research assistant at Playboy. “I was facilitating, like, the male-gaze-iest male gaze of all time, feeling suffocated,” she explained. “It was a reaction to being there sixty to seventy hours a week.” She used a company printer to print the photos of her green body, and the company kitchen to film herself laying pages of the book on mustard-covered bread, as if they were delicate slices of ham.

Loftus was in New York in February to perform her one-woman show, “Boss, Whom Is Girl,” which was staged at Joe’s Pub and is currently touring the country. The show is a loony, acerbic satire of corporate feminism, framed as an inspirational keynote from a character named Shell Gasoline-Sandwich, the billionaire G.E.O. of the surveillance-tech company Pee Pee Smarthomes. At the show, audience members were handed draconian nondisclosure agreements threatening murder by Silicon Valley assassins (“drones and various men named Josh”) for even thinking of disclosing contents of the talk. Loftus, as Shell, came out wearing a black turtleneck, and explained that she sleeps on a waterbed filled with tap water from Flint, Michigan, and is responsible for the massacre of a small island of European d.j.s. (The latter is based on Facebook’s role in fomenting ethnic violence in Myanmar, which she researched while at Playboy. “The show is secretly very thoroughly overresearched,” she told me.) The ordeal ended with Loftus fishing a yoni egg out of her vagina and flashing her pubic hair, which glowed in the dark, to the audience. Afterward, she emerged from backstage wearing a ruby utility jumpsuit that she had hand-bedazzled with sixty-five hundred rhinestones, as she put it, “mid-manic episode.” Onstage, she had carried herself with the crazed abandon of a little girl beheading a Barbie doll, but with her fans she was sweet and patient, posing for photos.

Like her one-woman show, the podcast “My Year in Mensa” condemns élitism, though it uses more traditional reporting methods. Loftus’s first job out of college was at the Boston Globe; she was fired when she tweeted, after a standup set, “crushing so hard at an open mic that I cum bloods,” which a local radio show referenced as “the end of journalism.” Nonetheless, she retains a reporter’s allegiance to fact. The first episode delves into the fraught history of I.Q. testing, which was developed in 1905 by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who adamantly insisted that it did not indicate fixed intelligence, and nonetheless adopted by eugenicists and racists to attempt to prove innate differences between social groups. One of Mensa’s co-founders, Roland Berrill, believed in the pseudoscience of phrenology, which involves measuring skulls to predict mental ability. The rest of the series is mostly dedicated to Loftus’s on-the-ground experience at the Mensa conference, some of which is pleasantly dorky; she attends a panel called “Because Science IS Funny: The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon and YOU!” But she also overhears a drunken Mensan at the hospitality bar claim that “not all dictators have been bad,” including Germany’s. (Later, he tips his waiter with a counterfeit three-dollar bill that features a caricature of Hillary Clinton.) Afterward, at a panel, she hears a man argue that the fact that slaves were counted as even three-fifths of a person led to the demise of the American South, prompting people of color to leave the room. Loftus attributes Firehouse’s far-right politics to Mensa’s toxic belief in a fixed intellectual hierarchy. “There is no overstating what community can do for someone who, as many members described to me, feel like misfits in their everyday lives and want to belong somewhere,” Loftus says in the podcast. “A society with murky goals whose selling point is superiority is not a healthy place to find it.”

At the conference, Loftus met Mensa’s enemy No. 2, a young leftist named Alex Herrera, who is aptly known as Two. He came with her to the bar in February, and I asked him whether he had listened to the podcast. “Yes,” he replied. “It was a hundred-per-cent accurate.” Herrera’s trouble with Firehouse began in April, 2018, when he shared a Times article to the group arguing that white Trump voters are motivated by the fear of losing social status. In the ensuing argument, Firehouse members accused him of being racist for suggesting that they were racist. He later snapped a screenshot of a Firehouse member’s comment that “black women need to keep their legs closed” and posted it on his own Facebook page. Loftus also took screenshots of Firehouse posts, exposing a discrepancy between members’ genial in-person presentations and their cruder online personalities, which incensed the group. As a result, the members mass-blocked both individuals, which struck Herrera as hypocritical, given their avowed belief in free speech. “If it’s supposed to be unmoderated, by blocking, you’re moderating that experience,” he said. In the podcast, Loftus notes, “If you can’t reconcile the person you are online with the person you are in real life, something in your community has gone wrong.”

Loftus concedes that she made mistakes, too, including the way she dealt with Mensa’s so-called boob thread. In 2015, a Firehouse member posted, “I want to see some boobs! Help me out ladies! #boobthread,” and the women of Mensa flooded the comments section with twelve hundred photos of their breasts. The overwhelming supply spawned a secondary boob thread, which garnered more than five hundred more. Loftus tweeted about it, to make fun of Mensa’s adolescent horniness. In retrospect, she reflected that the thread happened between consenting adults, and worried that her earlier criticisms had come off as slut-shaming. “I just feel bad about that,” she told me, at the bar. “I got called out, and they were right.” She concludes her podcast with an apology: “As a militant feminist myself . . . I regret my condescension and wish all boobs involved health and happiness.” Loftus’s Mensa membership is expiring in a few months, which is unfortunate: Firehouse might have been a good place to share her Shrek nudes.