21st Century Man on…Hosting Parties

Few things in the world are separated by a broader gap on the fun spectrum than attending parties and hosting parties. Going to parties can be an absolute blast. All you have to do is show up at someone’s nice, clean house, eat as much food as you want, drink as much booze as you can, fornicate as many fellow guests as you like, and then leave. Hosting parties, on the other hand, requires weeks of preparation and toil. When done properly, they are exceedingly expensive. And then your guests descend like locusts, consume everything edible in the house, clog your sink with puke, break everything that isn’t nailed down, steal your favorite CDs and fuck your vulnerable little sister, leaving you to clean up the mess with a terrible hangover.

Of course, I like parties as much as anyone, so I don’t want to give you the impression that these things make hosting them less worthwhile. Instead, I encourage you to think of your parties as charitable events. As an opportunity to give back.

Here are some guidelines you may find useful when planning your next soiree:

What to Serve

First and foremost, it isn’t a party without alcohol, so to a large extent you can control how badass your party is just by adjusting the variation and quantity of your alcohol supplies. Want a more badass party? Turn up the alcohol. Increasing the selection of wines, spirits and mixers on offer is a guaranteed recipe for success. Making your most unique and distinctive beers available may also impress your more cultured guests, but the single most important ingredient for a good party is an unslakable river of bland beer. The kind of beer you do not so much sip and savor as gulp and guzzle. The kind you won’t mind getting spilled all over the beer pong table. The kind that’s easy to clean up later, in puke form. Believe me, the last thing you want in a guest’s stomach when they fail to make it to the toilet in time is a thick, black Guinness.

The quantity and quality of the food you should serve are inversely proportional to and directly correlated with the booze supply. The less booze, the better the food has to be. The more booze, the more you can get away with crappy frozen appetizers and the like. And because you really don’t want to spend the whole party in the kitchen, I recommend that you provide enough booze to render all food more sophisticated than pizza rolls unnecessary. Let’s face it: when your bloody and shirtless friend, Les, is sitting on the floor eating fois gras with his fingers, he can’t meaningfully distinguish the earthy delicacy of that goose liver from a pâtè you’ve made with your own ass. The drunker people get, the more quantity becomes important. One of the best events I ever attended had so much goddamn liquor that the entire party was happily sated by nine pounds of roasted peanuts. The cleanup was nightmarish, but everyone agreed that it had been a smashing party.

Who to Invite

Inviting just the right mix of people can be tricky. Making even a single wrong choice can sometimes ruin an entire party. Or, in extreme cases, if the wrong guest ends up being a neighbor, boss or family member, this one seemingly insignificant decision can wreck your entire life. Exercise the appropriate discretion.

Depending on who you invite, you may need to provide space for your guests to ingest nicotine and other drugs. However, I must warn you that partaking of these things yourself may not be advisable. Getting the pizza rolls in and out of the oven can be harder than preparing a soufflé after a couple hits of green windowpane acid.

Regardless of who you leave out, you can expect most or all of these folks to attend:

The Mover and Shaker
This person simply can’t bring him/herself to RSVP, no matter how many friendly reminders you send out. Regardless of your enclosed SASE. This person is inconsiderate, but more importantly, they want to leave their options open until the last possible moment, in case something better comes up.

Paulsy
Paulsy is the guy with no motor skills who eventually spills beer on every surface of your house and allows stray pretzels and cheese cubes to bounce off his face and onto the floor, couch, etc. This malady is invariably accompanied by a total lack of self-awareness.

The Storyteller
The Storyteller is the self-important attention whore who can’t bear the thought that s/he might not be the hero of every story told at your party. Everything your other guests say reminds this person of the time something similar but fundamentally cooler happened to them.

The Sundance Kid
This person is the sidekick who cackles madly at every word the Storyteller utters. The Storyteller can ask where you got the avocadoes and the Sundance Kid will howl with laughter or erupt in thunderous applause, leaving you to wonder why you aren’t getting the joke.

Cassanova
This is the guy who pivots from one guest to another, indiscriminately hitting on all the women in plain sight of all the ones he’s already hit on and all the one’s he’s working his way around to.

The Prince/Princess
This person is convinced that your party, like most things in life, was set up with the express purpose of serving his/her every whim. They’re the guests who complain about the music or the brand of vodka you’re serving. Your party is essentially an inconvenience to them, but they come anyway because they’re such good friends.

The Tenant
The Tenant takes you up on the offer to spend the night, and then hangs around long after all the other sleepover guests depart. Around the time you prepare a bucket of soapy water and get down on your hands and knees to start scrubbing the floor, the Tenant is looking through your movie collection, suggesting that you all start drinking again.

The Hoover
This person seemingly spends the week leading up to the party not eating, so that he can do his best Kobayashi impersonation when he arrives, devouring all the food before most of your other guests even get a chance to try it.

The Human Torpedo
Homo rooterus is the person who takes a nasty dump in your primary bathroom instead of sneaking upstairs like a civilized person and destroying one of the bathrooms that won’t emit toxic fumes into the room with the appetizers.

The Amnesiac
The Amnesiac forgets that they just cracked open a drink, took a sip and set it down, so they just help themselves to another. At the end of the night, you find two cases of full, open beers scattered around the house, but hey…it’s a party!

The Jock
The Jock can’t simply sit and enjoy the company of others over a drink. He has to bounce from quarters to beer pong to darts to 3-man, telling your other guests along the way what pussies they are if they don’t join in.

Looking over this list, you may be wondering why you’d ever voluntarily have these people in your house, but the fact is-these people are your best friends. And if you don’t already know that, you simply haven’t invited them to a party yet. Or ever seen them with a few drinks in them. Don’t get discouraged. We all have doooshy friends. Instead, take comfort in the fact that all the embarrassing behavior at your party will become fodder for years of epic stories.

Now go plan your party already.