Face it: we all want our events to be their best, but we don’t always know how. The Art of Hosting is the guide to hosting you have been craving. It’s warm, candid, and full of practical advice for making your dinner party, barbecue, mixer, or wedding the best it can be. We hope you enjoy it!
Dinner Parties
Don’t have a fucking dinner party. Don’t you fucking do it.
Dinner Parties, Part Deux
Okay. So you’re going to do it. Fine. They are nearly always fucking wretched, but there are ways to make it work. It starts with the seating. Fix the chair thing. The chairs are the problem. There are torture methods, elucidated in CIA manuals, that involve victims being tied to chairs and made to listen to inanities for hours at a time. This is true. This shit is in fucking CIA interrogation manuals. You said you know history. Well, this is history. This is fact. The CIA tells its torturers to tie victims to a chair and then fill their ears with nonsense for hours. This is what nearly every dinner party ever held is: a dozen victims made to sit in chairs for hours at a time, listening to fucking nothing. If you fucking have to have a dinner party — and you probably shouldn’t because you will fuck it up — don’t make people sit in the same fucking chair for four hours. Think about the twisted fucking logic of that. You stupidly decide to have a dinner party. Fine. You’re an asshole. You decide to have twelve people at your fucking dinner party, all at one big fucking table. Great. So then you think fucking hard about who to invite, trying to make the group wonderful and balanced and fascinating and all that shit. Now what? You put them in chairs and who do they talk to? They talk to the person to their right and the one to their left, and absolutely no one else. For four hours. They talk to these table neighbors more in one night than they do their spouses in a month. It is too much. It is a crime. And you are a criminal. After an hour, everyone is fucking bored witless. After two hours they will contemplate murder. Your murder. The people at one end of the table never speak to, or hear, or even fucking meet, the people at the other end. How the fuck is that a party? What the fuck is the point of that? It’s like showing your guests a magnificent buffet, then allowing them only to eat from one corner of it. At the end of the night, at every fucking dinner party ever held, all the guests who never spoke to each other all night meet at the doorway, or on the sidewalk outside, and they say, Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk. This has happened at every fucking dinner party since the first cave-motherfucker came up with this world-ending idea in the first place. Sorry, we didn’t get a chance to talk. This is what they say. And they never see each other again. What the fuck is that? They were in the same room for four hours and didn’t speak to each other. Why? Because you are a fucking CIA torturer and kept them tied to one fucking chair all night. Dinner parties are a fucking abomination unless you fix them. Let people get the fuck up from the table. People only need twenty minutes to eat. Maybe thirty. Let them get the fuck up. They can come back and sit somewhere else. Otherwise what? You’re risking their death. This is true. This is dangerous. What you’re doing is actually medically dangerous. People can die the way you’ve set it up. You ever hear of thrombosis? You want someone dying of thrombosis? You want them getting some kind of deadly blood clot caused by sitting in one place for four hours? You want that on your conscience, motherfucker? A death at your dinner party? Don’t kill people at your party, you sadist. Don’t fucking kill your guests. That is bad hosting. Have people get up to get dessert, get a drink, and let them sit anywhere else. Your guests are not fucking hostages and you are not allowed to be a torturer who sometimes kills them. You’re not allowed that. Sorry. Tying people to chairs is torture. Torture as defined by the International Criminal Court. You fucking understand? Are you fucking Dick Cheney? If you are Dick fucking Cheney, then have your fucking dinner party where everyone is required to stay in one fucking chair all night. We’ll see you at the Hague, motherfucker.
Twenty-one Courses
Strike a fucking balance. No one cares that much about food. Even a foodie who travels across state lines to eat at some new bistro does not want twenty-two courses and a pamphlet about each food item. Know your place. Even if you are some fucking ninja-chef motherfucker with a red scarf and a TV show, no one wants twenty-two fucking courses and pamphlets. People want to talk to their friends. They want to drink some wine or saki. It is not all about you and your fucking food. You are part of the night, but you are not worthy of idolatry. Are you? Are you, motherfucker? This is dinner. It is not idolatry. It is not a cult. You are not David Koresh. You made some food. Fine. Your guests like food and will eat it with gusto. Just strike a balance. Don’t turn a nice night into the Bataan Death March. People want to eat for an hour or so, and then they want to get the fuck up from the table and do some other fucking thing. Maybe they want to go home. Maybe they want to go have car sex with their spouses on the side of the highway. Maybe they want to masturbate at home to Hugh Jackman in Wolverine or Brie Larson in Room. Doesn’t fucking matter. They don’t want to sit at your fucking table for four hours. That is too much time and too much food. No one wants to get fat at your table. You are not Jim Jones. You are not Jesus or Idi Amin. You are not fucking worth it and you have no fucking right. Strike a fucking balance. Know your place. If at any point your guests say, “Oh, another course! How exciting!” that means they want to murder you, your family, and display your severed heads on pikes outside their house.