Karl Klockars

For starters, I remain the only person I know (save my wife) who walked out of “The Hangover” and said, “Boy, was that…disappointing.”  It could be the fact that I’m just 6 weeks away from entering my third decade on this planet and I’m rapidly becoming a doddering old man, cranky and bitchy and wishing for a lawn to shoo the young’uns off of.

Unfortunately, the greater conflict that comes out of movies like these is that it reaffirms that every single bachelor party is pure debauchery.  That a man’s ultimate urges, left unchecked, will lead directly to Vegas and strippers and whores and cocaine.  Which, of course, is absolutely true, right?

Even if it’s not, I think the idea remains that every guy feels an overwhelming need to go be a badly-behaving boy around wedding-time.  The myth remains that when we as men are “throwing our lives away” or “losing our freedom” as our friends would like to call it, we have to go out and act in ways that are completely foreign and alien to us 99% of the time.

At least “The Hangover” showed us a fundamental truth of the bachelor party:  Bachelor Parties are not for the groom.  They are for the groom’s friends. I didn’t have a bachelor party.  My loving wife-to-be tried to set one up for me and I effed it up by having a terrible job schedule.  I didn’t want one.  If anything, I wanted to be left alone in a closet with a handle of Jim Beam.  If you want a truthful visual of the collective years of my single life, it’s basically loneliness and excessive alcohol intake.

Hey guys, lets party!

When it came time for me to have, or start thinking about having, a bachelor party, the questions kept coming up:  Are there gonna be strippers and a pile of cocaine?  And I can say in complete honesty:  I wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that.  Why?  Possibly because I’ve seen how things work out when people feel obligated to live up to that bachelor-party ideal.

I’ve seen the parties where people get all excited about embarassing the groom with scantily-clad snaggletooth “not good enough for Diamonds” ladies, and packing into bathrooms around a CD tray with razors and dollar bills.  They were not at all for the poor bastard that was getting hitched.  They were solely for the entertainment for the group of meatheads that only wanted an excuse to act like knuckledraggers.

I’ve seen the stupid shit that goes on when people feel that they’re obligated by popular male society to be a jackass.  The result is generally liver scarring, bad headaches, credit card debt, and an increased desire for bacon the following morning.  I’m not trying to be a nancy-pants prude here, I’m just bringing the truth:  Bachelor parties generally suck.

Who is this guy? Oh yeah, the GROOM.

Maybe it’s my dour outlook on the concept of the bachelor party that had me barely chuckling at “The Hangover.”  But at least they got one thing right:  The whole film was about the friends.*  The groom himself got about 15 minutes of screen time.  He was an afterthought, a vacancy in their minds and in their actual existence.  He didn’t matter.  He was just the driver.

That said:  Anyone that feels over-obligated to throw down some craziness for their own bachelor party has probably not done enough crazy shit yet.  If you haven’t gotten all that boy stuff out of your system, maybe that’s something to address before you hitch yourself to another human being for life.  In addition, if you’re marrying someone who you believe is going to change you from doing the things you normally love doing (thereby requiring you to do them to excess before you wed), again, rethink this whole deal.

Creativity is always prized over any sort of unoriginal thinking.  Avoid it at all costs – y’know, like clown-fear.  If you must do anything, grooms-to-be, do something interesting.  If you have to indulge in vice, go knock over a port-o-potty.  Go tag a building with some leftover spraypaint.  If you’re going to revel in your childlike freedom, at least do something childish.  Set a bag of dog mess on fire, if you have to do something stupid.

We were somewhere outside of Barstow...

Otherwise, jump out of a plane.  Climb a mountain.  Drive to Texas.  Dive to the bottom of Lake Michigan.  You know your wife better than anyone else – do something she wouldn’t want you to drag her along to (other than looking at naked chicks – but ask first, she might be into it).  Go take a boxing lesson.  Go shoot some guns.  Anything – just don’t be like the rest of the world that thinks they have to be a bad little boy.

After all that, go and get loaded.  The ol’ ball and chain won’t want you wetting the bed when she’s married to you, will she?  Not likely.

*The director’s basic theme for his films is that men are stupid and childish.  If the vast majority of men go and think this film is great – a la Old School – does that mean that a majority of men are sad pieces of excrement?  If that’s Todd Philips’ point, then he’s awesome.