I'm Having More Fun Than You (20 page)

My main problem with traveling to weddings is that I treat it like a vacation. So my first night in town—be it at the rehearsal dinner or not—I get so blindingly drunk that I’m inevitably hungover for the ceremony itself. In fact, to this day I am wrongly blamed for getting so smashed at Triplet #3’s wedding that I vomited in the parking lot during the reception. Fact: I hadn’t even been drinking that much and was merely still ill from the night before, thank you very much.

It amuses me to no end that, when planning a wedding, the bride and groom pay so much attention to details that no one else even notices. Christina’s wedding was on Block Island, which is an island between Rhode Island and Long Island, just off the coast of Bumblefuck. A few weeks beforehand, she called to ask me what ferry I’d be taking to get there. “Ferry?” I asked. “What ferry?” “The ferry to the island!” she exclaimed. “You know, it was on page four of the Save the Date booklet we painstakingly crafted for your benefit?” “Ohhhh,” I said. “That thing. Yeah, I was using it as a coaster.”

A few months before her wedding, my friend Marcia flew out to LA to hang out with me for a long weekend. To be clear, Marcia and I have never and—now that she’s married—will never hook up. (Though she was my prom date, I must admit I couldn’t seal the deal.) I have to confess, though, I did feel kind of strange about spending an entire drunken weekend with her. Like being engaged was some sort of contagious disease that I could catch. I had to remind myself that marriage isn’t cooties.

ALWAYS A GROOMSMAN, NEVER THE GROOM

When Brian asked me to be his Best Man, I was both honored to serve and thrilled to have ammunition to use against him for the next year. When we started to argue over something like who had the better SAT II scores or who could run the forty-yard dash faster in eighth grade, I’d always interrupt and say, “Wait, wait…what kind of man am I? What kind of man? That’s right, the
Best
Man. You said it yourself: the Best!” I started to wonder if one could get fired from the wedding party.

My primary duty as Best Man was to organize the bachelor party. And organize I did, sending thirteen warriors to Las Vegas for a weekend they would never remember. The real pain in the ass was not so much the planning, but rather laying out money for everyone and then trying to get them to pay me back. It’s not that my boys are cheap. It’s that they’re lazy and they’re dicks. I had to call one guy every day for six weeks, and received a check from another buddy who for some reason found it necessary to write in the memo section the words “I hate you.”

Triplet #1 recently got married…to another triplet. I know the odds are astronomical, but of all the chicks in New York City, he managed to find one from a set of female triplets. All six of the siblings are fraternal, so there was no risk of confusion. But Best Men and Maids of Honor were tagging in and out of that ceremony like some sort of black-tie WrestleMania.

SPEECH!

As a comedian, giving speeches is my favorite part of any rehearsal dinner or wedding. I prepare for them like I’m preparing for an actual gig, though it took me a while to realize that brevity is appreciated. Case in point: my never-ending, seventeen-minute Best Man “toast” at Brian’s wedding. While it was relatively well received, the entire speech had to be included on the couple’s 45-minute wedding video, since they hadn’t contracted for such complex editing. Needless to say, no one wants me to take up 38 percent of their most treasured memories.

I guess I felt I could do no worse than Brian had done himself, when he served as the Best Man at one of his fraternity brother’s weddings the year prior. Standing next to the groom and his, ahem, well-endowed wife, Brian closed his speech by accidentally congratulating his friend for choosing “the
breast
bride possible.” Brian called me frantically from the bathroom of the reception hall right after the toast to tell me what happened. I calmed him down, but quite frankly I was thrilled to have been given a Get-Out-of-One-Inappropriate-Gaffe-Free Card for my own upcoming speech.

Little did I know that Brian’s wedding would not be when I needed dispensation most. When Christina—whom I’ve known even longer than Brian—got married a few days after him, she held a clambake in lieu of a traditional rehearsal dinner. Oysters and lobsters as far as the eye could see. Unfortunately, I’m allergic to shellfish. After a dozen glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, Chris surprised me by asking me to make a toast. I grabbed the mic, started riffing on my dear friend, and about halfway through accidentally dropped an F-bomb on the crowd. Apparently, wedding speeches are not supposed to make babies cry and guests walk out.

But despite my personal string of snafus, I still believe that bridesmaids should never be allowed to make speeches. Honestly, they’re never good. I’ll even go so far as to say that, in my entire life, no girl has ever told me a story of any kind that was interesting or funny at all. Seriously, guys, if you and your girlfriend both witness an event,
you
tell me what happened.

And when bridesmaids give speeches, they always read directly from a folded-up printout of exactly what they’re gonna say, like a fucking sixth-grade book report. What are you doing? Outline and memorize! I think the only way that girls should be allowed to gives speeches at weddings is if they tell the true story of how the bride and groom actually met. Typically, the story goes that Rachel was at a bar, she accidentally spilled a drink on Shawn, he got her number, their first date was in the park, and the rest is history. Bullshit. Here’s what most likely actually happened: Rachel and Shawn met at a bar. She spilled a drink on him because she was wasted out of her mind. Shawn took her home but Rachel wouldn’t fuck him—which is pretty much the only reason why Shawn texted her the next weekend at 2 a.m. Rachel finally put out…and the rest is history.

WHY WE’RE GATHERED HERE

I like the little program you get when you arrive for the wedding ceremony. I immediately search for the list of bridesmaids. For single guys, this is our first look at the menu for the evening. Sometimes, it lists the bride’s relationship with each bridesmaid. And while the backstory is appreciated, all I’d really like to know is if she has a boyfriend and what my odds are of sealing the deal in the next, say, five hours. I was at a wedding once where two of my friends—who didn’t know each other beforehand—ended up hooking up. Later, the girl asked me if it was weird that the guy tried to sleep with her. Dumbfounded, I replied, “It’d be weird if he
didn’t
try to sleep with you.”

The fact is, every guest at a wedding who is invited without a “plus one” is in search of an elusive and mythical bounty: wedding ass. As the thinking goes, combining lonely single people with an open bar at an event celebrating love should equal rash decision-making and no pants for everyone. But of course the theory that it’s easy to get laid at weddings only holds true if there are actually available girls there. As I get older, each wedding I attend seems to have a smaller population of eligible bachelorettes. And you know the pickings are slim when even the singles table has fucking couples at it!

But that doesn’t mean the marriage of a man and woman who love each other doesn’t ever lead to premarital sex between a man and woman who barely know each other. I’ve done my share of damage, including two wedding weekends where I hooked up with two girls apiece. The first night is much easier, since guests are getting into town from all over the country and are eager to meet new people and party without inhibition. The actual wedding is a bit harder for me, usually because I have to spend at least until the cocktail hour avoiding the chick from the night before.

My primary target will always be the bridesmaids. Since the groom knows them, I’m able to gather better pre-wedding intelligence and, if I’m a groomsmen, jockey to get paired with the hottest single one when walking down the aisle. Plus, if one accepts that loneliness contributes to easiness, then surely the closer a woman is to the bride, the more desperate she becomes. Unfortunately, due to our large, still intact crew from high school, at Brian’s ceremony the groomsmen outnumbered the bridesmaids by about three to one. So not only were there not enough chicks to go around, but as Best Man I had to walk down the aisle by myself like a lost drum major in a marching band.

THE BIG DAY

I was rushing to get ready for my high school buddy Seth’s wedding when I realized the dry cleaner had given me back someone else’s tux pants and they were five sizes too big for me. Since I was at my parents’ house on Long Island, I didn’t have any backups and had to cobble together a makeshift outfit from half a tux and half an outdated, unflattering suit from college. Only later did I discover the dry cleaner had accidentally switched my tux pants with my dad’s, and mine were hanging in his closet in the next room. Which would have been funny had I not just spent the whole night looking like some kind of black-tie hobo.

Everyone says the big day is all about the bride. It’s her time to shine. And thank God, because if weddings were focused on the groom they’d be twice as painful. Grooms always look so fucking awkward during all stages of a wedding—from the time they walk down the aisle right until the last dance. They’re stiff, they’re nervous, they look like they’re about to faint. Sometimes when I’m sitting in the back of the ceremony with the rest of the degenerates who rolled in late, I just want to walk up to the groom, sit his sweating, anxious ass down, and take his place. Not because I’m desperate to get married of course; I just love being the center of attention.

After the ceremony and approximately six minutes into the cocktail hour of any wedding, I always have the same panicked thought: “There aren’t enough bartenders.” Seriously, if you can hire someone whose sole function is to make sure the bride’s train doesn’t touch the ground when she walks down the aisle, you can have someone serve me a fucking Goose on the rocks without making me wait more than a millisecond.

Christina got legally married at city hall six months before her actual wedding, in order to exploit some loophole that allowed her and her husband—both doctors—to get placed in jobs in the same city. I thought the wedding weekend would be a little anticlimactic, but I was pleasantly surprised to get just as belligerently wasted as usual. The first night was the drunken clambake toast disaster, and the morning after the actual wedding I woke up outside in a hammock. The final tally? Bridesmaids taken down: two; tuxes ruined by hammock: one; memories I’ll cherish forever of one of my oldest childhood friends getting married: zero.

During the reception, the bride and groom are like celebrities to me. They’re the stars of the show, but they’re mostly surrounded by their best friends, like a little VIP section. If you’re not a VIP, you actually have to observe and plan out when there’s an opening for you to go up and talk to them—as if you were looking for an autograph. Then you chat for like two minutes just to make sure they’re aware that you did in fact attend, but you know they won’t even remember it. Basically, the only difference between the groom and Justin Timberlake is that JT didn’t spend the summer taking lame-ass ballroom dancing lessons.

My move to Los Angeles coincided directly with the first wave of my friends getting married. Thus, since leaving New York I’ve played one of the most underappreciated roles at every wedding I’ve attended: the out-of-town guest. The simple truth is that flying in for a wedding is a huge pain in the ass. It’s annoying, expensive, and forces you to make sacrifices (for example, having to choose the wedding over the bachelor party). But I soldier on anyway. Why? Because I enjoy celebrating with my friends. I want to be in attendance on the most important day of their lives. And I like making toasts (sometimes unsolicited and often laced with expletives). All I really ask of the happy couple is that they recognize the contribution that single dudes make to their wedding. Seat us next to the hottest available chick. Thank us for spending three hours on Kayak.com looking for a decent flight. Use our crystal serving thingamabob. But most of all, hire another fucking bartender.

POST-NUP

Hanging out with married people my own age is really strange. You know, because they’re married and I’m still human. Guys who are about to get married are very fond of telling their boys that “nothing is gonna change; we’re still gonna hang out.” Trust me, everything changes. I remember talking to one of my buddies a few weeks after his honeymoon and saying, “Dude, all the boys are getting together. We’re going on a mancation. We’re going to fucking Mardi Gras. Are you in?” And my buddy was like, “I’m definitely in. Let me just ask my wife.” I said, “You know what? Offer rescinded. Rescinded! There will be no permission-asking on this mancation. You ruined it.”