Party hard, with no inhibitions. Forget to study — on purpose. And hey, while you’re at it, just maintain the façade of an utter screw-up for four years.
Behold the mindset of Dennis Bruce, former comedian and pretentious author of “Party Thru College: The Official Party Animal’s Guide to College.” In his eyes, it is perfectly acceptable to waste time and money on a “self-indulgent journey to nowhere,” a concept he adamantly endorses throughout his hilarious book.
Everything from the cover art, exhibiting large-bosomed women in swimsuits holding beers, to the table of contents featuring titles like “Dressing the Part: The Screw-up Wardrobe” and “The Typical Screw-Up Day” paints the parody of the ideal college student.
In the first chapter, Bruce thoroughly explains the fundamental difference between screwing up and flunking out — screwing up requires a much more skilled person. While flunking out will always end in due time, being a screw-up requires dedication and discipline because after all, the longer a person can go carefully allocating his inadequacy and bare minimum work ethic, the more talented he is.
Bruce provides a detailed chart of career possibilities for these so-called clever students: If you mess up in interior design, you can arrange the chairs at a burger joint, and if you fail in Asian studies, you are qualified enough to wash dishes in a Chinese restaurant.
Beware of courses like Wine Tasting 101 and Leisure Studies, Bruce says sarcastically, because these will only ruin the screw-up’s reputation. It’s way more conducive to a screw-up’s image to do badly in Quantitative Business Analysis.
It’s a good thing Bruce accompanies his self-proclaimed dazzling language with an equal amount of pictures, mostly flagrantly-stereotyped art of attractive females and frat guys. If he did not create a picture novella on a first grade reading level, the book really would be a joke, ironically. The images make the words more vivid and add to Bruce’s points.
Perhaps Bruce’s most comical proposal states “the human sense of aesthetic appreciation declines in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol ingested,” accompanied by a portrait of a beautiful blonde in a swimsuit beside an ugly witch. The witch is his illustration of how a woman looks minus a guy’s “beer goggles.”
Another highlight is the list of excuses why you didn’t study (the toilet is stopped up.) And Bruce ingeniously advises the screw-up what to do when accidentally scoring an A. There will inevitably be five stages of acceptance for the above average grade, including shock and anger that are bound to make you laugh aloud.
There are parts of Bruce’s rhetoric that are just plain offensive and vulgar. I know it’s a comedy piece, but there are sections adding nothing to his overall point, besides being distasteful.
You might wonder what place a book like this could have on the shelves of today’s college student. The key here is not to take it seriously. This book is meant to be ridiculous, and if you go into it with the right mindset, you’ll get some great laughs in.
Dudes, bros and the female versions of such would especially find the book entertaining. Yes, it’s funny. Of course, it’s creative. But no, it’s not something that will challenge your mind. Hopefully, this kind of lit will never turn into a genre, but I must say — if ever it did, Bruce would be the bestseller.