If you go to a wedding you are obligated to bring a gift, usually a Cuisinart food processor. A more personal gift would be to absent yourself from the ceremony if your relationship with the bride has been tangled and ugly in a sexual way. This can be a surprising present if you happen to be the groom, but it's apt to be appreciated in the long run.
Manners for New Year's Eve
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to. The hangover begins the next day and lasts through Super Bowl Sunday, when you lose whatever money you had left from Christmas by betting on the Toronto Blue Jays, who are not even a football team.
Manners at the Movies
The movies are so dull these days that the only polite thing to do is provide the entertainment yourself. After the movie starts, change seats frequently and fondle the people you sit down next to.
Manners and Clothes
Never wear jeans and T-shirts. The rich associate jeans and T-shirts with unskilled manual labor. The phenomenon of designer jeans and expensive T-shirts only serves to remind the rich of how deplorably high the minimum wage has become.
Manners and Sports
The most important part of sports is winning. Therefore it's imperative for a courteous sportsman to be a good winner. A good winner always praises the efforts of his opponent. He says something like "I'm sure you would have beaten me, Frank, if you weren't so fat." And a good winner is an honest winner. He says, "You notice that I still beat you, Frank, even though you lied about the ball being out of bounds."
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Excerpted from Modern Manners by P. J. O'Rourke Copyright © 1989 by P. J. O'Rourke. Excerpted by permission.
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