Yahoo Lifestyle Do you bore people at parties? The Dull Men’s Club is for you.
Grover Click was sitting at a bar with three friends in New York City when it occurred to him that he and his pals were all pretty boring.
The men belonged to a social club, and they were looking at a magazine that showed their contemporaries involved in activities such as fencing, judo and wrestling. One of them suddenly blurted out, “‘Hey, we don’t do any of these things - we’re kind of dull,’” recalled Click, now 85. “I had to agree.”
On that afternoon in 1988, the Dull Men’s Club was born.
“I suggested that we needed a club for dull men, and we got it started as a joke,” Click said.
They came up with activities they could participate in even if they did not have any particular athletic, artistic or technical abilities.
“We’d race elevators at Macy’s to see which one was fastest, and we’d have silly conversations about tire pressure,” Click said.
Soon, they had a room at the club where they’d meet. “It had 17 chairs - enough for 17 members,” he said.
When someone in the group suggested that they invite women to join them, most of the members shot down the idea.
“They weren’t as dull as we were,” Click said, recalling the consensus of the group.
Almost four decades later, much has changed.
The Dull Men’s Club is now a comfort zone for self-described dull men and women worldwide. More than 1.5 million members post about their latest boring pursuits on the group’s Facebook page and submit ideas to Click for the Dull Men’s Club website.
Click often posts about his own dull adventures, including the times he has participated in pea-throwing contests in the U.K., which is exactly what it sounds like. “We have a thing about peas in England,” Click explained.
On the club’s Facebook group page, it’s rare to find much that’s exciting or stimulating. There are frequent photos of people’s hands. A lot of members post pictures of bananas to give an idea of how to scale the items they photograph.
“Getting acquainted with a new oven, I noticed quite a discrepancy between the temperature selected on the dial, and the temperature indication on an analogue dial thermometer placed inside the oven,” another man recently posted on Facebook. “Time for a proper investigation!” Five club members chimed in with advice and opinions.
“Last night, while making calzones for my family, I came across the end shaving of a pepperoni and I was absolutely delighted,” a woman in her late 20s posted, getting 52 likes.
“I’ve been enjoying this wall for quite some time, hope you like it too!” wrote another member, posting a closeup video of his bland beige surroundings. He received 37 comments, and his post was shared twice.
Click loves it all. There are now several copycat clubs on social media, but he doesn’t mind. There are plenty of dull people to go around, he said.
“People post about their milk bottle collections, how they take out their trash, what kind of potholes they’ve observed,” he said. “I eat a chicken kebab about four or five times a week, and I like to take photos of those. It all works.”
Click said his proclivity toward dullness started while growing up in Chappell, Nebraska, a town with fewer than 1,000 people.
“Was I boring as a kid? Yes, I’d have to say that I was,” he said.
His birth name was Leland Carlson, but Click decided that name wasn’t dull enough after he started the Dull Men’s Club, even though he was working at the time as a tax attorney and accountant.
“Actually, just tell people I was an accountant,” he quipped. “Tax attorney sounds too exciting.”
“I thought Grover Click had a nice dull ring to it,” he said, adding that another benefit of the new name was that he wouldn’t have to explain his club activities to his employer.
Since retiring in 2000, he divides his time between Winchester, U.K., and Washington D.C., where he has an apartment near Washington National Cathedral. Although he’s been single his entire life, he said he has a girlfriend who puts up with his favorite pastime of sitting on park benches.
Click said he is baffled but delighted at the success of the Dull Men’s Club. He’s put out several calendars featuring some of the group’s members, from a California woman who has an obsession with “wet floor” signs to a New York City man who collects security envelopes.
Barbara Hartsfield, a 78-year-old nurse from Atlanta, said she has taken gentle ribbings from friends and family members since she appeared in Click’s 2022 calendar, but she considers her membership in the Dull Men’s Club an honor.
“I actually don’t consider myself dull - I prefer the term ‘intriguing,’” said Hartsfield, who posts on social media about her collection of 3,000 miniature chairs, accumulated over 30 years.
It was an unexpected treat to end up in the calendar, she said.
“Grover is such a character - I love his energy and excitement in looking for new things to tell people about, whether they’re dull or not,” Hartsfield said.
Click said there is no shortage of dull material for people to write about.
“But whoever thought that watching elevators at Macy’s would lead to all of this?” he mused, noting that in 2015 he wrote a book about the “Dull Men of Great Britain.”
One of Click’s fans, Wade Jeranek, now helps monitor the posts people share on the Dull Men’s Club Facebook page. He said he knew immediately that the group was for him when he stumbled upon it two years ago.
“I thought, ‘Wow, these people are interesting but dull,’” said Jeranek, 52, who lives in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and works as a security guard.
“I became fascinated with the posts from other countries like the Netherlands, where somebody posted about how their garbage pickup works,” he said. “Little by little, I realized I was one of them.”
Click admits that some might find the pursuits of club members more fascinating or eccentric than dull.
“I guess it’s a self-assessment thing,” he said. “If you’re thinking you’d be a good member of the Dull Men’s Club, then you’re probably already a member.”
“I should point out that we’re not dullards, we’re dullsters,” he added. “Dullster is the perfect word. It’s the opposite of hipster.”
Click said he recently submitted his new word for consideration by the Oxford Dictionary selection committee. He hasn’t heard back yet.
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