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21 Bad Taste Theme Party Ideas for a Funny Time

Updated on: Feb 16, 2024

If you want to throw a party your guests have never experienced before, a “Bad Taste” theme party may be the theme party or birthday party choice for you. “Bad Taste” parties can range from the merely tacky to the downright disgusting. How you want to organize the night and stay on budget is up to you! If you have guests with a sense of humor, a “Bad Taste” party can be a hilarious event. Here are some bad taste-themed party ideas, including nasty favors, trash decor, and gross menus.

Bad Taste Theme Party Food Ideas

1. Gross Food

Use food dye to paint your meals in a truly unappetizing light. Sandwiches can be touched up with a bit of green food dye for fake mold. For foods like pasta and rice, try smashing other foods that taste good with them. It’ll look gross but still taste like a pasta and rice meal. This isn’t limited to just-food. Make your drinks look gross with food coloring or mix juices to make a disgusting brown color (it’s ok! the juice will still taste great.) If it’s a party for adults, get mixers and alcohol for wild colored drinks!

2. Twinkies

These creamy squishy-filled foods are what may be the most unhealthy snack treat of all time. These are the epitome of bad-taste desserts. To make it fun with your bad-taste party, smoosh them into creamy, Twinkie balls. Then make icing with food coloring for a disgusting look to it.

3. Cat Litter

Buy a new cat litter tray and fill it with litter-colored candies, such as crushed peanuts and pine nuts. Scatter chocolates across the tray (for poop!) and leave a “litter” scoop by the side. This is good for any candy that can have stuff stuck to it. You can disguise gummies, nuts, chocolate, even fruit! Don’t mind bigger chunks of fruit or sticking gummies together in some chocolate. You can also crush up some dark chocolate pretzels!

4. Cheap Beer

Keystone, Natural Light, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Busch Light, etc. Order from a local liquor store. Cheap beer is pretty sickening. Feel free to try and make it tasty by mixing it with other drinks or even candies. Who knows, it might actually match more with the bad-tasting theme. Don’t do this if you’re not 21 or older.

5. Spray Cheese

A college kid’s staple, have a few cans of spray cheese on hand with crackers for an appetizer. You can find cans of spray cheese at your local grocery store or online. There are even different flavors such as Cheddar, Sharp Cheddar, and American. Not to mention, they'll make for great party favors at the end of the night.

6. Fast Food

Go through the drive-thru or order in, what better meal to have at your bad taste party than greasy fast food. You can even make it a potluck and have your guests bring their favorite fast food to share! Grab a party platter of chicken nuggets at McDonald's or Chick-fil-A or a messy platter of wings from Chili's. Any fast-food chain will do – find the greasiest food you can!

7. Cheese Doodles

If you are looking for a messy snack, cheese doodles are the way to go. These are a great snack, and they leave a cheesy trail that will disgust your guests. Grab a party-size bag of these at your local grocery store and leave the bag on your snack table for the guests to help themselves.

Bad Taste Theme Party Décor

8. Trashy Costumes

Have guests come dressed in terribly- ripped, stained (and maybe a little smelly) clothes. You can take the word “trashy” to a whole other level for adults. Wearing ripped lingerie, ripped fishnet stockings, broken heels, and smudged messy makeup to tie it all together.

9. Sleazy Costumes

Corny suits, sleazy comb-overs, and overly made-up faces (think Scott Disick, Snookie, etc.) Gold chains, hairy chests, and “bling” would also suit the mood. You can find costume materials at a toy store, costume store, or online.

10. Terrible Décor

Decorate the room terribly with ripped drapery, stains on the carpet, and a mess in the room. It’s also “tasteful” for a bad taste theme party to have tacky decor. Use bright mix match colors, decorations that don’t go together at all, and designs and patterns that would make your head spin looking at them together.

11. Garbage Bags

Instead of balloons, use trash bags to decorate the room. Tie or glue the opening shut and blow up with helium like an actual balloon. This may be time-consuming and it might not even work, but it’s worth a shot! If you have trash bags around at least you know you can clean up easily, right?

12. Toilet Paper

Do you like hanging up streamers at parties? For a bad taste party, hang toilet paper from wall to wall instead of streamers. Want to go all out and decorate outside too? You can tee-pee your own house and even make it a group activity! Get a big bag of toilet paper and throw it all over the trees and the house.

13. Props

Props can spice up your party or make it worse! Mix and match holiday decorations, place plastic palm trees around the room, and put up cardboard beer cutouts. Really any prop can set this up. Have old barrels by the door and fake trash around the house like balled-up pieces of paper. If you have a pool get some cheap styrofoam noodles and make tears in them. Check if food coloring will ruin anything, you don’t actually want to make a mess. If you’re in the clear add food coloring to your pool to make it look like a swamp or dirty lake! How weird!

14. Tacky Music

Play one-hit wonders, retro collections, and songs by celebrities who are wannabe pop singers. Remember those 1980s songs that had a ton of synchronizers and electric piano? Yeah, play that. A lot of your tacky music can come from the 80s and 90s era of everyone trying to make it big with a camera and a cheap music video for MTV. You could also play old mail-order CDs like Now That’s What I Call Music.

Bad Taste Theme Party Favors

15. Toothpicks

A little plastic bag of toothpicks would make a perfect tasteless party gift. If you want to be truly gross, make them used toothpicks!

16. Drink Cozies

You could get drink cozies with pictures of bad-taste things, like the cast of Jersey Shore or the Kardashians. You can get custom-made cozies online or you can grab some sharpies and the guests can decorate them themselves.

17. Cans of Spray Cheese

For a truly nasty touch, give out the already-opened cans of spray cheese you used at the party itself. Your guests might still be in a silly party mood as they’re leaving. This is great for an outside food fight and uses the rest of the cheese you didn’t use inside.

18. Bottle Openers

Your guests are going to need something to open their cheap beers. Though a single bottle opener isn’t a very inviting party favor- it’s perfect for a bad taste guest. You can get these pretty cheap at Walmart and Target.

Bad Taste Theme Party Games

19. Costume Contest

Have your guests come dressed in their best bad taste costume. The more creative the costume, the better! Make sure to offer a prize to the most poorly dressed guest.

20. Disgusting Food Contest

Challenge your guests to eat an array of disgusting food. Whoever eats the most unappetizing item wins! To play, gather up a disgusting dish for each round of the game, it's up to you on how many rounds you would like it to be. Then have everyone sit around the table and let the challenge begin! If someone refuses to eat the item or gets sick, they are out.

21. Taste Test

Have your guests put on blindfolds and taste test a variety of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter food items. Put different food items in paper cups then, without looking, pass around the food items for everyone to taste. Once everyone has tested an item, the group has to guess what it is. Once every item has been identified correctly, the game ends.