15 Controversial Dinner Party Questions That Are Actually Fun

One thing about me: I love to ask people icebreaker questions, no matter how well we know each other. I can be socially awkward at times, and having a few questions in my back pocket to get conversation going and flowing is really important to me. If you are like me at all, I thought of (and asked around for) 15 icebreaker questions that you could ask when getting drinks with friends, hosting a dinner party, having a picnic, or going on a date for the first time. If you’re looking for fun questions to ask, then read on. 

This one is a fun one — I’d personally probably pick going to outer space, because I’ve heard that seeing Earth from that distance is mind-altering. But what would you pick?  

As a straight-up question, it’s great to know whether your friends see themselves as Kim, Khloe, Kylie, Kendall, or Kourtney. And it’s even more revealing when people don’t want to answer the question at all. 

You can set your own parameters on this one: You could be nice and let people live with natural light, or you could say that they’d have to give that up, too, and see what they want. 

I would get rid of garlic. Controversial, I know — but you can have powdered onion, pickled onion, raw onion, caramelized onion, shallot, white, yellow, red onion … and I just can’t give all of that up. 

Now this is a real hot take — I’d get rid of summer. If you want to do the question on hard mode, tell people they can’t get rid of winter and see what they’d say. 

I’d pick “Age of Adz” by Sufjan Stevens. But this is a fun question because it’s not exactly what someone’s favorite album is — it’s equally about an album that they wouldn’t get bored of, even if it was the only music they could ever listen to for the rest of their natural born life. 

One of my favorite ice-breakers. The most fun part of the question is having people Google their elderly celebrity crushes and seeing how old they are. 

I didn’t come up with this one — a few friends did. What’s fun about this question is its less fixed identity and more about the kind of day, week, month or year you’re having. Sometimes I’m feeling like a girl boss; sometimes I’m feeling like a mob wife. It just sort of depends. 

How about I pick none and we move on? (I’d probably pick something like Signs, because I’d never live in a corn field in the middle of nowhere.) 

I typically ask this question for people around their birthdays — I call it their “birthday wisdom.” When I ask people this question, I give them time to think it over and let them come back to me as a two-parter. It’s a great question for birthdays, because it helps your loved ones reflect on their past year (and how they’re feeling looking back on their lives). But it’s also a fun question at the top of a dinner party — let people chew it over and answer it throughout the night. 

This one is fun because you get to see the kind of delusional that your friends are. My kind of delusion is that I’d probably be a good fit for gymnastics, because I’m pretty petite, but for no other reason than that. I can’t imagine flipping through the air like that.

And it can’t be something like potatoes in a sock, either. Just one vegetable in your hand. What’s your weapon of choice? 

An easy question for me, because I love eating the same foods over and over. Similar to the only-one-album-ever-again question, what’s fun about this is that you’re not really asking your friends what their favorite food is. You’re asking them what food they would be willing to tolerate, day in and day out, forever. 

Limiting this to competition shows is fun, but you can also allow your guests to answer the question with any reality television show, if you have a friend who thinks they would be great on the Real Housewives franchise, or excellent on Below Deck, for example. 

This is more fun than asking about a favorite movie, and gets people going with hot takes. Have everyone answer the question and let the arguments ensue.