Address friends overly “agressive” way to get attention back on him when around girls

Question

I often go out on weekends with a few friends of mine, we're all around 18-21 years old from Germany. One of them (lets name him L.) really is a chill guy. Me and my friends aren't really that good with girls in a romantic way, but we got some female mutual friends.

Now the deal is, every time our group is joined by a girl, L. behaves pretty "agressive" towards me and others. He's always trying to talk about himself in a good way while pushing us others down verbally. I should add we make fun of each other in a friendly, funny way all the time (as many guy-groups do) - nobody gets hurt and everyone, including the one made fun of at the moment, can laugh about the joke and/or roast the other one with a nice comeback. But when girls are around, L. does that to an extreme. He also always tries to push himself in the foreground.

Quick example:

I'm fairly skinny, hence I'm always called a leek ("Lauch" in German, a pretty common way to make fun of skinny people here in Germany). I don't really have a problem with that, but last weekend he wouldn't stop comparing me to thin objects literally all night (because a female friend of us was around). Furthermore, when one of us was speaking, he quickly got his phone out and showed us some memes to get the attention back on him, which was really annoying.

I now want to adress this behavior of his, make him aware of his behavior so that he hopefully stops/lessens it, but don't really know how.

Answer 1

I want to share what I would do in this situation with a big disclaimer that it might not be suitable for you specifically or your group of friends.

With my group of friends similar behavior was met with a very strong reaction from a few other people within the group and it was always very effective.

So I would say: Fight fire with fire

I want to note that making fun of each other was a favourite past time activity in my group and it was maybe more than other groups do.

Some examples: Boy 1 talks to Girl 1. Boy 2 tries to focus attention to him. Boy 3 (or Boy 1 in some cases) intercepts with something like "Oh Excuse him, he turns into attention black hole when he senses people without a Y chromosome."

Then pulls Boy 2 to the side and Boy 1 can continue conversation undisturbed.

Or another situation:

B1 speaks with G1, B2 tries to go "Oh look at this cool meme I saw yesterday", B3 immediately goes "No look at my meme", B4 goes "No look at mine" all obviously mocking mocking B2 trying to butt in. Then B3 continues with "Wasn't that nice, lets do something more fun, isn't this paint drying on that wall over there, lets go see" and pulls B2 away again before anyone saw whatever he was trying to show on his phone.

This is how we would handle this when any member tries to focus attention on him while someone is having a conversation with someone from the opposite sex. I am saying again, might not be suitable at all for your group and everyone needs to be in on the joke.

Answer 2

I think the best way to address this issue is to talk to your friend candidly in a private setting. You, or maybe you and one of your other friends, should initiate a conversation. I wouldn't suggest having the conversation with many more people, because then L might feel ganged up on and react accordingly.

You could start the conversation off with something like this:

Recently, I (we) have noticed that you act very differently when we're hanging out around girls. For example, last weekend you were incessantly teasing me about being thin. While I don't mind an occasional joke, it was annoying that you wouldn't let up on it. Additionally, when we weren't paying attention to you, you kept trying to show us memes, even though we were talking about something else. Have you noticed this behavior?

Give him a chance to respond. You may gain some insight into why he's acting like this.

Make sure to affirm his friendship:

We enjoy hanging out with you, and you're usually pretty chill. You're just hard to be around when you're acting out, and we'd really appreciate if you stop.

Going forward, positively reinforce his behavior by affirming when his behavior improves, and gently call him out on it if the annoying behavior persists.