well, in this particular case, operator.itemgetter is your friend :D import operator def get_users_by_posts(): return sorted(users, key=operat

well, in this particular case, operator.itemgetter is your friend :D import operator def get_users_by_posts(): return sorted(users, key=operator.itemgetter(1)) then, if you really want to, you can use functools.partial to fill the parameters from functools import partial from operator import itemgetter get_users_by_posts = partial(sorted, users, key=itemgetter(1))