Best Man Wedding Speeches

In the last post as you recall, I said that delivering great best man wedding speeches hinged on doing the right things. Success of the best man wedding speech also depends on not doing the wrong things. Here are 5 of my favorites that send up red flags:

1. The Bride Can Do No Wrong…

Whatever you do, don’t insult the bride. Not even a little bit. If the wedding is a movie, then the star of the movie is the bride. Avoid anything negative, remember the bride walks on water during her wedding day. Any comments that could be construed as insulting or embarrassing should be avoided at all costs.

2. Omar Khadafi At The United Nations

Needless to say, you don’t want to come across like good ole Omar at the U.N. A rambling, senseless wedding speech is not what you want to be remembered for. All good best man wedding speeches will have a beginning, middle, and end. The wedding speech should be well planned and rehearsed so it is well paced, relatively short, and is well received and remembered.

3. And now…Here’s Johnny…

If you are the type of person that loves to tell a funny story or is naturally funny, by all means use that approach in your best man wedding speech. If you are the serious sort, don’t use the funny man approach, it won’t work, don’t go there. A more serious, heartfelt approach would suit you better and come across as touching and very sincere. Stay true to your nature here. Yes, everyone loves to laugh, but not everyone is funny. A more serious story or account, perhaps even droll humor would suit you better. I know some very serious people that are seriously funny in a unique, droll kind of way. It works for them. If not, a more sincere, from the heart approach might be more fitting depending on personality.

4. Where Is Howard Stern When You Need Him?…

Don’t go for any subject that could be viewed as controversial and do it for shock value. You don’t want to be compared to Howard Stern, the king of shock jock. Best man wedding speeches should be free of controversial material. Personality quirks, religious beliefs, political views, physical characteristics, and known secrets of the bride or groom should be avoided completely. What may seem funny to you may not be funny at all to Cousin Leroy or Grandma Ethel.

5. I Said…What?…

If you can not remember your best man wedding speech the next day, you may have had too much to drink. One drink to calm the nerves before the wedding speech is fine in most cases. After the wedding speech and toast is history, feel free to get hammered. Do not let alcohol guide your wedding speech with slurred words and impaired judgement.

I could not have pulled off a better wedding speech without the expert guidance and golden material that had me picking and choosing what I needed to include to make my speech complete. In the next post, you will find out how I planned, practiced, and performed a most memorable best man wedding speech.

Delivering great best man wedding speeches is no accident. It takes a little foresight, planning, and action to carry out a successful wedding plan strategy. Here are some general guidelines to consider when you start the process of thinking about how you are going to implement an effective strategy. I would never go into a large block trade blindly on Wall Street, so I sure as heck was not going to do it with this wedding speech. There was too much at stake. I had a reputation to uphold after all.

1. Stick To The Plan…

Going off on a tangent, rambling, or thinking of things to say on the fly, is probably not the best approach when planning a well thought out wedding speech. Know what you are going to say and how you are going to say it. Is it a story, fond remembrance, or current events that you are going to focus your speech on? Will it be funny, serious, sincere, or a combination of all three. You need to know what your plan of attack is going to be before you start the detailed plan of your best man wedding speech.

2. Who Is Fair Game During Your Speech?

Are you going to poke a little fun at the groom, a light roast perhaps. Usually the groom is your very close buddy or brother, so he is usually fair game to go after as long as you don’t embarrass him or his lovely bride. The bride, her family, his family, their friends, their dogs or cats, are all off limits. Too much risk in offending someone and creating a problem. Mild roasting at the grooms expense is perfectly OK, if done in good taste.

3. It’s All In The Story…

People love stories. Build a story around the groom and with a theme. You can use your own experiences with the groom as material or gather information from the bride or grooms family. Childhood experiences can make hilarious material years later as one looks back. The more material you have to work with, the easier it is to come up with a theme and build your speech.

4. Be Confident…

Pretend you are the President Of the United States making a speech. Be confident, stand up straight, make eye contact with the bride, groom, and wedding guests. Speak clear and loud so they can hear you and pace yourself properly with pauses and gestures as you move smoothly through the wedding speech. You are the center of attention for a brief amount of time, make it count.

5. Be Yourself…

Don’t try to be someone you are not. Use your natural voice and your individual mannerisms that make “you”…you. The choice of the groom to make you the best man was made because of who you are. Most of the family and many of your mutual friends will appreciate the heartfelt wedding speech that you give. Everyone wants you to succeed in making a great wedding speech for the bride and groom.

I knew when my brother Frank asked me to be his best man that I was in trouble. Best man wedding speeches in the formal environment of a big wedding reception at a fancy country club with 500 guests staring at me in anticipation of a memorable wedding speech put me in a state of fear that I had not experienced since jumping off our garage roof when I was 8 years old with self-made wings on my arms trying to fly like a bird.

Planning was the key solution to my problem. I knew that as a day trader on Wall Street that before I enter a trade, it is always with a planned entry. In trading the financial markets, I don’t like to be in the market any longer than I have to. Until the trade is exited, there is always risk. I figured that the same applies for a best man wedding speech. So, my plan was to keep the wedding speech short. Less risk. Between 2 to 4 minutes was my plan for the sweet spot for my best man wedding speech.

I planned on using index cards to write out the speech highlights that I would be using. If push came to shove, I would use the index cards to make the speech. Turns out I did not need to. Research, planning, writting out index cards, practicing the speech, memorizing the key components of what I wanted to say, and delivering the final result worked just great to give me the confidence I needed to make my best man speech and wedding toast to the bride and groom. It was a great moment that I was proud to give to my brother.

Best man wedding speeches can be tricky. Using standard cliches, mindless rambling, offending the bride or other guests, not speaking loud enough, not making eye contact, a monotone delivery, a dull listless speech, and a myriad of other traps, all await the novice best man when the moment comes.

Here is a general outline of how I planned my best man wedding speech:

1. Introduction: General greeting and how I know the bride and groom.
2. Thank you’s: Thanking wedding guests and parents of the bride and groom for attending.
3. Story telling: This was the meat and potatoes of my speech, more on that later.
4. Best man wedding toast: Conclusion with a “from the heart” toast.
5. Applause : Now I can have a drink, maybe several.

In the next post, I will give you some of the dos and don’ts in putting together best man wedding speeches. Ideally, you will want as much preparation time as you can get to research wedding planning strategies that give the best chance of hitting a home run. Preparation and planning go a long way in giving a fantastic wedding speech and toast. It can really pay off in the end.