Taking on the mantle of Best Man is a great honour, but coming to terms with having to make the most anticipated speech of the wedding day (if not your entire life) can be a wee bit daunting.
As with most things in life, the success of your speech is as much down to what you don’t say as what you do. Given the traditionally raucous reputation afforded to the Best Man, it can be very tempting to go for smut and shock value, but this is in fact a really terrible idea. And take it from me, you want that information to sink in well in advance of the big day – not [pullquote position=”right”]when you’re standing up in front of two hundred people reeling off that gag about the Russian prostitute with the yeast infection that sounded so brilliant in the pub.[/pullquote]
With this in mind, here are our Top Five best man speech jokes NOT To Make in your Best Man speech:
1. Groom’s Ex-Girlfriends
Does this one really warrant a mention? Yes it does, because despite the obvious pitfalls there will always be the joker who thinks it’s a brilliant idea to proceed with an in-depth rundown of the Groom’s long list of sexually experimental lovers. One thing you can do is hint at his romantic past in such a way that makes it clear he finally got it right this time (after a series of disasters), but going into any greater detail than that is unwise. The bride doesn’t want to hear about it and, as a result, neither will anyone else.
2. Unpleasant Goings-on from the Stag Do
We’ve all been there. We’ve all been sitting around a wedding table with a bunch of people we already knew we didn’t like (and after three courses of mediocre food can confirm are still tremendously tedious) when the entire congregation collectively winces at the Best Man sniggering his way through a lengthy anecdote about Fat Dave being tugged off by a monkey in Bangkok. It’s not going to win you any friends.
3. Cost of the Wedding
This is actually a bit of a grey area. Depending on your relationship with the bride’s family, it might be possible to poke some gentle fun in this direction, but unless you’re confident it’ll be taken in good spirits, it’s probably best to steer clear.
4. The Dress
[pullquote]I thought the cliché that most girls have been planning their wedding day since they were six was just a big hilarious joke, but then I asked a few of them and BY GOD IT’S TRUE.[/pullquote] Setting aside for a moment how mental this is, make a note that one of the central aspects of this daydreaming is the dress. They’ve known what it would look like before they were old enough to master basic division. So, honestly, don’t go there.
5. Mother Of The Bride
This is the biggie. Sure, you don’t want rip the piss out of your best mate’s new wife, but you can actually get away with good-natured material about the bride provided it’s within the context of a) how gorgeous and amazing she is and b) how lucky the groom is to have (god knows how) ensnared such a rapturous beauty. Her mother, on the other hand, is out of bounds. At weddings, some MOTBs will be experiencing a strange cocktail of pride at their daughter’s nuptials and melancholy at the realisation that they must now be ‘of a certain age’, and on the off-chance that’s true in your case, don’t risk it mate. Just don’t risk it.