Best Man speech

I think the line from the film Wedding Crashers is good advice - something about making sure the speech is from the heart rather than trying to be funny.

It's very true that often the funny stories you remember are ones which only a small number of people will be in on. It happened to me at a friend's wedding. She married a German guy and his father decided to tag an impromptu speech onto the end of the speeches from everyone else. I was dragged up to translate for him and he made a reference to something which had happened a few years before which was a standing joke in their family but no-one except my friend, her husband, his brother and parents knew anything about so it made absolutely no sense to anyone else at all.

And don't worry too much about the amount of time - a sincere 3-minute speech will go down much better than 10 minutes of waffle. Get yourself a loan of a dictaphone or similar and record yourself speaking for say five minutes. You'd be amazed how quickly the time goes. Remember that making a speech it's good to try and speak slowly and distinctly so you might not fit as much in to the time as you would in a normal conversation.

Good luck.

Oh, also try the forums at www.weddingsonline.ie for ideas.

I've got to do a speech as groom next week and in preparation I did an evening course on public speaking a few months ago. From that I gained a few points - firstly, I agree with the poster above and the Wedding Crashers, a simple, genuine, complementry speech goes down a lot better than a few jokes lifted from the internet, secondly you should definitely practice, but don't try to learn your speech by heart or try and stick to the exact same words every time. It sounds forced and boring.

When we were doing our course, we would always get homework to prepare a speech for the following week. Everyone obviously spent a good bit of time writing them out and getting them ready beforehand. We'd read/recite our speeches during the first half of the class and then our teacher would invariably ask us to come back after the break and give the speech again, but from the opposite viewpoint - the speeches with only 5 minutes preparation always sounded a lot better then the prepared ones.

I'm using my cameraphone to tape myself practising the speech - the first time I even bored myself!