Wedding speech - the five quickest ways to ruin it
Burn the Toast are a company that specialises in speeches for weddings, and they have worked on over 1000 best man, groom and father of the bride speeches. In that time they have seen all of the most common wedding speech mistakes and have put together a list of some of the quickest ways you can ruin your wedding speech, in the hope that you can avoid the embarrassment of ruining your toast…
1) Using inappropriate content
Don't taint Grandma's image of the groom
by telling all about his lurid past!
At most weddings your audience will span three generations, so you need to make sure that there's nothing in your speech that you wouldn't tell to your grandma or any young relation. Top of the list of things to avoid are detailed reviews of the stag-do. Apply the rule that "what goes on tour, stays on tour." When it comes to selecting your material best men should at worst aim to mildly embarrass but never utterly destroy the groom.
2) Relying on jokes you've taken from the internet
You don't need to be a professional stand-up comedian to write your own material, just collect a range of information on your subject and with work and time your speech will take shape. Ask friends from different areas of the groom's life for amusing stories too. Although it can be tempting, you should try and avoid rehashing the same old wedding gags - "it's obviously been an emotional day, even the cake is in tiers," is probably one of the more tired ones, but there are hundreds of others which will get you nothing but the heard-it-before groans.
3) "I'm sure something will come to me when I stand up…"
Maybe one-in-a-thousand people could pull off this sort of improvisational feat with any degree of success, it's unlikely that you will. What often happens when you haven't prepared is that the nerves kick in and you find yourself grasping for anything to say, or worse still, rambling for an hour. Either way, you've just made an idiot of yourself and missed an opportunity to make a priceless contribution to the wedding. People remember that sort of thing.
The cardinal sin. Don't let everyone down by getting tanked
beforeyour speech. You have a responsibility to be on form
4) Getting drunk before you give your speech
There's an incredibly fine line between getting some Dutch courage and losing control of what you're saying and doing. Obviously, it's safer to abstain from drinking until you've done your speech, but at a wedding this can be hard, especially if you have to sit through a meal before the speeches. If everyone is nervous about the speeches, consider switching them to before the meal, that way you can get them out of the way and enjoy a few well-deserved glasses of wine with your meal.
5) Forgetting the relevant etiquette
Each of the speeches has its own particular function and it is important to make sure your speech does what it's supposed to. In many cases months of planning will have gone into choosing the correct wording of an invitation, or the political implications of the seating plan. So if you come along and forget to toast the bridesmaids (groom) or fail to welcome the guests (father of the bride) then you're going to be in trouble. Do some research and make sure your speech complies with the etiquette.
If you need help with speeches for weddings speak to Burn The Toast about how they can help you to create the perfect speech.