I recently sat through a “best man speech” that managed to embarrass the bride, the family and the best man. The best man was young but not so young that he didn’t know how to prepare a speech. He just put it off and decided to ad-lib it when the time came. That was a big mistake because whatever ideas he had loosely assembled in his brain pretty much evaporated as he lost control of his monologue. A little too much alcohol supercharged this comedy of speech-giving errors turned completely embarrassing but it shouldn’t have. The best man was simply too unprepared for this important part of the wedding events and it ended up as a sour note and humiliation for the bride and groom and well, anyone subjected to his diatribe of revealing statements that would have been better off unsaid or at least not all combined together into the disaster his speech turned out to be.
Why? Well there were simply too many things left to chance that could have been easily controlled using a few techniques that every best man should know before giving that all important speech.
Best man speeches are often a critical part of the festivities and potentially a wedding karma killer. By time you give your best man speech, people have forgotten the ideal feeling of the ceremony and fist entrances of the bride and groom. People are paying attention now because they want something new to keep the good mood going. You don’t want to be caught unprepared for this relatively simple but high profile obligation when you’re the best man. Ignoring the problem of being unprepared for your best man speech only makes the problem worse when you get in front of that crowd of 50, 100 or several hundred people, they’re waiting to be made to feel like they know the groom just a little bit better than when you began. They want to be reassured that the couple is a good match, that the groom is a good guy after all and he will be a great family man but you can wreck this expectation and create a very unpleasant environment for everyone very fast simply because you didn’t take less than an hour to prepare the basic elements of a successful best man speech.
