Guide to ensure that the best man really does win (From Worcester News)

Guide to ensure that the best man really does win

3:42pm Wednesday 4th January 2012 in Mike Pryce By Mike Pryce

SOME make you laugh, some make you cringe and others just send you to sleep. I suppose it all depends on how much you’ve had to drink by the time the best man rises to his feet at the wedding reception.

It’s a moment that can instil fear and dread in equal measure and not just in the person about to make the speech.

“What’s he going to say?” is something high in the mind of the bride and groom and probably also their parents. Are there going to be embarrassing details of previous girlfriends/ boyfriends, personal fetishes/faults or tales of staggering half-dressed and drunk out of a Rimini nightclub into the arms of the local Cabinieri?

Sometimes a speech works – very often it doesn’t – but now Worcester Round Table has come up with a guide to the dos and don’ts for the occasion to try to make sure the best man doesn’t put his foot in it.

Culled from experiences both locally and nationally, The Perfect Best Man’s Speech Revealed should be required reading for all potential groom’s best mates, but knowing the nature of the beast, is unlikely to be.

There’s no place like an inebriated wedding reception for flying by the seat of your pants and saying things you shouldn’t, often to people you don’t know and are unlikely to meet again.

However, a quick flick through this guide should avoid catastrophic opening lines such as: “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, I have to confess this isn’t the first time today I’ve stood up from a warm seat with a piece of paper in my hand,” (cue gales of laughter from the groom’s mates and an icy stare from the bride’s mother).

Or how about: “Ladies and gentlemen, fornication. Sorry I meant to say, for this occasion.”

Of course there are some people with no sense of humour whatsoever and the best man is always going to be battling against that. But what you have to remember about a wedding reception audience is that no one has bought tickets to be there, unless you count chipping in with a wedding present.

So there’s going to be a very wide range of sensibility and sensitivity in attendance. Choose to go to a Russell Brand or Freddie Starr gig and it’s taken for granted you are a fan of the genre. There may not necessarily be such a connection between the bride’s maiden aunt and the best man.

Best avoided are lurid accounts of how the groom or bride lost their virginity, often not to the person to whom they have just pledged their troth.

Also no bawdy swear words which can be picked up and repeated at full volume by small children present.

The most over-used joke is the one about deciding the seating plan on the value of the wedding presents and then saying to someone at the back: “Thanks for the oven glove, mate.”

Or possibly the congratulatory wedding message to their “biggest spender” from the girls at Spearmint Rhino. Of course, one of the dangers of the internet is that people trawl through it and will soon know if you’ve nicked the gags.

Best try to be original if you can and relate the speech to some particular happenings in the groom’s or bride’s life.

If you’re not a natural joke teller, don’t try.

There are plenty of ways of being amusing and interesting without aiming to emulate Tim Vine or Tommy Cooper.

In fact, in an interview about best man speeches to promote his Punslinger DVD, Tim Vine said: “Talk about the person because that is what people want to hear.

“You feel slightly cheated if a best man gets up and does a selection of jokes that you’ve vaguely heard before.

“Often they’ll get a laugh out of sympathy, but a lot of the time you should look to sacrifice haymaker laughs for talking about the person, because that’s where the interest is and occasionally people stumble on really big laughs.”

In other words, unless you are really good, keep the set jokes out of your wedding day speech.

However, Tim did add: “I spoke to this barn owl the other day and I said ‘I’ve just got engaged’. He said, ‘You twit, to who?’”

Boom. Boom.

Greg Jones, chairman of Worcester Round Table, has his own advice.

He said: “Being a best man can often be the most terrifying experience a bloke can face and I have seen usually strong men buckle under the strain, reduced to incoherent wrecks. This is where the Round Table can help, as our members have been and have seen a great many best men.

“The guide draws on our experiences of what to do and what not to do as a best man and as our members are all men aged between 18 and 45, it is written for blokes who are most likely to be facing this challenge.

“It contains everything from tips on organising stag dos (we’re good at this kind of thing – Tablers are always organising fun social activities) through to how to get your speech in good shape.”

So there you have it, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in humour or in stonyfaced silence, may the best man win.