Bad Weddings

HA HA. From The Guardian.

How to make the best of your best man's speech

Tim Dowling
Wednesday August 15, 2007

Guardian
No wedding is complete without a best man - although we might perhaps extend this sentiment to "no wedding is completely ruined without a best man", courtesy of a case currently being heard by a jury at Preston crown court. According to the prosecution, the trouble started when the best man at a wedding reception in Yorkshire misjudged the mood of his audience, and decided to expose himself in the name of entertainment. He then allegedly went on to batter a guest who upbraided him for this behaviour.

There are no doubt weddings where this sort of thing is positively encouraged, but herein lies the dilemma for any best man: it is impossible to gauge the mood of a group made up of two different sets of friends and family.

Best man speeches come in three basic varieties: pompous and lawyerly; shambolically ribald; and inoffensively boring. There are "good" best man's speeches - well judged, amusing, moving and brief - but they don't appear in sufficient quantity to constitute a separate category.

At the diabolical end, you have best men who employ PowerPoint and the odd one who thinks it's a good idea to recount the bride's sexual history in song while accompanying himself on the guitar. If you spot him at the rehearsal dinner scrawling on a napkin and asking people for words that rhyme with "venereal", replace him with a second cousin immediately.

Never, under any circumstances, have two best men (as happened at the Yorkshire wedding). If there's one thing worse than a loudmouth who can't wait to tell the family of the bride what a drunken, sexually incontinent no-mark her future husband is, it's two loudmouths trying to outdo each other.

And if you should ever be asked to be a best man, just remember that your main obligation is to thank the bridesmaids, and that anything else you say is liable to offend somebody. And when in doubt, don't get your penis out.