Top Tips For Groom & Best Man Speech (Part 1)

The good (and sometimes bad) thing about being a wedding photographer is that you get to sit through lots and lots and lots of wedding speeches. Usually we’re working quite hard whilst these are going on taking candid photos of the reactions of the guests, but I always pay attention to the speech to get a idea of when the guests might react (fit’s of laughter is always best, but doesn’t always happen.)

So the following is a few top tips gleaned from the numerous speeches we’ve sat through:

Always plan ahead
It really doesn’t matter how cool you think you are in every day life, don’t think you can just rock up to do the speech without any preparation. I’ve seen quite a few cool and funny guys become quite unstuck when it’s come to speech time and they have a room full of people looking at them.
Don’t do any ‘in jokes’
Jokes that only you and the hand full of guys that went on your stag do are going to get aren’t much good for the groom or best mans speech. It’s a bit like telling a joke that no one finds funny and then spending the next five minutes pissing your pants laughing your head off.
Practice make perfect
Where speeches are concerned, practice, practice and practice some more. The slicker you can be with your delivery the easier it will come and it really does make all the difference. If you can practice in front of a friend or a loved one then do that and get them to give you some honest opinions of how it went.
Don’t make any crude joke
Remember you’ve got more people in the room then just your mates from the stag do, so cracking jokes about what the groom did with that banana will go down like a lead balloon. Make all your jokes things that the vast majority of the room can relate to.
Read nice and slowly and keep your head up
As nice as your shoes might look unfortunately those two particular inanimate objects aren’t going to crack a smile at your craftily constructed jokes about the grooms over- use of hair gel (or what ever). So keep your head up and project your voice. Speaking nice and slowly will help you stop from stumbling over your words, slower, by the way, then you might think.

(We’ve got a lot more tips taken from the weddings we do in Surrey and Essex, so at some point I’ll put up part two.)

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