Tell your best man to limit his speech time

Weddings are famous for best man speeches, intended to be hilarious, a little bit cringey and full of good fun. But a wedding I went to last year featured probably the worst best man’s speech known to, well, man.

Not only was it painfully executed, with lots of mumbling, niche references that no one except the groom understood (know your audience, buddy), and relentless stories about other women the groom had had crushes on in his younger years (clearly making the bride uncomfortable, and again had very little relevance to the event in hand and 98% of the people at it) – it went on for a solid 55 minutes.

Seriously, it was like bloody marathon. About 25 minutes in, I noticed (drifting in and out of consciousness) that the speech still hadn’t reached a point in the groom’s life where he had even met the bride, and thought how much longer have we got to go? So when at 40 minutes in, he pulled out a small projector and ushered the bride and groom over to the corner of the hall, to watch a very quiet video he had concocted which none of the room could hear or see properly, he officially lost us all and the vibe plummeted.

A hubbub of murmuring broke out into full on conversations as the entire room lost interest, while the bride’s face turned to thunder. When the speech eventually finished she stormed out looking very pissed off. I’ve still never been able to work out if she was annoyed because the speech was so painful, or because we all spoke over it. Bottom line: give them a 15 minute window and cut them off if they don’t wrap it up after that.

Images: Getty

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