Punchlines or no Punchlines in your Best Man Speech?
Perfecting the timing required to deliver a killer punchline takes time, a lot of practice and comes with a substantial margin of error. Jokes can live or die in the milliseconds of a word being uttered too soon or too late. As well I know. And let me tell you. It’s not a pleasant feeling. I performed an early and late show in Brighton with exactly the same material. I stormed the first show and feeling like a God went into the second show, totally unaware that I was about to die on my arse. Besides the audience changing, which should have been in my favour (As far as I’m concerned, the more alcohol flowing through an audience the better) the only difference had to be in my delivery. Because most people hated me that night, I left the stage less like a God a more like a Gnome. Anyway, Something I wouldn’t want to happen to you and I don’t care if that offends the Gnome people. A really good way to avoid this is to tell stories. And you can’t go wrong with a funny story that somehow highlights a particular quirk of the Groom.. And the more embarrassing the better. The focus will stay firmly on the Groom and you aren’t being required to deliver punchlines. A Best Man dropped a great story about his mate, who after a few, likes to get naked. Perfect. Here’s what it looked like after a spin and a bit of polish:
“…Had he got hold of alcohol he wouldn’t be sat dressed in a fine suit we see him in today. Oh no. The suit he would be wearing would be the one he wore on his birthday. The pink, wrong one. See, after a few, Mark becomes all Scandinavian, and at one with his naked body. Something he feels needs to be shared with as many people as possible. It happened when we went for a weekend at a Butlin’s holiday prison. I left him for five minutes to find my chalet, (sorry cell), and within no time at all Mark’s gone all Sven. How do I find this out? Well, my room was a bit dark, so I put my bags down, walked over to the window, and threw the curtains open. At the same time as little lord nakedness comes waving by… and I should add, not with his hands…Things didn’t get any better when I turned around and got a first look at my newly illuminated room. Which was nearly as sparse and poorly built as Mark. Generally, people on an Adult’s weekend at Butlin’s aren’t easily shocked or horrified. However, following that incident, Butlin’s offered the entire camp counselling sessions for post-traumatic stress and set up a helpline. Personally, the incident has left me with a phobia of curtains...”
Can’t go wrong with a good story. Look at Shakespeare, he did alright.