Best Man Speech – The Poem

Many of the innovations in best man speeches are driven by pure fear. Most best men will happily admit to not being that jazzed about standing up about making a room full of people laugh. Here at bestmanspeech.com, we get that – the pressure to be funny is intense and if it can cripple professional comedians, then of course it’s going to have an effect on the guy from IT.

This means that guys around the world are looking for ways to somehow alleviate that pressure and bring about laughs in a much less stand up comedy type way. The wedding video is growing in popularity although takes hours to produce and/or a lot of cash…followed closely by wedding songs, handy if you can play the guitar…a little more taxing if you’re a bongo player…and the budget version of them all….the poem.

It seems that although creative writing might not be everyone’s cup of tea, a disproportionate number of men like to think they can turn their hand to poetry. Although their idea of poetry and that of their English teacher, might be two very different things.

This might sound predictable, but the wedding poem is something to be very much avoided. Poetry recitals to dedicated poetry fans is one thing. They’re happy to sit there for hours and listen to endless carefully crafted lines in ever swirling patterns and pentameters. Listening to John the builder run through his rhyming couplets is a very different ball game.

It can work for maybe one or two lines, but making it the speech and nothing else, and so going on for 5 minutes or so, is going to extremely painful for all concerned. By minute 3 the sweetness of your effort is going to be eclipsed the ever more toe curling writing, and the awkwardness of guests sitting there absorbing it whilst doing their best to avoid eye contact with anyone.

In order to patch it through to 8 minutes you’re going to have to include increasingly obscure stories whose fleeting references thanks to the brevity of poetry are soon going to be rendered unfathomable. Just stick to a well drilled, well written funny and balanced speech, and neatly swerve death by best man poem.