Funny Wedding Toasts – My Story
If you are looking for help in giving funny wedding toasts and speeches then I urge you to keep reading. I have been through the horrors of a bad speech and eventually found a way to give funny wedding toasts with confidence every time.
Click the link below to see the book I found to turn my wedding toasts disaster into a triumph.
Funny Wedding Toasts Disaster!
It all started when I was asked to give the best man speech at a wedding. I remembered that at other weddings I had been to, the people who were due to speak very often had a miserable time as their appointed hour drew nearer. I saw many hardly-touched reception meals and increasingly jittery speakers. You should have seen the state one groom got himself into prior to his groom speech – I have rarely seen a more miserable guy and this was meant to be his wedding day!
To be honest I took a pretty relaxed attitude to the wedding toast I had to give, I thought I could just wing it on the night and everyone would love it. The reality was that as the time of the speech got closer the more nervous I was becoming and in the end the speech and toast were terrible. It was the worst feeling in the world and I felt like I had really let my friend down. Everyone was very polite but we all knew I had bombed.
This experience made me quite aware of the fact that good wedding toasts do not happen by magic!
Funny Wedding Toasts Need Planning
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A few weeks later I got another invitation to give a speech at my cousin’s wedding. I knew I had to make some big changes if this was going to be a success. The first thing I realized was that giving funny wedding toasts is not easy.
Look at how difficult the job of a stand up comedian is – they have to get up in front of all those people and make them laugh. The first thing I realized was that I needed some ideas so I got some books from the local library about making wedding speeches and funny wedding toasts. Some were not bad but none of the books I found really went into funny wedding toasts without getting too cheesy. What I really needed was some good speech and toast frameworks that I could re-work to fit my cousin’s sense of humor.
In the end I started looking for inspiration online and eventually found a great source of material that made it possible to create extremely funny wedding toasts. They have content for speeches and toasts covering all types of wedding speeches (best man speech toasts, funny best man speeches, funny groom speeches, maid of honor wedding toasts, father of bride speeches etc). Now don’t get me wrong, you can’t really just use their content verbatim, I still needed to do some work but the brilliant thing was how granular their toasts and one liners were.
I was able to put together a basic framework for the speech and then just grab the funny snippets of content in the book and work them into the speech. This meant I could create a speech that was pitched perfectly in terms of my cousin’s sense of humor.
Cutting and pasting from the ebook made creating a rough draft of the speech very easy which is not something I could have done with a book from the store.
Once I had the rough draft of the speech I went away and started practicing. I wanted to be able to recite the funny wedding toasts without notes (I would recommend always taking a copy of the speech with you in case you “dry” as they say in theatrical circles.) because I felt this would give me the most self-confidence. And having this self-confidence is key if you want to make the must out of the funny parts of your toast or speech.
I went back to the e-book every day to get more material or replace jokes that just were not working. What I also found going through this exercise was that it improved my own creativity and I was able to come up with quite a lot of my own jokes as well.
Eventually I had my finished wedding speech that was memorized and ready for the big day. I was curious to see if the jitters I had experienced at the previous wedding would resurface.
In all honesty I felt great. I enjoyed every minute of the day and was able to have my wedding meal without thinking I was going to throw up with stage fright every two minutes!
The speech went down a storm and lots of people came up to me afterwards to congratulate me. I was the most fantastic feeling in the world and I was floating on air for the rest of the night.
Anyway I hope you found all this interesting and that you have found some pointers for delivering funny wedding toasts and speeches.
Funny Wedding Toasts Don’t Happen By Magic
The biggest obstacle I found in delivering a wedding speech and funny wedding toasts was the lack of confidence. It was really weird because in my day-job I speak in front of large audiences on a regular basis and am never nervous and my talks are always very well received.
I therefore just assumed that I could deliver a funny wedding speech in the same way as I speak in my day job. However when it came down to it, the toast and wedding speech itself just were not very good or funny. I could not believe that delivering funny wedding toasts could be so difficult!
Un-Funny Wedding Toasts?
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Afterwards I tried to work out what the problem had been and it dawned on me that when I am speaking for a living, it is on a topic that a) I know very well and b) I have been speaking about for over fifteen years. This familiarity with the subject, I realized, is what drives my confidence.
When I tried to do a wedding speech followed by some funny wedding toasts however, I was not familiar with the material and I was not used to standing up in front of people and trying to be funny.
So with another wedding speech looming on the horizon, I needed to figure out how to solve these two problems. It came down to preparing funny material, and practicing it until it was almost word for word.
Funny Wedding Toasts – Ideas For Material
Ideas for material I got from a great book that I found online. The practice and tailoring of the toast I did on my own locked away for several hours!
The key is taking a well defined speech or funny wedding toasts framework and hanging all the unique things you want to say on that framework. There is no book that will give you every word of your speech but you can use their examples to build you own unique speech upon.
In terms of the humor – you need to be careful not to get too bawdy, or too sentimental. It is a fine line and a lot will also depend on your timing.
Funny Wedding Toasts – Practice Makes Perfect
However once you have been practicing the finished speech or funny wedding toasts for several hours, you will get so comfortable with the material that you will naturally find yourself ad-libbing and this is where you can get some real comedy gold coming out.
Once I had put all this into practice, the results were beyond my wildest dreams. No pre-speech fright and a laughing audience.
Being word-for-word prepared has been central to my ability to give funny wedding toasts and speeches.
Funny Wedding Toasts and Speeches If You Are Not a Comedian
Funny Wedding Toasts – Injecting Humor
Funny wedding toasts can transform a speech. There is nothing worse than humorless wedding toasts or speeches. I know this because I have given them and listened to them! If we want to be able to give funny wedding toasts we need to have the confidence, understand the audience and prepare thoroughly.
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Not everyone is born to be a stand up comedian. Very few people are able to stand up like Billy Connelly and give an hilarious stream of consciousness monologue to keep a crowd of 200 wedding guests entertained. In fact, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, most people put a fear of public speaking above fear of death, so they would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy!
So given the fact that at some point in our lives we will be called upon to give a wedding toast or wedding speech, how can we avoid the gut wrenching anxiety during dinner before the speech and most importantly when the time comes, deliver a funny and sparkling toast or speech that will be remembered for ever?
Funny Wedding Toasts Books
The easiest way is to get a book with lots of ideas for funny wedding toasts such as funny groom toasts or best man speech toasts. You can find quite a lot of these types of books at your local bookstore but they can be quite expensive and may not be dedicated to the type of speech you are going to give. I gave up looking for offline books after not really being able to find something funny enough for the occasion (the guys getting married, Tom (my cousin) and Sarah are a real pair of jokers so they were expecting something pretty good from my speech) and I eventually started looking online.
At first I thought I would try and get something for nothing and I looked for free wedding toasts. There are a few around but honestly they are extremely lame and pretty much unusable. It’s only when I was prepared to pay a little that the content started to get exponentially better.
Funny Wedding Toasts eBooks
In the end I found an online book with exactly the right sort of funny wedding toasts I needed for my speech. I downloaded it straight away and was able in minutes to use several of the speeches in the book to tailor my own speech to Tom and Sarah. This preparation gave the confidence I needed so I was relaxed all day leading up to the speech and in the end, after my final toast, everyone was on their feet. It was quite something. The turn around from my previous efforts in the realm of funny wedding toasts was unbelievable and I no longer have that pre-speech dread and now actually look forward to giving speeches!
