Making a wedding speech for today's audience

When you are crafting your wedding speech, it's important to think about ways to make your speech interesting, relevant and entertaining for the audience. You'll want to talk about the happy couple themselves, of course, and your best wishes for their lives together, but everyone will be expecting that; the trick to getting their undivided attention is to be a little different. Most of the audience will have heard a number of wedding speeches before, so how can you make yours different?

One way to show that you have really been thinking about how to entertain this specific audience is to include asides or jokes that refer to topical events. Connecting a recent news story to something in your speech will show that the speech has been written especially for this event, and that you have been thinking about the speech right up until the day you give it.

You need to make sure, of course, that any topical news story you use is appropriate for the event (nothing likely to upset, offend or annoy any of the attendees, please), and can be linked in an amusing way to the couple themselves. Shoehorning in a reference to a headline you spotted in a paper on the way to the wedding won't cut the mustard!

To give an example: "We are all happy to be here to celebrate the wedding of Rebecca and George, in the same year that marks 100 years since the first successful expedition to the North Pole. Of course, I'm not suggesting a wedding day is anything like a 3000 km hike, but George - here's some Kendal Mint Cake just in case…" would be suitable and be likely to raise a few smiles, while "Did you know it's the 35th anniversary of the Falklands War this year? Anyway, onto George and Rebecca…" will not!