How to deliver humour in a wedding speech

Telling a joke is an art form, ask any comedian. Telling a great joke in the wrong company brands both the joke and the deliverer of that joke as not funny, whereas telling a weak joke in the right company will work better as the audience will be more forgiving. The best outcome of all, however, is to tell a great joke in the right company and then you will have guests reaching for the champagne with tears of laughter in their eyes.

An ideal length for a wedding speech, unless it is an extremely formal affair, is around eight to ten minutes. This is plenty of time to make your speech, tell your joke or anecdote, thank those you have to thank and then sit down, before people start twitching.

A pitfall to avoid is drinking too much through nerves before your speech. This predicament will ruin even the cleverest and funniest speech as the audience will have difficulty in understanding slurred words, and there is a real chance that you will mix up the order of your speech, or forget the punch line entirely. Avoid outrageous or inflammatory remarks, no matter how amusing these may be. You want your wedding speech to be memorable, for the right reasons. Treat everyone respectfully and when you start your anecdote do not drag it out too long, or allow your voice to speed up to get finished more quickly. Enjoy your speech, enjoy your joke. If you tell your story in an unhurried and confident way the audience will listen.

Wedding speech humour must come from a place of sincerity, or the listeners will think you are trying to 'get one up on' the butt of your funny story. This is to be avoided at all costs. The best wedding speech funnies are derived from childhood events, or a funny story attached to how the bride and groom met, how the groom asked her to marry him, or vice versa.