Warning: A Free Best Man Speech Could Be Bad For Your Health!
A free Best Man speech taken from the internet can seem like a lifesaver if you’re stuck for ideas (and running short of time).
But what might at first appear like a smart solution to your wedding speech woes could just blow up in your face and cause you a lot of stress when you least need it.
In this post I look at why free Best Man speeches often don’t live up to expectations and why writing your own is much better for your health (and your credibility).
So what’s wrong with a free Best Man speech?
Writing your Best Man speech can be an intimidating prospect. It’s only natural to feel you need a bit of help and these days where’s the first port of call when you have a problem? Google of course!
A quick search will prove that there’s no shortage of material online relating to wedding speeches: wedding speech jokes, wedding speech examples and wedding speech templates. In fact that’s probably how you found this website!
But while there’s nothing wrong with a quick web search for inspiration, relying too heavily on material found on the internet can seriously harm your speech.
Some of the problems with free Best Man speeches include:
- Variable quality – as with the internet as a whole there is a wide spectrum of quality and it takes time to sort the good from the bad.
- Recycled jokes – if you’ve found a particular joke or speech idea online then other people will have too, so there’s a good chance some of your guests will have heard it all before in someone else’s wedding speech.
- Uneven content – you’re unlikely to find a speech that exactly matches your needs so you’ll end up having to take different bits from different places and they won’t fit together very naturally.
Are you being personal?
But putting these issues to one side, the biggest problem is that a speech taken from the web will have none of the personal detail specific to your friend and his wedding. And a few cosmetic changes here and there will do little to hide this.
Just take a moment to consider why you’ve been picked by your friend to be his Best Man. It’s likely to because you’re a close and loyal friend, who’s known him longer than most and the two of you have a rich history of shared experiences.
Given this, why would you choose – on your friend’s special day – to use a largely generic speech copied from someone else?
Even if your speech goes down reasonably well, the Groom will be quietly disappointed that you didn’t seem to feel there was enough material in your friendship to fill a few minutes of speaking time on his special day.
The answer is of course to write an original speech yourself. You may even find it’s quicker and less stressful than trying to cobble together some Franken-speech from old parts found on the internet!
What’s stopping you from writing your own speech?
There are two main reasons you might shy away from writing your own Best Man speech from scratch:
- You don’t think you have enough time to write a good speech.
- You don’t think you have the skills or experience to write a good speech.
Both of these are valid concerns, but a free Best Man speech is not the answer.
First of all, if you’re short of time, trawling the internet for appropriate material is not necessarily the best use of it. And even if you find something promising, it may look like 90% of the work has already been done but it can be surprisingly difficult to adapt it to your needs.
Secondly, the vast majority of best men are not experienced speechwriters or speakers. Nor does anyone expect them to be. But it’s much easier to learn how to structure a simple speech and add your own thoughts and ideas than it is to take someone else’s end product and retrofit it.
And ultimately it’s much more satisfying – because when it goes well, you can take the all the credit!
So just remember, when it comes to free Best Man speeches, the only free speech that’s worth spending any time over is the one you create yourself written specially for the occasion.
