How Not to Use Jokes and Humor in Your Wedding Speech

You tell a joke and no-one laughs. We've all been there. But having your joke fall flat at a wedding reception can be a particularly painful form of public embarrassment. Consider these incidents:

1. The Best Man, adopting a creative analogy with hotted-up sports cars (the Groom's hobby), compares and contrasts the Bride to the Groom's long-term but ex-girlfriend. He concludes that the Bride is a better make, with less miles on the clock, fewer drivers, and - ahem - shinier hub-caps. After the speeches, the Best Man bumps into the ex-girlfriend's brother, a guest at the reception and also the partner of the Bride's new boss.

Mom Joke

2. The Wedding Emcee - who has spent the whole evening mispronouncing the Groom's name - 'entertains' the guests between heartfelt speeches by reading out 'funny sayings' from a dog-eared joke book. The vast majority of his one-liners are terrible puns: 'The only ring that means something in marriage is the enduring. Unless you count the suffering.' (Get it?)

3. The Father of the Bride complains that his farm is in trouble because of 'hippy, inner-city, communist terrorists' like his 'layabout Son-in-Law', who are 'wrecking the country'. He concludes by toasting the bride and groom and announcing that "this bloody wedding has nearly bankrupted me, so you might as well enjoy yourselves."

4. The Best Man regales the guests with a string of mother-in-law jokes, concluding using the upbeat "Happy is he that marries the daughter of a dead mother", apparently according to an old proverb he found on the Internet. The Mother of the Bride has recently been diagnosed as having cancer.

5. The Best Man cracks a joke in regards to the Bride's recent excess weight, implying the short engagement was a shotgun reaction to an unplanned pregnancy. The humiliated Bride heads for the door, her face glowing red like a radioactive beet. Her dress snags on the Groom's chair. She whirls about, teeters for a few terrible seconds, then tumbles backwards off the stage and onto the floor with a thud. Luckily, she wasn't pregnant: just overweight.

These wedding joke catastrophes happened because the speaker misunderstood the job plus the audience. In order to avoid shaming your good name, remember these three tips when searching for material:

Avoid jokes about topics that divide people, like religion, politics and sex, and select topics that contain universal appeal, like the challenges of marriage or the Groom's nerves.

Tailor the tone of the jokes to the couple, your guests along with the venue. What might benefit a casual gathering of 20 good friends and family in San Francisco or Melbourne, may be woefully inappropriate for a black tie reception for 300, including the Mayor and members of the press, in New York or Oxford.

It's customary for the Groom to cop most of the personal abuse in the speeches. It's also increasingly common for speakers to make light-hearted jibes at the Bride's expense as well. These jokes should concentrate on endearing quirks, other than abject failings. Any joke that begins with the words "[He's] [She's] so [fat] [dumb] [ugly] that..." shouldn't ever make it to your final draft - regardless of how funny it may be.

How Not to Use Jokes and Humor in Your Wedding Speech

Friends Link : Baby Room Themes