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@Sharkstar
Next Saturday I am going to be Best Man at my mate Ben's wedding in a little town four hours North of Melbourne, Australia. I am flying out tonight.
One of my duties, obviously, is to give a speech, which I have been putting together in fits and starts over the past few weeks. It's a vaguely terrifying process, even for someone, like me, who is used to giving presentations at work. I'd be interested to hear people's experiences of either giving such a speech, or of speeches they have heard at weddings that have gone particularly well or badly.
One of the worst I have ever seen was at the wedding of an old university friend a few years ago now. The best man, also a friend of mine, and normally very funny and a great raconteur, somehow managed to get very very drunk during the day. After dinner, he was sloshed. For some reason he had decided to use a 'prop' to liven up the speech, which consisted of an old motorised car antenna and battery pack that he somehow managed to hide in his trousers. The plan was to propel a rubber chicken out of his trouser fly as he was speaking, using the motorised antenna. Needless to say, this didn't quite come off. The chicken didn't emerge from the trousers, probably falling down the leg, and instead the thin end of the antenna caught in his boxers and pulled these out of the fly until they finally unsnagged, at one point giving some of those at the top table, I am told, an unwelcome glimpse of his nutsac.
On top of all this, the acoustics of the room were poor, and the words that might have made the intended purpose of the apparatus clear didn't carry, so for most people the whole affair looked more like a piece of performance art than a speech.
Needless to say, I won't be getting drunk on Saturday, and I have no plans to use any props.