How long should a best man speech be

Five minutes. Around 650 words on the page. That is the answer for almost every best man at almost every wedding, and you can stop reading here if that is all you came for.

Under four minutes and it reads like you couldn't be bothered. Anything past seven and the room starts leaving you a table at a time. Five minutes holds two good stories, the thank-yous, one sincere paragraph about him and the person he has just married, and a toast. It is also short enough that nobody sits there working out how much longer you have got. If you are still working out the shape of the thing rather than its length, the best man speech page sets out the running order these timings assume.

On its own the number is not much help. You write in words and you deliver in minutes, and the exchange rate between the two is worse than you think.

Words on the page, minutes in the room

Silently, on a screen, you move through your own draft at something like 200 words a minute. Say it out loud in the kitchen and you drop to about 150. In the room you land nearer 130, because you are standing at a microphone in front of ninety people, you have had a drink, and the page is shaking slightly in your hand.

130 is the number that matters. It is also the one nobody uses at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night with the document open.

The ranges are deliberately wide. The bottom of each one is a clean read with nothing interrupting you. The top is the same script in front of a room that is enjoying itself, which is the version you are actually hoping for.

Laughter eats your time

A laugh costs you about seven seconds, and only two or three of those are the laugh.

The rest is the shape around it. There is the beat before, while the room works out that the sentence has finished and that was the joke. Then the laugh. Then the tail, where it drops away in the middle of the room while two blokes at the back are still going, and you have to hold your nerve and wait, because if you start the next line into that noise it goes under and nobody hears it. That is a line you spent an hour on, gone.

A best man speech that is working gets somewhere between six and ten of those. Ten laughs at seven seconds is seventy seconds in which you are not saying anything at all. So the 850-word draft you timed at five forty in the kitchen runs six and a half at room pace, and nearly eight once the laughs are in. The better it goes, the longer it runs, and you will not notice at the time, because a laugh feels like time well spent when you're the one getting it.

Chasing more than ten is usually how a speech drifts into the material that should have stayed in the group chat, which is a separate problem covered in where the line is in a wedding speech.

What actually happens at minute eight

By the time the speeches start, most guests have been sitting in the same chair for a couple of hours. They have eaten. They have had a few. The room is warm, somebody's three-year-old has hit the wall, and there is a bar in the corner of everyone's eye.

For the first four minutes none of that matters. You have novelty on your side, and the whole room wants to hear what you are about to say about him.

Minute six is where the shift starts if you are not very good. Minute eight is where it starts even if you are. People don't decide they have gone off you. They begin doing small things: a glance at a phone under the table, a top-up, a whispered aside, a chair scraping as somebody carries a child out. Each one costs you a fraction of the room, and a laugh needs everybody listening in the same moment to work at all. Once that goes, the jokes stop landing, however good they are.

You feel it happening too, and that is the part that does the damage. Sensing the attention go makes you speed up, and speeding up kills the pauses that were doing half the work. Punchlines get swallowed. Material that was fine on page one stops working on page three, and nothing about the material has changed.

What five minutes actually buys you

Five minutes is more than it sounds like on paper. Here is a budget that fits.

That is four minutes fifteen of talking. Add eight laughs and you land just past five. The beat-by-beat version of that structure, including why the sincere paragraph goes late rather than early, is in a best man speech, beat by beat.

What will not fit: a third story, a run through the whole history from school to now, an in-joke that needs two minutes of setting up, and a round of thanks that names ten people. Any one of those adds about ninety seconds, and ninety seconds is what takes you from five minutes to nearly seven.

The floor matters as much as the ceiling. Three minutes sounds disciplined until you hear it, and then it just sounds thin. A room can tell the difference between somebody who edited hard and somebody who ran out of things to say. Three minutes only holds one story, which means the whole speech rests on that story working. If it gets a smaller laugh than you were expecting there is nothing behind it, and you are at the toast with the room still warming up. A second story is your insurance.

Twenty seconds is enough for a proper opening. It sounds like this:

For those who don't know me, I'm Dan. I've been Tom's best mate since we were eleven, so I've got twenty-four years of material and about five minutes to use it. I've picked the two stories his mother can survive.

Cutting a speech that has come back too long

Guessing the length does not work, and reading it silently works even less well. Stand up, read it out loud at the pace you would really use, and put a stopwatch on it. Do it twice and trust the second number. The first read is always quicker than a room will let you go.

If it comes back at seven minutes, don't start trimming adjectives. Three hundred words cannot be removed a word at a time, and the version that survives that process reads like a telegram. Cut a whole story. You almost certainly have three and you almost certainly need two, and the one to lose is whichever needs the most setting up. A story where you have to explain who Baz is, and where the flat was, and why the three of you were in Prague, spends forty seconds before it starts being funny.

The other place the fat sits is the thank-yous. A best man doesn't have to thank everybody in the building. The groom and the father of the bride have already worked through most of that list by the time you stand up, which is one of several reasons the running order matters. If you can get a look at the speeches before yours, delete anything already covered.

When five minutes is the wrong number

Two of you sharing the job is the one real exception. A pair needs longer, because every handover costs a second or two and the room has two speakers to get used to, but nothing like double. Eight to ten minutes between you, traded in short chunks so it keeps moving, is the target, and the two best men speech page goes through how to split it.

The rest of the adjustment comes from what happens before you. If the father of the bride has run twelve minutes and the groom another eight, you are getting up at the twenty-five minute mark and the room's patience is no longer yours to spend. Take a minute out of yours. At a small wedding where you are one of two speakers, six minutes is comfortable and nobody is counting.

Speeches before the meal move it the other way. If the couple have put them there, the drop-off starts later, because nobody has been in that chair for two hours or had three glasses of red yet, and six minutes will feel like five. The pressure comes from the kitchen instead. Every starter is plated and somebody is waiting on you to sit down. Ask whoever is running the day what time they need you finished, and work backwards from that rather than from a number you read online.

One last practical thing. Print it at 14 point, double spaced, and number the pages. The timing you rehearsed only survives if you can find your place again after a big laugh. Most speeches that overrun were the right length in the kitchen. Then somebody lost their place on page two and started filling while they looked for it.