Where the line is in a wedding speech

The joke that killed on the stag do is usually the one that sinks the speech. Same words, different room. On the stag it was eleven blokes who were all there. On the Saturday it is ninety people sitting down after a meal, her grandmother is near the front, his new boss is at table nine, and nobody in that room was in Prague.

A best man joke has gone too far when it costs somebody who never agreed to pay, or when the couple brace instead of laughing. Those two tests settle nearly every line people get stuck on. The rest of this is which subjects reliably fail them, and what to do with a joke you cannot bring yourself to cut.

Most people who ask for help with the best man speech are not stuck on structure. They have written the thing, it reads well enough, and there is one line they keep going back to without ever deciding. Start with that one.

Two questions, in this order

Who does this joke cost? Every joke sends someone a bill. When the groom pays it you have a roast, and he agreed to that the day he asked you. When the bill lands somewhere else (his mother, her father, an ex who is not in the room, a guest at table six who has done nothing wrong) the room registers it even if nobody could say what just happened. You hear it as the back half of the room going quiet while the front half is still laughing.

Is the couple laughing, or bracing? The brace is easy to spot once you know it. The smile stays exactly where it is. The eyes drop to the tablecloth for half a second and come back up. Anyone at the top table doing that has just decided to get through the next ninety seconds, and they will remember the line long after everybody else has forgotten it.

You cannot run either test on the day. Run them now, at the kitchen table, out loud, on every joke in the speech.

The danger zones

Some of these are absolute and some are a matter of degree, and the difference matters. Treat all of them as absolute and you end up with a speech that says nothing about anybody.

Exes

Absolute. No name, no number, no "third time lucky", no "a few of us had money on somebody else". Not even the fond version the couple themselves joke about at home, because at home there is no audience and here there are two families. This is the only one on the list that can still be causing trouble at Christmas.

The stag do

The stag do is a closed room, and most of what happened in it is funny because you were there. One test: can you tell it in three sentences to somebody who was not? If it needs a preamble about who Baz is, why the minibus stopped and what the barman said afterwards, you are spending ninety seconds of a five-minute speech on set-up, and the payoff had better be enormous.

What usually survives is the outline rather than the incident. "We took him to Prague. He came back with a tattoo he still cannot explain and one shoe." Eight seconds, no context needed, and every person in the room builds their own version.

The bride's family

You have met her mother twice. Whatever licence you have earned is with his half of the room, and it does not carry across. If you are also his brother you have more of it than anyone, which is half the point of the brother of the groom speech, and it still stops at her family.

By the time you stand up, the father of the bride speech has usually already happened, and the room is still holding what he said about his daughter. A fond observation about her mother, landing four minutes after that, comes from a stranger.

Drinking

One drinking line is a character note. Four is a description, and by the fourth the room has stopped hearing jokes. You also have no idea who in that room has had a bad year with it, and you will not find out until afterwards, when somebody quietly tells you.

Money

What the wedding cost, who paid for it, the ring, what either of them earns, and the joke about her spending his money. All out. Money jokes carry a second problem: whoever paid for the day is sitting in the room, and they have spent months deciding not to mention it.

Weight, hair and looks

Dead, including the two that get waved through most often. The hairline joke is exhausted. "Punching above his weight" is an insult to the bride with a compliment wrapped round it, and she will hear it the right way round, in a dress she chose, in front of everybody she knows.

The couple's sex life

Every version, including the euphemism, because the euphemism is the joke and the room can do the arithmetic. Both mothers are four feet away with a clear view of you.

In-jokes

If a story needs four people to have been present, the other eighty-six are watching four people laugh. An in-joke fails twice: it gets no laugh, and it tells most of the room they are not the audience. One, kept short, is the limit.

The same rules run through the maid of honour speech, with one wrinkle. There is less of a tradition of expecting a roast in that slot, so a line that passes as banter from the best man lands harder coming from her closest friend.

The defence that does not work

"He'll love it, he's got a brilliant sense of humour." Probably true, and beside the point. The joke goes out to the whole room: his grandmother, his new mother-in-law, his boss, and a hundred people holding coffee cups. He can take it. Whether they can hear it about him and still like him is the question you are answering.

Five ways to save a joke you cannot cut

Sometimes the line is the best thing in the speech and cutting it costs you your biggest laugh. Try these before you bin it.

1. Move the target onto yourself. Same story, you are the idiot in it. A self-roast has no victim, and it tends to get the bigger laugh anyway, because the room is not busy checking whether the groom is fine.

2. Keep the shape, lose the detail. Name the category and let the specifics go.

Something happened in Prague. I have been asked not to describe it, by Dave, and separately by the hotel.

3. Stop one beat early. Give the room the set-up and let them assemble the punchline themselves. What they imagine is funnier than whatever you were going to say, and nobody can quote you on it afterwards.

4. Put it in the past tense of a changed man. Roast the old version of him, then hand the credit to his wife. "He was the worst housemate I have ever had. Ask him where the hoover was kept. Then Emma moved in, and within a month there was a hoover and he knew." The joke survives intact, and you have arrived at the sincere turn without a gear change.

5. Text the line to the groom. Not the speech, one line. He is the only person you can ask without spoiling anything, and he knows precisely what she will find funny.

Length does half the damage

A joke that goes too far is often a joke that went on too long first. A borderline line in minute two is a wobble the room forgives inside ten seconds. The same line in minute nine, when people have been listening politely for a while and the coffee has gone cold, is where an afternoon turns. Cutting two minutes will save more borderline jokes than rewriting them.

Work out where you actually stand on time before you start editing the content. How long a best man speech should be has the numbers, and the beat-by-beat running order shows where the roast is meant to sit, which is earlier than most people put it.

Read it to one person who will be in the room

Not a mate from the stag. Somebody who will be sitting at a table on the day: his sister, your partner, anyone who knows both families. Read the whole thing out loud at speaking speed, and watch them instead of the page.

Listen for where they go quiet. The laughs tell you nothing you were not already hoping for. The silences are the useful part, along with that polite noise people make instead of laughing, which you will recognise the second you start listening for it.

If there is nobody you can do that with, that is the main job the £125 checked version does. I read the speech out loud and take out what will land badly in that particular room. It is usually one line, and the person who wrote it already had a feeling about it.

What the room is actually doing

Everybody arrived on your side. They want the speech to go well, they will laugh at things that are only moderately funny, and they will forgive a stumble, a dropped card, a long pause and a joke that only half works. If the dread is less about one line and more about standing up at all, the ten minutes before you speak is about that part.

The exception is being made to worry about somebody else in the room. Keep the bill on the groom and they will let you go a long way.

Which leaves the line you have been arguing with yourself about. Read it out loud tonight and work out who pays for it. That is usually the whole decision.