Most professional speech writers think that wedding reception guests are one of the hardest audiences to write for. This is because of the huge diversity of the audience, which will normally consist of a variety of different ages, sexes and religions. Some guests will be sober, others not so!

In addition to this the wedding audience is made up of many different social groups from the groom’s side and the bride’s side. Amongst these are close personal friends, immediate family, distant family, work colleagues, acquaintances, and neighbors. This makes it very difficult to judge the extent that you can get away with saying things, and where exactly any boundaries lie.

Such a wide range of social groups means that there will be many people present at the groom’s speech who do not know many other guests. This will make them feel slightly excluded and will help to reinforce any inhibitions they may already have, making them less receptive to your humor.

Grooms speeches need to be functional, sincere, and with just the right amount of humor. The speech needs to be more light-hearted than the father of the bride’s speech, but not as outright comedic as the best man’s speech.

You need to work out a way of thanking all those that need be without it sounding as you are reading from a list. You need to be sincere but at the same time humorous. This is a very difficult balance to achieve for an inexperienced writer, and requires a certain amount of thought, planning, and rehearsing.

I have had the misfortune to attend weddings where the hapless groom plunders quickly and nervously through a succession of well worn clichés, then ends with a feeble attempt at humor, which is greeted with a stony silence from the audience. This is not very fun to watch, or to be a part of.

Try wherever possible to include a few choice one-liners in your groom’s speech If you practice them beforehand you should be able to hone the delivery to perfection. It does need to be genuinely funny though, so you should try it out on just one or two people first.

Of course the speech needs to consist of much more than a few funny one-liners. You can get examples of really good speech ideas from books written by professional speech writers, in which you will be able to find many speech examples that you can weave together seamlessly into a quality speech you would be proud to give, and which will be well received.