Make Jokes About Current Events
A great way to get laughs with your Best Man speech is to make jokes about current events. Why? Well, current events are things that everyone knows about. Also, if you feel like you don't have enough material for your speech, using current events can be a great source of additional material for your speech.
Here's an example: since Trump is always in the headlines these days, you could say this: "Bob actually went to a Trump rally the other day, not because he's into politics, but because he wanted to see if he could get The Donald to get Mexico to pay for this wedding."
We're now going to do a case study. In 2016, a Best Man wanted my help writing him Olympic jokes since the summer games were happening in Rio de Janeiro at the time.
Specifically, he wanted to poke fun how the groom waited a long time to propose and tie it in with the Olympics.
So, I used this process here on how to write a joke.
I started by making a list about the actual Olympics:
sports, games, summer, winter, IOC, rings, track and field, pole vault, stadium, podium, Ancient Greece, athletes competed naked in Ancient Greece, opening ceremony, closing ceremony, athlete's village, world records, swimming, speedos, diving, basketball, USA Dream Team, Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Usain Bolt, countries, training, every 4 years, etc. (this list could almost be limitless - the more items you jot down, the more chance you will have at creating jokes)
I then made a list about the host country, Brazil:
Brazil, South America, Latin America, large country, Portuguese, Zika virus, jungle, rio de janeiro, Jesus statue, Brazilian wax, beach, Atlantic Ocean, corrupt government, Police strike, Amazon rain forest, soccer, coffee, Pele, Ronaldo, Neymar, green and yellow flag, etc. (again, this list could almost be limitless - the more items you jot down, the more chance you will have at creating jokes)
After making these decent sized lists, we tied some of the items with the bride waiting very long for the groom to marry her. Here's what we came up with:
-similarities between Olympics and weddings: rings, podium, ceremony
-waiting a long time could be related to Olympics only occurring every four years
-they met a long time ago - let's think of Olympic things that happened a long time ago: Ancient Greece, athletes competing naked, wearing wreaths, etc.
-Brazilian wax! There's got to be a joke in there! Let's somehow tie that to the groom having one because it's much funnier because usually only girls get them
And now let's get to the actual jokes. We came up with four of them but if we had spent more time I'm sure we could have come up with many more!
When you read about how to write a joke here, you will learn that constructing a joke is all about setting up an assumption in the guests' minds, and then SMASHING that assumption with the punchline. One of the most important elements in comedy is "surprise", and that's exactly what punchlines do, surprise the guests' because they aren't expecting it.
Below, the italicized text are the assumptions, and the underlined text are the punchlines.
Joke #1
"To me it's perfect that today takes place during the Olympics because there are a lot of similarities to a wedding and the summer games. There's the rings, the ceremony, the podium, and much like the athletes, Katie had to wait multiple years for the actual event to happen."
Joke #2
"One difference, however, is that tomorrow the Olympics end in a Brazilian stadium while tonight ends in DJ showing off his Brazilian wax."
JJoke #3
"It's not fair. DJ gets to leave here tonight with a beautiful wife wand I get to leave here with that thought in my head."
Joke #4
"In all seriousness though, I couldn't be more happy for you two. Katie - I think you can agree with me that it was worth the wait to marry DJ even though you guys met all the way back in a time when Olympic athletes competed naked."
