The Complete Best Man: How to turn a terrifying prospect into a piece of cake [Paperback]

This book is absolutely brilliant. The author tells you all you need to know about a best man's duties (and his all-important speech!) in a straightforward and really humorous way. I found it invaluable and cannot recommend it too highly. Thanks, John, as you promised in the blurb of your book, you turned a terrifying prospect into a piece of (wedding) cake!

Now, obviously there was a wedding approaching, and I had been asked to be the best man, which in itself is a dubious honour. A honour yes, but it comes with the responsibility of keeping that bloody speech. And since you are looking at this book now, I'm assuming you are in the same boat as I was.

The biggest challenge of being the best man is, no doubt, the speech. And that was the reason I got this book. Sure half of the book is dedicated to the other responsibilities of the best man, but that is just common sense, that doesn't require a book. The other half of the book is about the speech, which in the end isn't too much information. It gives you a flexible structure for the speech with some examples, what to mention, what to avoid and some example speeches.

Now considering we are living in the time of the Internet. There are plenty of web sites out there offering example speeches, even for free. And YouTube is full videos about this. So all the information in this book can be found from somewhere else, and I would highly recommend you to look into those places. But then again, it is nice to have something in writing, and the outlay in the book is ok, if only to give you a hint on how to organize your speech, but this by itself won't be enough.

Now, about the speech itself, looking at this book, Internet and YouTube, it seems to be that the same jokes are repeated over and over again, ad nauseam (if you didn't recognize the joke in the beginning of he review, you haven't done your research yet). The one good advice that this book gives, is start collecting material early, and I do mean early, months before the actual event. And whatever you do, don't try to wing it. We are talking about the best day of your mate here, put some effort into it. And besides, even if everything else goes perfect, but you mess up the speech, people will remember - no pressure.

The point of collecting all that material early on, is that when you then start writing the speech, you have something to make it personal, sure use a few of the cliche jokes, but for goodness sake, try to have some of your own material there, lots of people have already heard those jokes. And people laugh the most when the joke really is about the groom they know.

And if you are interested, yes mine went pretty well (yes, I was nervous), people laughed. Yes, I used some of the cliche jokes, but tried to keep it down to a minimum. Unless you're a born speaker, writing a good speech requires a lot of effort, so be prepared to spend way more than just a few hours on it. But if you put some effort into it, it can actually be good fun, so try to enjoy yourself.

We bought this book for our best man as a way to actually ask him to be the best man! So, although we didnt actually read it from cover to cover, my fiacne did have a good look through and was very impressed with what he read. We would defo reccommend this book as we did quite a bit of reserach befor ebuying and some were too American (not trying to offend any US citizens reading this, we just we do some things different in the UK!!) and some were a bit out-dated.