Jokes, jokes, jokes - every best man wants them. As well as your own jokes, renting comedy videos and films, asking people for their favorite gags and looking for funny lines on the internet can also provide you with inspiration for your best man speech. If you do borrow jokes, you will need to personalize them to make them appropriate, rather than just throw them into the speech. Go for quality rather than quantity: a handful of well-polished witticisms will do you better service than a scatter-gun approach involving a hundred ill-digested one-liners.

Academic Archive

Old schoolbooks, school reports and university notes can also provide material. Ask one of the groom's family to get them down from the attic and take a look. If there's a school report saying how your high-flying friend and groom will never amount to a hill of beans, or a funny essay they wrote when they were ten, it could be amusing to read it out.

Hands-on help

If you're worried about any aspect of your speech, talk it through with someone who's been there before. Talking to someone with experience will calm your nerves and give your confidence a boost. They survived the ordeal, after all!

And if they still have a copy of their speech, ask to see it. They can also advise on how to source material, where they got their best man speech ideas from and how they put the whole thing together.

You can also learn from their mistakes, rather than making your own. They may have unwittingly stumbled on a sensitive subject, for example, or their speech may have overrun or been too short. Ask them which were the bits that really worked, and what were the things that could, in retrospect, have been improved on. Finding out how not to do it can be a great help in making your own effort a success. And if they are willing, ask them to read your speech after you've written it, for some last-minute expert advice.

Criticism

Weddings aren't the place for criticism. Don't knock anything relating to the venue or the service, and don't make jokes at other people's expense, especially the bride's. This is the happy couple's perfect day, and you need to help keep it that way by considering other people's feelings at all times.

Past Romances

There's nothing wrong with talking about the groom's previous loves - provided they're really firmly in the far distant past.

Tell guests about the flirtation he had with that cute little blonde... in the sandpit back at nursery school.

Don't tell them about the girl who broke his heart when he was 16 and whom he's never really forgotten - or about any other romance he's had since the age of seven, for that matter. It's also worth noting that while you can make vague allusions to the groom's sowing of wild oats - such as 'He was a bit of a wild lad at college' - you should never even hint at anything similar about the bride. Double standards still apply, at least at weddings!