Epic Best Man Fails

The Hangover happens. Seriously. People wake up in hotel rooms missing a groom. They give horrible speeches and publicly break up with girlfriends at weddings. I know. I've been there. Chaps, welcome to the biggest fails in best man history. Listen, learn and survive!

The major malfunction

I once had to sneak into a log cabin next to a lake in the middle of Iowa with the hangover of the century. The mission: to retrieve one of the groomsmen's suits. The problem: getting past the bride, her mum, and all the girls in the bridal party without giving the game away.

The reason the suit was missing: the best man was too busy packing extra crates of Bud into the boot of his car to check all the important stuff, like whether all the ushers' and groomsmens' suits had come back from the dry cleaners.

I never found the suit, because it was hanging on a rail in a strip mall 300 miles away. I did get to startle nearly 30 ladies in various stages of undress, but that's another story...

As a result of the aborted suit-retrieval mission, we were late checking the groom into the bridal hotel room, which meant we had to get changed in a swimming pool and rock up to the church 20 minutes late. Until you've screeched to a halt outside an American church, smoke coming off the tyres and drenched in sweat, to get strips torn off you by a hysterical mother in law with no respect for tequila headaches, you haven't lived.

Best men, you have been warned. Take your eye off the ball for one second and you're on the sh*t list for life!

The awkward speech

We've all seen it. The best man who thinks he's funny and ends up with a foot in his mouth. Like this amazing effort, which happened in a delightful hotel filled to the brim with swanky decorations, flowers, sandstone columns, the works.

Picture the scene: posh wedding, posh parents, everyone's dressed to the nines. And the best man stands up to give his speech. A bit pissed. Waving his champagne glass around for courage.

'Sarah's mum never liked Ben much. She'd like him even less if she saw all the coke and hookers he ended up with on his stag weekend in Amsterdam.'

Silence. Except for the bride's mum grinding her teeth together, and the bride's dad popping a collar stud.

Oops. The poor old best man never recovered from his fatal error - assuming everyone in the room has a sense of humour...

Keep it light, fellers, but don't be a dick. Gonna talk about boobies and crack? Do it on the stag party.

The blank

'I just wanted to say that - um - I'm not big on speeches - er - I just wanted to say that - um.' Hardly Hemingway, is it. We've all been close to a blank in our time. If you don't want to go out like this guy:

http://www.epicfail.com/2012/11/28/best-man-fail/

you need to do some prep. Write your speech on a napkin if you have to. And start big. Nothing gets the crowd on your side like a massive cheer at the beginning of a spot of public speaking. Charge those glasses, toast the heck out of the happy couple, and you can surf a tide of goodwill for at least 5 minutes (hint: if your best man speech is longer than 5 minutes, you're going to fail anyway).

The faint

Think best men don't suffer from attacks of the willies? Check this dude out.

I know exactly what he's going through. I nearly did this myself. Spend the night before drinking whisky with your buddy before he's led up the aisle, wrap yourself up in a hot hire suit and let nature take its course. Ouch.

Top tip: if you're not used to standing still for long periods of time, you might be prone to locking your knees together. Don't. This cuts off the circulation to the top half of your body, and you go out like a light.

The drunk guy

Being hammered at a wedding is pretty much par for the course. If you're best man, though, you owe it to your bro to wait until after the speech. You can slur all you like, cry into your pint, crack onto every bridesmaid in the place - but you have to do it after you've publicly stood up and told a room full of strangers how lucky he is to be marrying his wife. Them's the rules.

Sadistic grooms arrange weddings where everyone eats, then everyone speaks, then the best man gets in last. You have no say over this. Just roll with it. And drink water.

There have been plenty of epic drunken toasts in the history of best men. Surely this is one of the best: