How do the nature of British and American best man speeches differ; in which ways and why?

How do the nature of American and British best man speeches differ; in which ways and why?

I decided to investigate best man speeches due to their interesting nature. Best man speeches fall within the genre of speeches. As a prepared speech; they are multimodal and therefore contain features of both spoken and written language. They have the prepared and structured format of written text yet the interactive and conversational form which spoken language has.

As the best man speech is a traditional speech its purpose is known widely by all and certain points which are expected to be hit and must be hit in order for it to be successful;

•  It must be very humorous, commonly mocking the groom
•  It must include thankyou’s and a toast
•  It must honour the bride and groom

The audience at which the speech is targeted is an audience with a wide variety of age, tastes and humour. This is what makes writing a best man speech such a complex procedure.

The aim of my project is to compare and contrast British and American Best man speeches as I am interested in finding how aspects of culture are reflected in a speech. I expect to find that the structural features within the speech and the register to be the same yet the humour to be different as this is an issue which is essentially down to taste which will vary between cultures.

To discover the features within best man speeches I had to take transcripts YouTube clips. I decided to use the first two minutes from when the dialogue begins from four best man speeches. This way I would have enough data to show patterns and similarities in the speeches. Best man speeches tend to be at a length of around ten minutes. I wanted to compare features within different speeches so decided to take only the first two minutes which narrows down my data allowing a more detailed analysis of the first part of the speech.

To ensure that the speeches I looked at were considered to be effective by a wide audience therefore to make my analysis fair. I looked at the number of views and likes a video had; only choosing videos which were widely liked with the most views. I made sure that the speeches were dialogue based as some of the videos which were widely liked and viewed had other reasons other than the dialogue for being liked such as dance sequences.

The root of a Bestman's speech; Houmor

Most speeches show a relationship of language and power were the speeker has power over the audience however I would argue that for a best man's speech this is not the case. I beleive that the relationship of a best man with the audience is more symilar to the dynamic of an audition, for example; if a person auditioning auditions well and successfully entertains his audience then the audience, through their reaction, give power to the speeker and he is then seen as a powerfull figure, yet if he is unsucessfull the audience unconciously create an almost infamous conection with him. This is one of the reasons writing a best mans speech is such a high pressure and high profile task.

The purpose of a best man's speech is split into two; adressing the formalitys and entertaining an audience through houmor. Here I will be looking at houmor as this is the key to entertaining an audience at a wedding; therefore gaining power/success. It had become a tradition at weddings that best man's speech must be comical to the point of stand up comody. Stand up comody has many symilaritys to a best mans speech;

• It has the same audience-speeker relationship
• It has the same pressure to create houmor
• It involves a symilar type of humor which is taylored specificly for the audience
　

Houmor within a British best man speech

Looking at speech one and two both contain elements of self deprecitaion.

reference to the grooms bad behavior. This works as a device which appears to embarass yet the british culture has pride in bad behavior so it is actually giving an image which the groom wants.

very subtle voyerism
　
Houmor within an American best man speech　
　
Comparison