Best Man Speech for a Childhood Friend (Funny, About 4 Minutes)

The speech

Good evening. I'm Caius, the best man. Aurelio and I met in the second grade when his family moved in across the street, and within a week his mother had told my mother that I was "a lot." She was right, and Aurelio has been cleaning up after that fact ever since.

Here is the thing you need to know about the two of us. I have always been the one with the idea, and he has always been the one with the plan. Those are not the same job, and only one of them is useful.

The summer we were eleven, I decided I was going to ride my bike down the sledding hill behind the middle school. In July. No snow, just dirt, a chain-link fence at the bottom, and a drop near the top that I had not noticed because I had never once looked at it. I announced this at breakfast on a Tuesday, and Aurelio did not say no. He never says no. He said, "Okay. Give me until Thursday."

On Thursday he walked the whole hill with a rake. He moved rocks. He borrowed a helmet from his cousin, because I did not own one. He dragged an old mattress out of his garage and laid it against the fence at the bottom. And then he stood at the top with his mother's kitchen timer, for reasons he has never explained, and said, "Go."

I made it about forty feet. The drop I had never noticed put me over the handlebars, and I rolled the rest of the way, and when I got to the bottom I was fine, because I landed on a mattress that an eleven-year-old had thought to put there two days earlier. He walked down the hill, looked at me, and said, "That was faster than I expected."

That is Aurelio. He cannot stop you from doing the dumb thing. He has never tried. He just quietly makes sure there is something soft at the bottom, and he has done that for me, for his sister, for half the people in this room, for as long as I have been alive.

So when he told me about Bronwyn, I listened for the plan. There was no plan. He had met her at a friend's kitchen table, talked for four hours, and forgotten to get her number. The most prepared man I know, who keeps a spare phone charger in three different jackets, walked out of a house without the one thing he needed. He had to go back the next morning with a story about a scarf. There was no scarf.

Bronwyn, you are the first thing in his life he did not plan for, and I have watched him get comfortable with that. He leaves the house without checking the weather. Last month he let you pick the restaurant without reading a single review, which for him is roughly the same as skydiving. He has spent his whole life laying mattresses at the bottom of other people's hills. You are the first person I have ever seen lay one for him. Thank you for that.

So, everybody, glasses up. To Aurelio and Bronwyn. Go fast. The mattress is in place.

Why it works: The joke is on the speaker the whole way through, one story carries everything, and the turn to the bride shows the groom letting someone plan for him for once.