Jokes and One-Liners for your Wedding Speech or Toast

Hear, hear!
Weaving some magic into your wedding speech

You've done the hard work — the vows are written, the order of service is sorted, and now you're looking for that one perfect joke, quote, or one-liner to bring the room to life. A well-timed laugh can ease the tension, warm a crowd, and turn a good speech into an unforgettable one. We've gathered our favourites below: toasts, sentimental quotations, witty one-liners, and jokes — enough to suit any style, from the heartfelt to the hilarious.

Tips for Using Humour in Your Wedding Speech

• Know your audience. What gets a laugh among your uni mates might land very differently with Gran in the front row.
• One or two jokes is enough. A speech that's all punchlines has no heart. Use humour to punctuate warmth, not replace it.
• Avoid anything you wouldn't say sober. If you'd hesitate telling the story at a job interview, leave it out.
• Deliver it straight. Don't laugh at your own jokes — let the room do that. Pause, make eye contact, and wait for the response.
• Test it first. Rehearse in front of someone you trust and watch their face when you hit the punchline.

Jokes and One-Liners for the MC

The MC's jokes do a different job from a speech. They keep the evening moving, cover the gaps while the kitchen catches up and get the room on side early. Keep them short, keep them about the day itself, and never punch down at the couple. Swap in real names and details wherever you see brackets.

• Good evening, everyone. I'm your MC tonight, which means I'm the only person here who has seen the actual timings. Please don't ask me what they are.
• Before we start, please put your phones on silent. The couple has paid a photographer a lot of money, and none of the photos need your screen glowing in them.
• The bar is open, the food is on its way and the speeches will be short. Two of those three things are guaranteed.
• We'll hear from the best man shortly. He has asked me to remind you that everything he says tonight is alleged.
• [Couple] met [number] years ago. [Name] says it was love at first sight. [Name] says it took a second look. Possibly a third.
• Dinner will be served table by table. If your table is called last, please know it's nothing personal. It's alphabetical. Mostly.
• If anyone needs the Wi-Fi password tonight, it's "talk to the person next to you".
• Good news, everyone: the venue has a generator. This is South Africa, and these two are planners.
• Speeches start now. Anyone who goes past five minutes will be played off by the DJ, who has been practising all week.
• The father of the bride tells me he isn't nervous about his speech. He's told me that four times in the last ten minutes.
• Uncle [name] has asked the DJ for nothing recorded after 1985. The DJ has asked Uncle [name] to stay away from the decks.
• A quick note from the venue: the fire exits are clearly marked. The exits from the dance floor, once the DJ gets going, are not.

The best MC lines land straight after something practical, like a timing announcement or a call to the buffet, because the room isn't expecting them. Have three or four ready and use them when the moment comes rather than reading them out in a block.

Speech Openers for the Best Man, Groom and Bridesmaids

The first ten seconds of a speech decide whether the room relaxes. A light opening line buys you goodwill for everything after it.

• For those who don't know me, I'm the best man. For those who do, I apologise in advance.
• I was told to keep this short, clean and not embarrassing. So this will be a very short speech.
• My wife and I... Sorry. I've been waiting all day to say that.
• I'd like to thank [name]'s parents for raising someone so wonderful, and for not asking too many questions the first time I showed up.
• I've known [name] for [number] years: through school, varsity and three questionable haircuts. I have never seen them this nervous, and I'm the one holding the microphone.
• They say a best man's speech should be shorter than the groom's time on the dance floor. So I'll be done in about thirty seconds.

For the rest of the speech, our guides to the best man's speech, the bride's speech and the father of the bride speech cover structure, timing and who to thank. If the speech is in Afrikaans, start with our beste man toespraak guide.

Toasts

Cheers!

Toasts are typically short, heartfelt wishes, such as:

• Let us toast the health of the bride; let us toast the health of the groom; let us toast the person that tied; let us toast every guest in the room
• Here's to the groom, a man who keeps his head though he loses his heart
• My greatest wish for the two of you is that, through the years, your love for each other will so deepen and grow, that years from now you will look back on this day, your wedding day, as the day you loved each other the least
• Here's to matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!
• May the roof above you never fall in and may you both never fall out
• To the lamp of love: may it burn brightest in the darkest hours and never flicker in the winds of trial
• May your love be like the misty rain, gentle coming in but flooding the river

Sentimental Quotations

Well said!

Pepper your speech or toast with one of the following warm and heartfelt statements:

• Love is life — Leo Tolstoy
• Love is a flower which turns into fruit at marriage — Finnish Proverb
• Love is friendship set to music — Anonymous
• Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination — Voltaire
• Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit — Khalil Gibran
• Marriage is a mistake every man should make — George Jessel
• A man without a wife is like a vase without flowers — African Proverb
• Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same — Emily Brontë
• There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved — George Sand
• They do not love that do not show their love — William Shakespeare
• Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman — Joseph Joubert
• We have the greatest pre-nuptial agreement in the world: it's called love — Gene Perret
• When love reigns, the impossible may be attained — Indian Proverb
• Without love, the world itself would not survive — Lope de Vega
• The highest happiness on earth is marriage — William Lyon Phelps
• To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with — Mark Twain
• To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage — Lao Tzu
• In so much as love grows in you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul — St. Augustine

Or some of these longer quotations:

• Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without — James C. Dobson
• What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow — Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Marriage is like a golden ring in a chain, whose beginning is a glance and whose ending is eternity — Kahlil Gibran
• Marriage is like a pair of shears often times working in opposite directions, but punishing anyone that comes between them — Sydney Smith
• Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years — Simone Signoret
• Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate — Barnett R. Brickner
• A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person — Mignon McLaughlin
• Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• We never live so intensely as when we love strongly. We never realize ourselves so vividly as when we are in full glow of love for others — Walter Rauschenbusch
• There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage — Martin Luther
• Come, let's be a comfortable couple and take care of each other! How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with — Charles Dickens
• When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible — Nora Ephron
• When the one man loves the one woman and the one woman loves the one man, the very angels desert heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy — The Brahma Sutras
• Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry — Tom Mullen

Or one of these in verse:

• To keep your marriage brimming,
  With love in the loving cup,
  Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
  Whenever you're right, shut up.
  — Ogden Nash
• If two stand shoulder to shoulder against the gods,
  Happy together, the gods themselves are helpless
  Against them while they stand so.
  — Maxwell Anderson
• I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance,
  A church filled with family and friends.
  I asked him what kind of a wedding he wished for,
  He said one that would make me his wife.
  — Author Unknown

Wedding Jokes

A bag of laughs

A few well-timed jokes can add some spice to a wedding speech. Try some of these:

• A businessman boarded a plane to find, sitting next to him, an elegant woman wearing the largest, most stunning diamond ring he had ever seen. He asked her about it. "This is the Johnson diamond," she said. "It is beautiful, but there is a terrible curse that goes with it." "What's the curse?" the man asked. "Mr. Johnson."
• Adam and Eve had an ideal marriage. He didn't have to hear about all the men she could have married, and she didn't have to hear about the way his mother cooked.
• Two cannibals just finished a big meal and one turns to the other while rubbing his stomach and says, "You know, I just ate my mother-in-law, and she still doesn't agree with me!"
• I bought my wife a new car. She called and said, "There's water in the carburetor." I said, "Where's the car?" She said, "In the lake."
• I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
• Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day.
• A husband said to his wife, "No, I don't hate your relatives. In fact, I like your mother-in-law better than I like mine."

Witty One-Liners

On a lighter note

Used sparingly, these saucy quips can wake up a sleepy audience:

• A wedding ring is sort of a tourniquet worn on one's finger to stop circulation.
• A bachelor is a man who never makes the same mistake once.
• Compromise: An amiable arrangement between husband and wife whereby they agree to let her have her own way.
• "I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest?
• In my house I'm the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.
• It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
• Love is grand; divorce a hundred grand.
• Marriage is the institution where the woman loses her name and the man his solvency.
• Marriage is a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering.
• Marriage isn't a word. It's a sentence.
• Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.
• My wife says I never listen to her. At least I think that's what she said.
• My wife suggested a book for me to read to enhance our relationship. It's titled Women are from Venus, Men are Wrong.
• My husband said he needed more space. So I locked him outside.
• Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.
• The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
• There's a way of transferring funds that is even faster than electronic banking. It's called marriage.
• You know what I did before I married? Anything I wanted to.
• We always hold hands. If I let go, she shops.
• I married Miss Right. I just didn't know her first name was Always.
• I haven't spoken to my wife in 18 months — I don't like to interrupt her.
• If marriage were outlawed, only outlaws would have in-laws.
• Just think, if it weren't for marriage, men would go through life thinking they had no faults at all.
• Wedding rings: the world's smallest handcuffs.

From the Cynics

• A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers — Ruth Bell Graham
• A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together — James H. Boren
• A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished — Zsa Zsa Gabor
• A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married — H.L. Mencken
• All marriages are happy. It's the living together afterward that causes all the trouble — Raymond Hull
• Any married man should forget his mistakes — no use two people remembering the same thing — Duane Dewel
• Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too — H.L. Mencken
• He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of — Mae West
• I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury — Groucho Marx
• I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it — Lyndon B. Johnson
• Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards — Benjamin Franklin
• Like good wine, marriage gets better with age — once you learn to keep a cork in it — Gene Perret
• Never marry for money. Ye'll borrow it cheaper — Scottish Proverb
• Our marriage has always been a 50-50 proposition — with the possible exception of closet space — Gene Perret
• The most dangerous food is wedding cake — American Proverb
• The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding — Oscar Wilde
• The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds — they mature slowly — Peter De Vries
• The best way to remember your wife's birthday is to forget it once — H.V. Prochnow
• The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep — A.P. Herbert
• When a man opens the car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife — Prince Philip