We've all heard a wedding toast or two that made us cringe—and gave us a healthy fear of handing over the microphone at our own weddings. But whatever you've witnessed in the past, prepare yourself for something even worse: Seven wedding toasts so horrifying you won't want to believe they're real.
They have no idea what they’re walking into.
1. Some toasts you never forget—no matter how much you'd like to. Take this grossly sexist speech Franklin heard more than 15 years ago and can still remember word for word: "The father on the groom said, 'A wife is like a good tile floor,'" Franklin recalls. "'If you lay it correctly, you can walk all over it for years.'" Yuck.
2. Even best men make wedding toast blunders. And, according to Sue, the best man at her brother-in-law's wedding made a big one. "The best man raised his glass and instead of saying the bride and groom's first names, he said the groom and the groom's ex-girlfriend's names," she recalls. "There was a moment of stunned silence, and I am not sure the best man was ever fully exonerated for the faux pas."
3. Nerves can get the best of us all—even April, who, as a singer, is used to being center stage in front of a crowd. "I was nervous—and I had a few drinks to deal with the nerves, which only made it worse," says April, who remembers giving a toast that went something like, "When we were young Amy would only eat hot dogs. She knew there were other foods out there, but hot dogs were her only choice. Charlie, you are just like that—the only hot dog Amy will ever eat for the rest of her life." Yep—she went there. "As you can imagine, there was silence, some laughter, and I think I repressed everything else thereafter," April says.
4. And then there's when you ruin your own wedding. Reader Heather was at a wedding during which she watched the groom grab the microphone for an impromptu toast. "We all assumed it was going to be about his lovely new bride but instead, it was about his best man," she says. "It got worse. He wanted to toast him for always being there for him, especially at the lowest points of his life—like when the love of his life broke his heart, who was clearly not the blushing bride at his side! The entire bridal party ran from the head table to the bathroom in tears."
5. A good toast should enhance the event—not steal the show. But Denise watched in horror as the best man at the wedding she was attending captured everyone's attention in the most inappropriate way possible. "He said, 'I'm so inspired by Carl and Sarah's wedding that I've decided to propose to my woman too,'" she recalls, adding he made good on his promise immediately. "With that, he got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend," Denise says. "Aside from the obvious upstaging of the bride and groom and stealing the spotlight on their special moment—which is supposed to be all about them—his mother almost had a cow."
6. Turns out, it's not just the bride and groom who can suffer through a bad speech. Chelsi and her husband denied the groom's step-father the chance to give a toast at their own wedding, but couldn't keep him from grabbing the microphone three mother's later when her brother-in-law tied the knot. "He talked about how a marriage is supposed to be the merging of families—and that unfortunately my husband and I didn't make an effort to introduce him to my family at our wedding and how bad that was," Chelsi says. "He said that even though he and the bride don't get along or see eye-to-eye on many things, that there would still be the merging of families—unlike what happened at my wedding. It was pretty unbelievable considering that most of the people in attendance hardly know us, and because he was talking about our wedding in a toast at someone else's wedding."
7. Bad jokes during toasts are bad enough. But how about a bad joke about a condom? Sarah still cringes when she thinks about the speech her best man made at her wedding. "He made a condom joke that may or may not have been about us—it was something about a convenience store and buying condoms with a punch line about finding women in the middle of the night," Sarah recalls. "I still have cringe-worthy thoughts about my 70- and 80-year-old relatives—and frankly parents— who were in the room and heard it. What poor, poor taste."