Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Wedding Toaster - Toasted

Unplugged and err brownish. The preparatory notes are out here. In a nutshell the toast revolved around fairytales. But fair is for fairytales which we all remember in our own ways.

Anyways, so I was in Goa for a wedding and was asked to raise the toast. They told me to keep it short; ideally not more than 3 minutes. So then I got into speech mode around 2 days before the wedding day. Wasn't tense but wanted to make a good impression, if you know what I mean :-)

So I started to think of flow. Broke up the toast into parts as mentioned out here. Wrote a poetry called "Finding Never Never Land" (about fairytales) to end with. And since ppl wouldn't want to listen to serious stuff, I padded the beginning and end with some humour. So it was 90 seconds of humour/sarcasm/pokes at family etc to start with and then 90 seconds of poetry and some subtle humor to end with.

I searched on the net for marriage jokes but everything seemed too run-of-the-mill types and stuff that everyone must have heard a thousand times (if they attend many weddings). So the week before that in Pune I met this lady who told me about how she had raised a toast with picture ppts and then another one where she used this particular 'upper hand' joke which I had not heard of till then. And since I attend a lot of weddings I thought it was something nice to start with. It was actually something that no one who I spoke to had heard of before. So I polished the joke, added it to the flow.It had this pretty good punch to start the proceedings with and grab people's attention. It had modulated tones and changes in diction and subtle eye expressions etc etc...

Now the compere/MC was supposed to introduce me before I raised the toast. So he calls the bride and groom to the cake and just before I start uses the very same 'upper hand' joke in a different flavour. The joke that not many had heard of till now. And everyone laughed... and then he asked me to raise the toast....

And so I started without the joke that would set things in flow. But otherwise the toast was decent.

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