Will's Web Watch: Please God! Not another best man doing the 'key joke'

With viral emails and jokes there is a tendency to see the same ones over and over. The first time you see a long list of jokes, or the winners of the Darwin awards, you may well chuckle. The second time they may still raise a smile. After that you tend to just delete without opening, knowing what's coming and knowing you definitely won't find it funny a third time.

And that's fine - pressing delete is not the hardest thing you'll ever do - but this is a pattern which transfers itself into real life, where there is no 'delete' button to ease your pain.

In your life - if you are male - there is a very good chance you will be asked to be a best man at a friend's wedding and the easiest thing to do nowadays is to turn to the internet for help. But don't.

The reason Amazon.com is so successful is because it sells products multiple times to its consumers. It sold millions of the latest Harry Potter book. The internet is about mass commerce, rather than bespoke tailoring of products. Any speech will therefore not be original - no matter what 'personalisation' sites might tell you - and there is a very good chance many people present will have heard much of it before.

In the past popular jokes may have spread by word of mouth and within a community there was a chance you might hear the same joke at a couple of weddings but now, with the internet, the best man's speech is pre-packed and invariably identical from one wedding to the next.

At a wedding at the weekend I became aware that the best man was laying the ground work for the infamous - and tragically unfunny - 'key joke', which he admitted to finding online.

Typically, before the ceremony, or before the reception, the best man goes around and hands out a load of keys to assorted women. During his speech he will then say something along the lines of: "I know during the groom's bachelor days he had a lot of girlfriends and I know some of them are here today but I've been asked that if any still have a key for his front door that they return it now..."

Cue a long line of people standing up to return his front door key and an ever diminishing level of hilarity from the jaded audience.

Having got wind of this before the ceremony I was sorely tempted to say when the vicar reached the "if any persons here present know of any just reason why..." to stand up and say "Yes, me, I know of a good reason - the best man's speech is going to be awful".

Weddings are important occasions in everybody's life. In the same way that women don't want to turn up in the same dress as somebody else, so the best man should take pride in not turning up with the same speech as somebody else.

The internet is here to make life better not blander. Search on Google or AltaVista now and you will find hundreds of sites offering you a 'build your own best man's speech' style package. But break down what you see and it's hundreds of sites offering very little variation. The same jokes and the same tales and anecdotes to slip in - or on.

Guaranteed one of the first three sites you find will throw up the above 'key joke'. All you do with these services is basically change the name of the bride and groom - but how long will it be before somebody forgets to even do that?

Of course the best man's speech follows a set convention and there are some time-honoured crowd-pleasers which people almost expect to hear but surely it is worth giving a little more effort to such an occasion. It should be an honour, not the kind of chore where you look for an easy way out. Perhaps the modern bride and groom have invited such an impersonal touch upon themselves by putting their wedding list online but, even still, it's not the best way to repay a compliment. "Thanks for asking me to be best man - now here's a crappy speech written by somebody who's never met you..."

Save the internet for taking the hassle out of buying books, banking and doing your weekly grocery shop - buying some more time to dedicate to life's more important tasks.