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Laugh Staff co-founders and amateur comedians Cameron Amigo and Josh Womack are hoping to tap into the estimated 5 million best-man and maid-of-honor speeches delivered every year. Their start-up company matches people who are shy about public speaking with comedians who can help teach them about tone, timing, delivery and knowing when to pause for laughter.
(Ted Crow, The Plain Dealer)
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cameron Amigo and Josh Womack want to make wedding receptions less awkward and more memorable, one best-man toast at a time.
"We've gone to a lot of weddings and seen a lot of best-man and maid-of-honor speeches not go so well," Womack said. People ramble on aimlessly, share mortifyingly inappropriate stories about the bride or groom, and end up being remembered for all the wrong reasons.
That's where their newly created Laugh Staff comedy consultants business comes in.
"Every other aspect of the wedding is handled by professionals. The best man and maid of honor speeches should be, too," Amigo said. He is a Marietta native who recently worked as a tug boat captain for Great Lakes Towing Co., and is currently serving in Kuwait with the Ohio Army National Guard.
"The bride doesn't have her Grandma sew her dress, she has it made by a professional. The same goes for the best-man speech. Take the time to make it perfect for the bride and groom on their special day."
For $24.99, you can send them your speech and have a professional comedian punch it up into something you'd be proud to deliver.
Or for $59.99 to $99, depending on the number of edits and amount of coaching, a comedian will write your speech for you.
"We send the client a questionnaire and try and get as much info on the bride and groom as possible (names, where they met, wedding location, hobbies, funny courtship stories)," said Womack via email from Gates Mills. When not doing standup, he is also regional development manager for the nonprofit National Kidney Foundation Inc. "From the questionnaire we come up with the speech."
And for $199, with input from you, they promise a 12-hour turnaround for procrastinators who need a last-minute speech that's ready for prime time. The price includes being able to call the comedian-coach on the day of the wedding.
When to smirk
Cleveland sisters Emily Gibbons and Laura Sokolowski reached out to Laugh Staff for help with their maid-of-honor toast when their sister, Diana, got married on May 25.
"Before contacting Josh, my sister and I didn't know where to start with the speech," Gibbons said via email. After they told him a little about the bride and groom, how they had met and some of their quirks, "within 24 hours he emailed me the best maid of honor speech I've ever read."
They added some sentimental details of their own, but kept about 70 percent of what he'd written, including his hints on when to smirk.
"Josh asked so many good questions in the info gathering phase so the speech flowed really well and it didn't need much changing," she said. "I was laughing uncontrollably after reading the first paragraph of the speech, so I knew it was going to be a hit."
How not to bomb
Amigo said that although YouTube has videos of people giving best man and maid of honor speeches, and other sites offer pre-written speeches with blanks for the names of the bride and groom, "the first and worst mistake people make is copying a speech off the internet."
"Not only is this insincere, it's hard to memorize someone else's story," he said. Using the client's own experiences helps ensure that "when it's time to give the speech, it's natural because they've already told their story a thousand times."
Also, "just because your friends think you're funny doesn't mean a roomful of strangers will think so," Amigo said.
"Giving a best-man or maid-of-honor speech is hard. Most adults haven't had to speak in front of 200 people in their lives, let alone with the pressure to be both funny and sincere."
He said Laugh Staff beats other wedding-toast sites because he and Womack are used to speaking in front of people three to four nights a week. "We speak in front of drunk people, hecklers, and a wide range of demographics," he said.
"Bombing, that's the biggest fear for a best man or maid of honor. And no one knows how to prevent that better than a comedian."
Womack agreed, saying that as comedians who do a lot of standup, they know all about timing, when the audience is likely to laugh, and how to build up to a dramatic spin in the speech.
"You usually know you're going to do this [toast] at least eight to 12 months out," he said. "It's your responsibility to put some effort into your speech, rehearse it, and put some thought into it."
Appealing to men
Groom-to-be Michael Schwabe, director of digital strategy for Akhia, a public relations and marketing communications agency in Hudson, said that because so many wedding websites and Pinterest boards are designed for brides, "I think that this idea is great, especially from a man's perspective."
He said most people who are planning their weddings think about the logistics of nailing down the place, the date, the caterer and the deejay, "but nobody thinks about the speech."
The last time he was a best man, "I wrote the speech in my head driving from the church to the reception," he said. "It's one of those things that doesn't get thought of until the last minute."
Not only do most people dislike public speaking, but many of those who deliver toasts bring up inappropriate stories or try to be funny and fail. "The speaker may have a great topic, but it isn't engaging or geared to the right audience," he said.
But being able to have someone help out, from the humor perspective or not, offers you the opportunity to turn something dry or uncomfortable into something fun and enjoyable, he said.
High risk, high reward
Since launching in mid-March, Laugh Staff and its stable of comedians have already written speeches for more than 25 clients from Cleveland to Australia, many of whom never told their married friends they got help with their speeches. And although Laugh Staff has a website, they've gotten most of their clients through word-of-mouth referrals.
About 16 of their clients were giving best-man toasts, while the other seven or eight were giving maid-of-honor toasts.
"With all the stress surrounding a wedding, it was so nice for us to have another thing checked off our list," Emily Gibbons said. "It took the pressure off of us so we could focus on helping our sister."
And the feedback from the men? "Everyone that we've worked with so far has been really pleased, and you can tell they're really grateful to have another set of eyes on what they're about to say," Womack said.
"Best-man speeches are high risk, high reward," he said. "If you try to be funny and you're not, that's really bad. You also want to be funny in appropriate ways. That's the idea of having someone who can do it well help you. It's a bit more difficult than people realize."
"The first thing is: Know your audience. You may have some frat brothers there, but you're not at a frat party. No F-bombs. Know who's in the room."
Don't forget the bride's parents and groom's parents. "Bring them into the speech, because it's their big day, too. You might say, 'They've done a great job raising Linda, but they've also done a good job pretending to like Michael.' "
Born from a bad place
The idea for Laugh Staff came from conversations Amigo had at a recent wedding reception.
The groom, who knew Amigo did standup at local comedy clubs, approached him and said his best man was about to say some things that would leave everyone feeling awkward and uncomfortable. "When he's done with his speech, do you mind getting up there and telling some jokes that will put the room back in a good place?" he asked.
Amigo agreed, and after the best-man and maid-of-honor speeches bombed and killed the celebratory atmosphere in the room, Amigo's impromptu performance brought it back.
"After my routine, someone came up to me and asked if I could help him with a best-man speech he had to write," he said. "I did, he loved it, I loved helping him, and he offered to pay me afterwards. That's when the idea was born."
For Amigo, working on the business from Kuwait means waking up early or staying up late, especially on the quick turnarounds, but he and Womack are making it work via email and Skype.
Amigo sees enormous potential for Laugh Staff. "Honestly, it could be huge," he said. "Once we climb in the [online] search rankings, I anticipate that we'll do about 1,200 speeches a year. There are over 2.3 million weddings in the U.S. alone. We've already had two international customers -- both from Australia. We also just posted a blog on a popular U.K. best-man blog, so our reach is going global.
"However, just by keeping it in the U.S. and Canada, that means there are almost 5 million best-man and maid-of-honor speeches a year.
"The problem is real, the volume is there. We just need to get the word out to the potential clients and work hard to deliver an amazing service, which I have no doubt we will do because we have a group of caring and hilarious comedians."
The two also recently submitted a five-minute video audition of their business for Shark Tank, the ABC reality show in which aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business to skeptical investors.
Limited audience
Sid Good, president of Good Marketing Inc. in Cleveland, liked the idea as soon as he heard about it. "Is sounds like a terrific service. Why wouldn't you use it?"
But he wonders about having to rely on a target audience that isn't self-sustaining. How often are people asked to be maids of honor and best men?
Perhaps Laugh Staff should expand its focus to "anyone doing any kind of public speaking, in any venue," he said. Not necessarily to write the entire speech, but taking advantage of the company's invitation to "punch up a speech or enhance it."
"Any time you give a speech, you want to inform, but it's also important to entertain, and it's very difficult to do both," he said. "This helps you make sure that you're delivering the best information and doing so in a fun and entertaining way."
Amigo believes so strongly in Laugh Staff's potential that he plans to make it his full-time job when he comes back to the U.S. next spring.
"If you ask my fiancee, she says I already do this full-time," he said via email. "The plan is that when I return from overseas, I will give Laugh Staff everything I have. This is of course dependent on the volume we receive, but I'll do whatever I need to make it happen.
"Look, we're Browns fans . . . we don't give up," he added.
Emily Gibbons said that not only did Laugh Staff's speech get her sister's 125 wedding guests laughing uncontrollably, but her sister Diana and her brother-in-law loved it, too.
"We definitely outdid the best man," she said.
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