Funny Best Man Speech for a College Roommate: 3 Full Examples

Evening, everyone. I'm Marcus. I lived with Nathan for three years at Leeds, which legally makes me the only person here qualified to confirm that he has lost at Monopoly and cried about it.

We were assigned the same flat in first year, two strangers and one tiny kitchen. Within a week we had a whiteboard on the fridge tracking who owed whom for milk, and within a month that whiteboard had a second column for grudges. By Christmas it needed a third column to explain the first two.

I work in software now, so I appreciate a good system. Nathan does not believe in systems. Nathan believes he is personally exempt from them. He once spent four hours building an elaborate rota for whose turn it was to take the bins out, a rota that named me on every single day, and then defended it as fair because he had drawn it up.

The man is competitive in a way that should worry a doctor. We played board games most nights, and I have watched Nathan flip a Scrabble board because I challenged the word 'qopik'. It is not a word. He maintained for the rest of term that it was a small coin used somewhere he could never name. He lost a game of Risk so badly one night that he went quiet, walked out of the flat without a word, and came back forty minutes later with a kebab for himself and nothing for any of us. He called that a strategic withdrawal.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about a person like that. The same stubbornness that makes him insufferable over a coin makes him completely immovable when it actually counts. Second year I failed a module and seriously thought about packing the whole degree in. I did not tell anyone. Nathan worked it out from the look on my face, sat me down at that filthy kitchen table, and made me a revision timetable. Then he sat next to me every evening for six weeks, doing his own reading, just so I would not be alone with mine. He never once made it a big moment. He just refused to let me quit, the same way he refused to admit qopik was not a word.

That is who he is. Loud about the small things, silent and unshakeable about the big ones.

Then Sophie came along. They met at a pub quiz, on opposing teams, and Nathan's team lost by a single point on a question about rivers. He demanded a recount. There is no recount in a pub quiz. He asked anyway, and Sophie, who was on the winning team, leaned over and offered to explain how points work. He has been trying to win her round ever since, and to his enormous credit, it took.

What I have watched since is the funniest thing of all. Nathan finally met someone he is happy to lose to. Sophie beats him at cards and he just grins like an idiot. She corrects him in front of people and he thanks her. The competitive streak that three years of flatmates could not dent, she switched off with a smile, and the rest of us are still trying to understand how.

Sophie, you should know exactly what you have taken on. This is a man who keeps score of everything and will absolutely remember that you said you would do the washing up in 2019. He is also a man who will quietly carry you through your worst week and never bring it up, never put it on a whiteboard, never add it to the column. The first part is exhausting. The second part is the best thing about him.

Nathan, living with you cost me a lot of milk and most of my sanity. I would do all three years again tomorrow.

Everyone, on your feet and glasses up. To Nathan and Sophie. May she keep winning, and may he keep loving that she does.

Hi everyone. I'm Priya. I shared a house with Dev for two years at university, which means I have a folder of evidence and the legal right to read from it tonight.

We met because Dev advertised for a housemate with a flyer that promised, and I quote, a 'high vibrational living environment'. I moved in expecting plants. What I got was a man who had nine business ideas and zero clean mugs.

Dev is an entrepreneur. He has always been an entrepreneur, in the specific sense that he has started many businesses and finished none. In the time I lived with him he launched a company selling personalised dog bandanas, a service that woke people up with a phone call from a stranger, and a brand of hot sauce so violent it took the shine off the kitchen taps. None of them made a penny. Every single one of them taught him something, usually about chemistry.

I'm a doctor now, so I have a professional interest in the hot sauce in particular. We lost a flatmate to it. Not in a tragic sense. He just tried a spoonful on a dare, went very still, and moved out the following weekend. Dev framed his departure as a customer testimonial.

You would think a person who fails that often would eventually stop. Dev does the opposite. He fails, he laughs, he writes down what went wrong, and he starts the next one before the last one has finished collapsing. For two years I watched him get knocked flat and bounce straight back up, and somewhere in the middle of all that nonsense I realised it was not stupidity. It was a kind of courage the rest of us are too sensible to have.

And it pointed outward too. Our third housemate, a quiet lad called Femi, was the kind who pays rent on time and otherwise disappears. Halfway through the year Femi's loan fell through and he was about to drop out and go home, and he told nobody but Dev. Dev's response was to invent a job. He decided his hot sauce empire urgently needed a, his words, head of operations, and he paid Femi out of his own student overdraft to do filing that did not exist. Femi finished his degree thinking he had earned every penny. He had not. Dev told me the truth years later, by accident, and made me swear I would never let Femi find out, so I would like to apologise now to Femi, who is sitting at table four.

Then he met Aisha. She bought a dog bandana. It was the only sale that business ever made, and it turned out to be the only one that mattered. She emailed to say the sizing was wrong, he offered to deliver a replacement in person, and he has been finding reasons to turn up at her door ever since.

Watching them together has been a genuine privilege. Aisha is the first investor who ever told Dev no and made it stick. She talks him out of the truly mad ideas and backs every good one to the hilt. He listens to her in a way he has never listened to a bank, an accountant, or any of the rest of us. She is the best decision he has ever made, and the only one he did not have to pivot on.

Aisha, here is your due diligence. This man will pitch you a new venture roughly once a fortnight, usually while you are trying to sleep. He will also back you with everything he has, fail cheerfully at your side, and never let a bad week beat you on your own. The schemes are a circus. The loyalty is the real business, and it has never once gone under.

Dev, being your housemate was the worst return on investment of my life. I would put every penny in again.

So everyone, up on your feet and charge your glasses. To Dev and Aisha. May this be the one venture he never walks away from.

My name is Tom. Lewis and I roomed together for three years at Cardiff, and I am here to tell you that he once joined a club for a sport he could not name, purely because there were free biscuits at the meeting.

We met in halls, two doors apart, both eighteen, both pretending we knew how a washing machine worked. Neither of us did. His first wash turned every white shirt he owned a soft and permanent pink, and he wore them all year and told people it was a statement.

Lewis cannot say no to anything. In one term he signed up for the rowing club, the debating society, an a cappella group, and a society for the appreciation of cheese, and he attended exactly one session of each before the sheer weight of his own diary crushed him. He owned a rowing vest he never rowed in. He had a single solo in the a cappella group and learned it phonetically in a language he did not speak. To this day he can sing forty seconds of something beautiful and has no idea what any of it means.

I'm a paramedic, so I have a finely tuned sense of when a situation is about to go wrong. Living with Lewis kept that sense sharp. He agreed to host a dinner party for twelve people in a kitchen the size of a phone box, having never cooked anything more ambitious than toast. Halfway through he realised he had bought a chicken and no way to cook it in time, so he served twelve people a starter, a long apology, and a second starter. People still talk about it. Some of them fondly.

But there is a reason he cannot say no, and it took me two years to understand it. Lewis says yes because he genuinely cannot stand the thought of letting anyone down. The same instinct that fills his diary with nonsense is the one that means he has never let me down once. When I had the worst night of my life in second year, a real one, the kind you do not bounce back from by morning, he stayed up till four with me on the kitchen floor and just did not leave. He had an exam at nine. He sat it on no sleep and never told me. I found out from someone else, years later.

That is the truth about him. He will overcommit to absolutely everyone, because he would rather run himself into the ground than leave a single person standing alone.

Then Hannah walked in. She joined the same hiking society Lewis had signed up for and, in true Lewis fashion, never once attended. They met on the one walk he finally went on, mostly because she was going. He turned up in brand new boots, got a blister within a mile, and limped the entire route rather than admit he wanted to stop. Hannah noticed. Hannah always notices.

What she gave him is the thing none of us could. Hannah is the first person Lewis has ever felt able to say no to a whole world for. He stopped joining everything, because he finally found the one thing he actually wanted to show up to. The diary is clearer now. The man has a free Tuesday. I have seen it with my own eyes.

Hannah, your warning is short. He will say yes to things he has no business agreeing to, and you will occasionally come home to twelve confused strangers and two starters. He will also never, ever let you face a hard night by yourself. He does not know how to leave. That is the man you are marrying, blisters and all.

Lewis, you said yes to nearly everything in three years and meant almost none of it. Today is the one yes I have watched you build your whole life around.

Everyone, please stand and lift your glasses. To Lewis and Hannah. May this be the one thing he never overbooks.