Have you seen the movie Bridesmaids? Well, if you haven’t, you won’t get the joke either.
Starring Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne as, among others, two rival best friends of Maya Rudolph’s Lillian Donovan, it features a sort of wedding speech-off. At an Irish wedding, the best friends of the bride and groom replicated the scene, but “most of the guests” didn’t get the bit.
‘Mike, welcome to the family’
In the video, posted to TikTok by Cathy, an Irish real estate broker living in Chicago, the bride’s best friend starts by thanking the party’s hosts.
She talks about how she and Cathy grew up together. They knew each other from the age of 7. She thanks the marrying couple for inviting her to be a part of their celebrations, and adds, “Mike, welcome to the family.”
It’s a regular best friend wedding speech, with awkward glances at the prompts on her phone, titters from the audience, and a general feeling of conjugal bonhomie.
Regular, that is, until she’s interrupted by the best friend of the groom. She speaks up from the side of the room, with a microphone of her own, and weighs in with her own speech, thanking Cathy for inviting her to celebrate with them.
‘Do you remember that trip we took with the boys, to Miami?’
She goes on to repeat, almost word for word, the speech delivered by Rose Byrne at the much-loved Bridesmaids scene. Right down to her adding that “dessert wine will be out soon”, and calling the bride and groom the “couple of the decade.”
Then, right on cue, the first woman pipes up again. She’s playing Kristen Wiig. In the movie, Wiig and Byrne’s characters (Annie Walker and Helen Harris III, respectively) compete for the attention and affection of Lillian Donovan, the bride.
In the scene, they alternate, speech after speech, becoming more and more exaggerated in their statements of love and nostalgia. It quickly descends into embarrassing, and very funny, chaos. Eventually, Wiig starts speaking in Spanish, then singing; Byrne joins in.
In the Irish/Illinoisan remake, there’s a twist: one friend speaks Spanish while the other signs along with her own interpretations of what the Spanish words sound like. And, yes, they sing the house down. At one point, you can see a woman leaning over to her neighbor and saying, “It’s from the movie Bridesmaids.”
“That story had an end,” People quotes Kristen Wiig as saying, last month. So any readers who had been cherishing hopes of an eventual remake should probably put those hopes to bed. “It’s so beloved to me for 10 million reasons,” Wiig added, “and I think it’s OK to just have it exist in the world as it is.”
You may need to just watch the TikTok to relive it!
Watch the video below.
