Top 10 Hilarious & Poignant Commencement Speeches By A Celebrity

Top 10 Hilarious & Poignant Commencement Speeches By A Celebrity

5. Will Ferrel & Lisa Kudrow



Venue: Harvard University & Vasar

Year:2003 & 2010

One of the many memorable parts of Will’s speech:

I didn’t graduate from Harvard. In fact, I didn’t even get a call back from admission. Damn you, Harvard.
I’m not one of you. I can’t relate to who you are and what you’ve been through. I graduated from the school life. I got a degree from the school of hard knocks and our colors were black and blue, baby.

You are about to enter a world of hypocricy and double speak. A world where your limo is half an hour late… A world where your acting coach Bob Leslie Dunkin tells you time and time again that you will never ever be considered as a dramatic actor because you don’t play things real.

This is where my faith in you guys comes into play. Without a doubt, you are the finest most talented group of sexual beings this land has to offer. Four of you… will go on to magnificent careers in the porno industry. I’m not trying to be funny, that’s just a statistical fact.







4. Jon Stewart



Venue: College of William & Mary

Year: 2004

One of the many memorable parts:

Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I…I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.



3. Steve Jobs



Venue: Stanford University

Year:2005

One of the many memorable parts:


When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.

It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.



2. Brad Delson of Linkin Park



Venue: University of California, Los Angeles

Year:2009

One of the many memorable parts:

When university officials called me seven days ago… boy, was I pumped. I can’t remember the last time I was picked first for anything. Since I’ve never actually made a keynote speech before, I figured they usually wait until few days before the ceremony before they write the speech.

You can imagine my astonishment when my father in law showed me an article in Saturday’s LA Times entitled Actor James Franco backed out as keynote speaker to UCLA. So after 6 hours on facebook and several incoherent tweets with someone named francofan420, I was able to corroborate that unfortunately I was not the university’s number 1 draft pick.

After the initial shock wear off, I began to think about my own graduation ten years ago and strangely I do not remember my own graduation ten years ago. I definetely don’t know who gave the speech. So I thought to myself how high could the bar be set for this whole keynote thing.



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