Elvis Has Left the Chapel

BEING wed by an Elvis impersonator is so last century.

In the age of reality TV and Twitter, celebrities (we use the term loosely) are more accessible than ever. Some of them are even available to officiate at your nontraditional wedding, and they come without the reverence of a priest, pastor or rabbi.

Take Kevin Smith. Or rather, take Kevin Smith at your own risk. Nothing is sacred at a wedding officiated by the disaffected writer, director and star of films like “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy,” who has long been the online king of comic-book geeks.

A ceremony overseen by Mr. Smith in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles is part podcast, part reality-show-style confessional, and more profanity-laden than some divorces. His weddings, at the SModcastle, his recently opened theater, start with him interviewing the couple for 45 minutes about sex and exes, followed by a quickie ceremony. It is then all made available for free streaming on SModcast.com. The wedding package costs $5,000.

“I’m always going to be an omnipresent-but-not-there third in your marriage,” declared Mr. Smith, clad in a ceremonial terrycloth bathrobe, as he was about to wed his first couple, Rhonda Sheffield and Chris Jacobs, on Oct. 10. That comment, said onstage, was followed by a crude remark about the couple’s sex life.

Mr. Smith’s credentials come courtesy of an application to the Universal Life Church, which has been around since 1959 and has grown in influence since the advent of the Web. According to its Web site, the church has 20 million ordained ministers, a long list of well-known ones including Glenn Beck and Doris Day. Weddings by the group’s ministers are legally binding in all states, though some require additional documentation.

“I had my assistant spend 10 minutes filling out a form online,” said the comedian Kathy Griffin, another Universal Life minister. “It’s really hard. It’s a lot of dedication to the Lord and a commitment to spirituality.”

Said Mr. Smith, “It’s silly that anyone in this world tells you that there are only certain people that can marry you.” He has seven weddings booked for his theater in 2011. After learning about it on Mr. Smith’s Twitter feed, the Jacobses became the first couple to have a ceremony there.

For those who aren’t committed to the rituals of a traditional ceremony, a comedian’s services are an offbeat solution. Mr. Smith, who was famously ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight this year for being overweight, said, “It’s got to be a chick with a great sense of humor who says, ‘I want to be married in a 50-seat theater while the dude who’s too fat for airlines asks us about the first time we had sex.’ ”

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For a more reverent option, there are famous musicians turned ministers, like Rev Run, a former member of the 1980s hip-hop group Run-DMC, and the soul singer Al Green, who has been a minister at his own church in Memphis since 1976. Both regularly officiate wedding ceremonies.

A New Zealand couple’s campaign to get the rock singer Alice Cooper to marry them in Las Vegas next summer has attracted nearly 5,000 fans on Facebook. No word on Mr. Cooper’s reaction to the campaign.

Sometimes simply asking pays off. Two years ago, a New Jersey couple wrote Ms. Griffin a letter, requesting that she marry them. “They picked me because they wanted people to laugh,” said Ms. Griffin, who wed them on her Bravo television series, “My Life on the D-List.”

Abbe Thorner and Jason Wood of Hollywood took a similar approach in July. When their scheduled officiant canceled two weeks before the big day, the couple wanted to find someone “entertaining and funny” to step in, and they had recently read a magazine story about the fun-loving, up-for-anything-once Jason Segel, a star of “How I Met Your Mother” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” “We had a couple glasses of wine and we posted an ad on Craigslist: ‘Jason Segel, will you marry us?’ ” said the now Mrs. Wood.

Responses to the post led them to the Den, a bar the actor was known to frequent on Sunset Boulevard. Having posted fliers in the surrounding neighborhood, they were having a drink there when Mr. Segel walked in with one of their fliers in hand. “We weren’t stalking him,” Mrs. Wood insisted.

Mr. Segel was up for their idea. Since he was going to be out of town promoting his movie “Despicable Me” on the original date of their wedding, he said he would officiate a few days before on July 6 during his previously scheduled appearance on “The Tonight Show.”

“It was insane,” Mrs. Wood said of the couple’s 15 minutes of fame. “We’re nobodies! Let me tell you, my husband and I tried to plan a very low-key wedding and this is the extreme opposite. We wound up on national TV.” Their wedding, which many of their guests got to attend, was only the second ever conducted on the show. The first: Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki in 1969.

“We have our marriage license, signed by Jason Segel and Jay Leno, who was our witness,” Mrs. Wood said. (Mr. Segel was ordained online through the same church as Mr. Smith and Ms. Griffin.)

“It was important to us to make this our experience,” said Mrs. Wood, who dated her husband for eight years and doesn’t put much stock in religion. “We thought, What would make us happy? That’s how we’ve always been as a couple. We don’t do crazy things, but we’re on our own adventure, and that’s what this was. It was just part of that adventure.”