Not Easy for Them to Say

Mel Tillis accepts the Entertainer of the Year award
from the Country Music Association in 1976.

Mel Tillis, the endearing country music showman, passed away from respiratory failure in November of 2017. He had earned a place in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Grand Ole Opry and received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama for an enduring career that included such hits as "I Ain't Never," "Coca-Cola Cowboy," and "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town," and who was equally noted for a pronounced stutter in speaking which he often used to comedically self-deprecating effect on the stage.


I. A Brief but Enlightening History of Stuttering

With Mel Tillis in mind, there's a lot more to stuttering than meets the eye, or for that matter, more than meets the ears. Stuttering has been around for centuries. One of the earliest probable descriptions can be found in the Old Testament's account of Moses' being confronted by the burning bush when God commands him to tell the pharaoh to release the Hebrews from their bondage in Egypt.

The Old Testament according to the gospel of Cecil B. DeMille
in "The Ten Commandments" (1956) depicts Charlton Heston
as Moses kneeling before the burning bush.

In the King James Version of Exodus, Moses protests that he is "slow of speech, and of a slow tongue," which many have inferred as an admission of stuttering. Moses insists he is of "uncircumcised lips," so the Lord finally gives in and appoints Moses' brother, Aaron, to speak for him in confrontations with Pharaoh.

Stuttering occurs in all cultures and ethnic groups. Seventy million people worldwide (about 1% of Earth's population) stutter. Approximately four times as many men as women stutter. The exact causes of developmental and acquired stuttering are relatively unknown, although genetics and neurophysiology are believed to contribute.

Demosthenes was a statesman and political orator in ancient Athens whose speeches encapsulated the mastery of Athenian intellect and offered insight into the politics and culture of 4th century BC Greece. In contrast to his convincing prowess as a public speaker, he initially had "an inarticulate and stammering pronunciation," according to Plutarch, a 2nd century AD biographer. Demosthenes got rid of his speech impediment by practicing speeches with marbles in his mouth and by repeating verses while running or out of breath. He also practiced speaking before a large mirror.

To strengthen his voice, Demosthenes spoke on the shore
over the roar of the waves, as depicted in this 1870
painting by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouy.

Partly due to a mistaken perception of stupidity because of a stutter, partial deafness, and an evident limp, Claudius, who became emperor of Rome in 41 AD after the assassination of his nephew, the infamous tyrant Caligula, was at first shunned from the public eye, going so far as to originally having been purposely excluded from public office.

Derek Jacobi (right), a masterful stage actor frequently employed
by director-actor Kenneth Branagh on-screen, delivers a bravura
performance as the stammering, lame emperor-to-be, here facing off
against his morally rancid nephew Caligula (played by John Hurt) in
the critically lauded 12-part BBC miniseries "I, Claudius" from 1976.

Despite his infirmities, Claudius proved to be a capable and efficient administrator during his 13-year reign. He died after being poisoned by Agrippina, his fourth wife, who happened to be Caligula's sister and mother of Claudius' successor and adopted son, Nero. In gratitude for her securing him the crown, Nero arranged for the eventual murder of his mother.

The nature of stuttering became the basis for a number of historical sobriquets during the Dark Ages. In the 9th century, we find Louis the Stammerer (pictured below), otherwise considered by the French as King Louis II. The son of Charles the Bald, he was a physically weak ruler who succeeded his older brother Charles the Child but reigned a mere year and a half before dying on his way to defend his realm from invading Vikings. One of the later successors to the throne was Louis the Stammerer's youngest son, Charles the Simple (also called Charles the Stupid).

Notker the Stammerer was a 9th century Benedictine monk at an abbey in what would become modern Switzerland (pictured below). Renowned as a musician, writer, and poet, he was described by a brother friar as "delicate of body but not of mind, stuttering of tongue but not of intellect."

Charles I, king of England and Ireland from 1625 to 1649, was a weak and sickly infant who had difficulty learning to walk. He was fitted with special boots of Spanish leather and brass to strengthen his ankles. His speech development came slowly, as well, and he retained a hesitant delivery and stammer throughout his life. In spite of his stutter, he regularly delivered public speeches and earned sizable respect in so doing. Unfortunately, Charles' reign came to an abrupt end when he was beheaded by Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads during the English Civil War, which sought to abolish the monarchy and replace it with a Parliament-ruled commonwealth. That idea lasted all of 11 years before the monarchy was restored with Charles' son, Charles II, on the throne.

The venerable Alec Guinness (right) portrays Charles I in the 1970
historical drama "Cromwell," with Richard Harris in the title role.

Speaking of British monarchs who stuttered, the plight of the stammering Prince Albert, Duke of York, who would become King George VI in 1936 after his elder brother, Edward VII, abdicated the throne to marry an American divorcée, was dramatized in the 2010 film "The King's Speech," which won Academy Awards as Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. Colin Firth earned the Best Actor Oscar for his portrait of the struggling royal who hires an Australian-born speech therapist, Lionel Logue (portrayed in an Oscar-nominated performance by Geoffrey Rush), to help him cope with his impediment during the mid-1920s.

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(Top) Colin Firth consults with Geoffrey Rush in "The King's Speech."
(Bottom) Real deal King George VI makes a public address in 1938.

Two years after "The King's Speech," English actor Samuel West essayed George's dysfluency in "Hyde Park on Hudson," a 2012 fanciful comedy-drama about the King's 1939 visit to President Franklin Roosevelt's country estate in Dutchess County, New York. Bill Murray surprised audiences and impressed critics with his tender and charming depiction of FDR.

George VI (Samuel West) regards his first American hot dog
with trepidation in "Hyde Park on Hudson."

It was George VI who asked Winston Churchill to assume the responsibilities of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1940. Churchill later had a second term as Prime Minister in 1951, first under George VI, then his successor, his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.

Churchill himself had a mild stutter which he thought added an interesting element to his voice. He stated, "Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience." Despite his dysfluency, he became one of the greatest orators in the United Kingdom.

Charles Dodgson, the mathematician, logician, and photographer who penned the timeless children's classic nonsense novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There using the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was a 19th century Anglican deacon of Christ Church of Oxford University in England whose hopes to become an Anglican priest were discouraged by his habitual stuttering when he spoke. Born to parents who were first cousins, Charles and most of his ten siblings struggled with stuttering past childhood.

His dilemma inspired a poem: "Learn well your grammar / And never stammer / Write well and neatly / And sing soft sweetly / Drink tea, not coffee / Never eat toffy / Eat bread with butter / Once more don't stutter."

He referred to his well-known stammer in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with the inclusion of the character of the Dodo (pictured above), in direct allusion to his oft-used stumbling pronunciation of his own name as "Do-Do-Dodgson."

Indefatigable British character Ian Holm ("Mary, Queen of Scots," "Robin and Marian," "Alien," "Chariots of Fire," "Time Bandits," "Greystoke," "Brazil," "Henry V," "The Lord of the Rings," "The Hobbit") adroitly illuminated the embarrassment and anguish of Dodgson's impediment in his personal favorite role as Reverend Charles Dodgson in the whimsical 1985 drama "Dreamchild" (pictured below).

Ian Holm, as Charles Dodgson, pen-named Lewis Carroll, shares
a tender scene in "Dreamchild" with Amelia Shankley, as Alice
Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Wonderland's Alice.

II. Stuttering on the Screen and the Tube

In fiction, a young, handsome, innocent seaman is impressed into service aboard a British man-o'-war in 1797 in Billy Budd, the last, unfinished novel by Herman Melville, the 19th-century author of Moby Dick. Popular with the crew but reviled by John Claggart, the sadistic master-at-arms, Billy struggles with a stutter that worsens during periods of intense emotion. When Claggart falsely accuses Budd of conspiring to lead a mutiny against the ship's sympathetic captain, the youth, unable to speak coherently because of his stutter, lashes out and accidentally kills the master-at-arms. Billy faces a court-martial and is tragically sentenced to be hanged.

In 1962, actor Peter Ustinov co-wrote, produced, and directed the motion picture "Billy Budd," in which he also portrayed the ship's troubled captain. Robert Ryan played the viciously cruel Claggart, while a young Terence Stamp was the naive, stammering Billy.

Tensions rise high between Robert Ryan and Peter Ustinov (right)
while Terence Stamp looks on in a scene from "Billy Budd." This
was the film debut of Stamp, whose performance garnered him a
Golden Globe Award as Most Promising Newcomer and an Oscar
nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

In "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," free spirit and rabble-rouser Randle Patrick McMurphy, personified in a manic tour de force that garnered Jack Nicholson the Best Actor Academy Award, is surprised to learn that a number of fellow patients at a psychiatric hospital are voluntarily committed, among them Billy Bibbit, a timid and suicidal young man with a severe stutter. Based on the novel by Ken Kesey, the 1975 movie also won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (Milos Forman), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher as the steely, antagonistic Nurse Ratched)), and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Under the glowering gaze of Nurse Ratched, Billy Bibbit
enjoys a brief moment of glory and self-satisfaction.

Brad Dourif, more or less making his feature film debut as Billy Bibbit, was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor. In the picture, as in the book, the virginal Billy loses his stammer when McMurphy sets him up with a prostitute, only to have the impediment return after Nurse Ratched cruelly threatens to inform his mother of his sexual escapade. Billy has a traumatic breakdown and locks himself in a doctor's office where he kills himself by cutting his throat.

In what might have been an allusion to his role in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Brad Dourif had an uncredited cameo as a stuttering gas station attendant in the opening moments of the 1998 slasher picture "Urban Legend." Set at a service station on a dark and stormy night, yet one more variation on the old killer-is-in-the-car gag has a lone woman fight off what she perceives as an attack by the stammering, agitated attendant before driving off as the frantic attendant, who was trying to warn her, shouts, unheard, "Someone is in the back s-s-seat!"

Brad Dourif, seen here in "Urban Legend," is best known as the voice
of Chucky in, to date, seven films in the "Child's Play" franchise.

As dramatized in the 1983 film "The Right Stuff," directed and scripted by Philip Kaufman from the best-selling account of the Project Mercury astronauts by Tom Wolfe, Annie Glenn (played by Mary Jo Deschanel), the wife of Friendship 7 pilot John Glenn (Ed Harris), was afraid of and unwilling to speak at news conferences during her husband's initial flight because of a pronounced stutter.

John Glenn (Ed Harris) and his wife, Annie (Mary Jo Deschanel),
share a domestic moment in "The Right Stuff."

In his autobiography, John Glenn wrote that his wife's stuttering was never a problem personally, and he "just thought of it as something Annie did." She went through intensive speech therapy and was relatively successful in masking the outward symptoms of her dysfluency. A proud moment for the Glenns was the first public speech she gave about her experience as a stutterer.

John Glenn keeps a watchful eye on the camera,
alongside a beaming Annie Glenn.

One of the screen's most memorable stutterers would have to be Ken Pile, a jewel thief and animal lover played by Michael Palin in "A Fish Called Wanda," a 1988 heist comedy about a gang of double-crossing crooks co-written by Palin's former Monty Python mate John Cleese, who also stars as a lovelorn barrister, along with Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline. Seventy-eight-year-old filmmaker Charles Crichton, known for the British comedies "The Lavender Hill Mob," starring Alec Guinness, and "The Battle of the Sexes," with Peter Sellers, directed the picture, which he co-wrote with Cleese. "A Fish Called Wanda" was Oscar-nominated for directing and original screenplay.

Kevin Kline won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as the mean-spirited, British-hating Otto who, in an especially harrowing scene, ties up and mocks a sputtering, uncontrollably stammering Ken, torturing him with chips (french fries) up the nose and devouring Ken's beloved pet fish from his aquarium one by one to find out the whereabouts of the stashed diamonds. As squirm-inducing as this scene is, there was an actual account of a man in the audience in a Danish theater who laughed so hard during the bit when Ken has the fries shoved into his nostrils that he had an attack of tachycardia and died from cardiac arrest.

Despite extensive research into stuttering in an effort to not offend
stutterers for the sake of cheap laughs, Michael Palin's depiction of
a socially awkward, nervous, reclusive character with low self-esteem
was nevertheless regarded as the stereotypical image of stutterers.

(Above) Ken is about to exact revenge on the reviled Otto, who
mocks Ken: "It's K-K-K-Ken c-c-c-coming to k-k-k-kill me!"

According to Ira Zimmerman, chairperson of the National Stuttering Project, "Palin's father stuttered, and Palin wanted to show how difficult and painful stuttering can be. Palin sponsors the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children in London. Like many severe stutterers, Palin's character is sometimes too eager to please people...He is also skilled in his nonverbal field - stealing jewels." Palin was also vice president of the charity Action for Stammering Children.

In brief, Winston-Salem, North Carolina-born Jihmi Kennedy etched a memorable vignette as Private Jupiter Sharts, a stammering recruit in the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first all-black units in the Union Army, in the 1989 Civil War epic "Glory," scripted by Kevin Jarre ("Tombstone") and directed by Edward Zick ("The Last Samurai"). Whatever shortcomings Jupiter suffered from his impediment was more than made up for by his prowess as a dead-shot marksman.

Matthew Broderick, in the role of his career as Colonel Robert
Gould Shaw in "Glory," tempers Private Sharts' skill at reloading
a Springfield rifle-musket in split-second timing under gunfire.

As a unique career diversion, Jihmi Kennedy took a decade hiatus from acting to serve as a popular high school teacher in his hometown of Winston-Salem before returning to acting in 2002.

In 1990, Stephen King's semi-autobiographical character of Bill Denbrough, a horror novelist with a recurring stuttering stigma, was brought to life (although not physically in resemblance to King's description) by Richard Thomas (best known as John-Boy on TV's "The Waltons") in the miniseries "It" (pictured below), directed by longtime John Carpenter collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace.

"Stuttering Bill's" innate leadership of a childhood gang of misfits called the Losers Club in King's fictional Maine town of Derry carried over into adulthood, years after his kid brother was murdered by the shape-shifting, sewer-dwelling "Pennywise the Dancing Clown." Despite his increasingly recurring stammer as a grownup, Bill is instinctively respected for his optimism, determination, and cleverness as the undisputed leader of the club, whose portrayals include Annette O'Toole, John Ritter, Harry Anderson, Dennis Christopher, Tim Reid, and Richard Masur.

Bill Denbrough was played as an adolescent in "It" by Jonathan Brandis (pictured below), a former teen actor best known for his roles as Bastian Bux in "The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter," as a cross-dressing soccer teen in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy "Ladybugs," and as a youthful prodigy in the TV series "seaQuest DSV." When his career drastically waned into adulthood, Brandis hanged himself at the age of 27.

In the unasked-for big-screen reboot of "It" in 2017, directed by some Argentine dude named Andy Muschietti and featuring some Swedish dude named Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise, some Philadelphia-born dude named Jaeden Lieberher portrayed "Stuttering Bill" Denbrough (pictured below).

Austin Pendleton is a playwright, stage director, theater instructor, and actor whose most memorable roles include Lt. Col. Moodus, the boot-licking son-in-law of Gen. Dreedle (Orson Welles) in "Catch-22," musicology philanthropist Frederick Larrabee in "What's Up, Doc?" and the escaped convict from death row in "The Front Page," with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. In 1992's "My Cousin Vinny," starring Joe Pesci and Oscar-winning Marisa Tomei, he portrayed a public defender whose smooth, polished demeanor is quickly belied by a terrible stutter. Hilariously sputtering and blissfully oblivious, he, in the words of Roger Ebert, "thinks it a triumph if he can successfully complete a sentence."

"I knew he would be really funny in the part," director Jonathan Lynn said of his friend, Pendleton (pictured above). Lynn, who would go on to direct Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry in "The Whole Nine Yards," recalled, "But I really didn't quite imagine just how funny. And I had to literally hide behind the camera...because I was laughing so hard. I had to somehow stop myself from making a sound, and I could't let Austin be put off by seeing me...That's the funniest moment I've had on any film I've ever made." Pendleton, who stutters in real life, said he had trouble finding acting jobs afterward due to his being typecast as a stutterer.

The powerful 1996 drama "A Family Thing" cast Robert Duvall as Earl, a Southerner who learns that his real mother was an African-American maid who was raped by his father and died in childbirth. His adoptive mother's deathbed wish is for her son to go to Chicago to meet his black half-brother, Ray, played by James Earl Jones. The movie, scripted by actor Billy Bob Thornton, limns the difficult, emotional struggle involved for the two to ultimately bond, leading to a shared visit to their mother's gravesite.

James Earl Jones remembered telling director Richard Pearce that he had been a stutterer in childhood. After his father abandoned the family, the transition to living with his maternal grandparents was so traumatic that he developed a stutter so severe he refused to speak. He remained functionally mute until he entered high school. An English teacher who nurtured Jones' talent for writing poetry helped him end his silence. Pearce, according to Jones, "suggested I let Ray be a stutterer. It helped me reach this character who feels things very deeply. All the hurts that have happened to him in life are still sitting deep inside him."

James Earl Jones' pop, Robert Earl Jones, plays an ill-fated conman
alongside Robert Redford in "The Sting."

Incidentally, James Earl Jones' estranged father, Robert Earl Jones, was a prizefighter and actor who was blacklisted in the early 1950s because of his involvement with left wing politics in the 1930s. His later career included roles in several TV shows and movies, among them "The Sting," "Trading Places," "The Cotton Club," and "Witness." He didn't become acquainted with his son, James Earl Jones, until the mid-1950s, when they finally reconciled.

"Buddy Boy," a noir-ish psychological thriller from 1999, featured Dublin-born Aidan Gillen (best known as Baltimore politician Tommy Carcetti on "The Wire" and the treacherous "Littlefinger" on "Game of Thrones," both HBO series) as a voyeur who lives with his invalid, abusive mother in a rathole of an apartment, enduring poverty and isolation, further exasperated by his habitual stutter. His only solace is his Catholic faith and his discovery that he can spy from his back stairs on a mysterious neighbor, probably not coincidentally played by Emmanuelle Seigner, the muse and wife of exiled filmmaker Roman Polanski who that same year portrayed a seductive witch in Polanski's thriller, "The Ninth Gate," with Johnny Depp. Critic Rex Reed was moved to remark, "Not since Roman Polanski at the pinnacle of his European weirdness have I seen a film this strange and riveting."

Portrait of a stutterer: Aidan Gillen stars as "Buddy Boy."

In 2016, Irish writer-director Benjamin Cleary won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film with "Stutterer," a heart-aching ditty about Greenwood, a lonely typographer with a crippling stutter who develops a flourishing online relationship with a woman who turns out to be deaf.

(Top) Another passenger on a bus: British actor Matthew Needham
plays the isolated Greenwood in "Stutterer." (Bottom) Scottish
actress Chloe Pirrie plays the beguiling object of affection.

The always fascinating actor Paul Giamatti was cast as the beleaguered, grieving, and stuttering superintendent of an apartment complex who rescues a naked woman from the swimming pool that turns out to be a water nymph trying to find her way back home in the Blue World in "The Sixth Sense" filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan's adult fairy tale "Lady in the Water" (2006).

Paul Giamatti comes to the aid of the water-
logged nymph played by Bryce Dallas Howard
in "Lady in the Water."

The supporting cast in "Lady in the Water" included Bob Balaban as a snarky film reviewer (director Shyamalan's unsubtle dig at critics of his previous movies), Jeffrey Wright (best known as CIA agent Felix Leiter in Daniel Craig's 007 pictures), Mary Beth Hurt, Tovah Feldshuh, and Shyamalan himself in an ego-satisfying role as a self-important writer.

"Rocket Science" is a 2007 coming-of-age comedy-drama about Hal Hefner, a 15-year-old stutterer who takes a chance by joining the high school debate team after he gets a crush on its star player. The film was written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz, who made the Oscar-nominated documentary feature "Spellbound" (2002) about the Scripps National Spelling Bee. At the time, Blitz was developing a storyline for what would become "Rocket Science" when an executive for HBO Films convinced him to base the screenplay on his own experiences as an adolescent stutterer.

"Rocket Science" writer-director Jeffrey Blitz (far right) poses with
his youthful cast, including Canadian actor Reece Thompson (in
the cap) as the obsessive, stammering Hal Hefner.

Roger Ebert noted, "'Rocket Science' is not a formula high school movie, is not about formula kids and is funny in a way that you laugh but it still kinda hurts."

On the small screen: Singer Bobby Sherman was a teen idol with a string of singles spanning the 1960s into the mid-'70s, including such hits as "Little Woman," "Easy Come, Easy Go," "Hey, Mister Sun," and "Julie, Do Ya Love Me." In 1968, no doubt in an effort to capitalize on his success as a heartthrob, Sherman was cast as one of a trio of logging brothers in the period sitcom "Here Come the Brides." Inspired by the efforts of Asa Mercer, the founder of the University of Washington in Seattle in 1861 who strove to import marriageable women to the Pacific Northwest from East Coast cities that had been left short of eligible men due to the Civil War, the western-tinged series was surprisingly targeted at women, and most of the raucous humor was at the expense of the burly men.

(Clockwise from top left) Bobby Sherman, Bridget Hanley,
David Soul, Robert Brown, and Joan Blondell as Lottie the
saloon owner make up the cast of "Here Come the Brides."

Robert Brown, a ruggedly handsome TV actor with few credits beyond "Here Come the Brides," portrayed Jason Bolt, the eldest lumberman brother, with David Soul (who would go on to greater TV renown on "Starsky & Hutch") as Joshua Bolt. Bobby Sherman's role, Jeremy Bolt, began to overshadow his television siblings as he became the boyfriend of the leader of the imported brides, played by auburn-haired Bridget Hanley. As depicted in the series, Jeremy also struggled with a conversation-stopping stutter, which was temporarily cured by a traveling huckster. When he discovered that his benefactor was really a con artist, the stammer returned.

Bobby Sherman retired from show business in the 1970s for a career as a paramedic. He also worked for the Los Angeles Police Department, where he taught CPR and other life-saving techniques to academy recruits.

"Here Come the Brides" costars Bridget Hanley
and Bobby Sherman are reunited in 2013.

III. Stuttering Sidekicks

At a time before political correctness, there were comedic performers whose repertoire featured characters with a comical stutter. From the 1930s through the '50s, Roscoe Ates provided comic relief in movies and on television, mostly westerns. He spent much of his childhood overcoming a severe stutter. He started his show business career as a concert violinist but found more lucrative work as a vaudeville comedian, reviving his long-overcome stutter for humorous effect. In the 1940s, Ates portrayed Soapy Jones, the comedic sidekick for singing cowboy Eddie Dean in 15 B-movies.

Careful, Soapy, that gun is loaded.

In the all-star 1933 Paramount Pictures version of "Alice in Wonderland," featuring Gary Cooper as the White Knight, W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, and Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Roscoe Ates played a stammering Fish Footman to Sterling Holloway's plaintive Frog Footman (pictured below).

The mystery behind Paramount's extravagant adaptation of "Alice
 in Wonderland" and the reason it disappointed audiences is why the
studio insisted on casting so many familiar stars and then making
them unrecognizable under layers of papier-mâché and latex makeup.
Dressed up as an oversized egg as Humpty Dumpty, W.C. Fields, who
was highly claustrophobic, actually suffered a panic attack, clawing
the makeup from his eyes and cheeks. The powdery-throated Sterling
Holloway, under a massive amphibian head as the Frog Footman to
Ates' Fish Footman, fared better as the voice of the Cheshire Cat in
Walt Disney's 1951 animated feature "Alice in Wonderland."

Shug Fisher was a popular character actor, country-western musician and singer, and comedian. He was born George Clinton Fisher Jr., but his mother, who was part Choctaw Native American, called him "Sugar" as an infant ("'cause I was such a sweet baby"), which got shortened as "Shug." He learned how to play the guitar, fiddle, and mandolin, adding comedy material to what became a traveling act, including his talent for mugging and an ability to stutter at will. He eventually hooked up with Roy Rogers and the western singing ensemble Sons of the Pioneers.

Not one of his more stellar roles: Shug Fisher downs a cola in
1959's "The Giant Gila Monster," co-produced by actor Ken Curtis,
a close friend of Shug's best known as Festus on "Gunsmoke." 

Shug, who appeared on several episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies" as Shorty Kellems, an old buddy of Jed Clampett's from the hills, as well as 27 episodes of "Gunsmoke" as various frontier characters, did a memorably funny turn in the 1955 Tom and Jerry cartoon "Pecos Pest" as the voice of Jerry's Uncle Pecos, a mustached country artist from Texas with a prevalent stutter. He performs a song titled "Crambone," Fisher's own variation on the traditional British folk song "Frog Went A-Courtin'" repeatedly replacing broken guitar strings with whiskers plucked from Tom's face.

IV. Stuttering Toons

When it comes to animated stutterers, none is more popular than Porky Pig, famed for his signature closing line at the end of Warner Bros. cartoons: "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" Porky Pig, who became the oldest continuing Looney Tunes character, was introduced on March 2, 1935, in the short "I Haven't Got a Hat." Studio head Leon Schlesinger suggested that animator Isadore "Friz" Freleng create a cartoon version of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedy shorts. Warner Bros. wanted a character with a timid voice, and Freleng named him after two brothers who were childhood classmates, nicknamed "Porky" and "Piggy." Porky Pig makes his debut painfully stammering his way through the Longfellow poem "Paul Revere's Ride" during a school talent show (pictured below).

Porky Pig was originally voiced by Joe Dougherty, who actually suffered from severe stuttering. In the cult favorite 1936 Merrie Melodies cartoon "I Love to Singa," about a swinging owlet who wants to sing jazz, Dougherty provided the voice for a stammering hayseed bird having difficulty reciting the nursery rhyme "Simple Simon" (pictured below).

Because Dougherty couldn't control his worsening stutter, production costs rose as recording sessions took hours, until it got to the point of Leon Schlesinger having to let him go. The 1937 cartoon "Porky's Duck Hunt" not only introduced the character Daffy Duck but welcomed Mel Blanc as the new and continuing voice of Porky Pig (pictured below).

A very short black-and-white Porky Pig cartoon was made in 1938 as part of a so-called Warner Bros. "blooper reel." Porky is seen doing carpentry work, when he smacks his thumb with the hammer. Grimacing in pain, he grabs his thumb and cries, "Oh, son of a bi-bi-, son of a bi-bi, son of a bi-bi-bi-gun!" He smiles at the camera, pointing at the audience, and laughs, "You thought I was gonna say s-s-son of a bitch, didn't ya?"

The "blooper" was never shown publicly until it aired on a 1973 TV special celebrating Warner Bros. 50th anniversary. The clip was also included in the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection" DVD set released in 2006.

Actually, when you look at the collection of characters that populated Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, particularly those voiced by Mel Blanc, it's amazing how many would be considered non-PC nowadays for their assorted speech impediments used to comic effect. Besides Porky Pig's stutter, there was Daffy Duck's slobbering lisp, ditto Sylvester the Cat's sloppy lisp (which Blanc asserted was identical to Daffy's lisp but wasn't sped up in post-production), Elmer Fudd's habit of pronouncing l's and r's as w's (a trait shared by Tweety Bird), Speedy Gonzales' exaggerated Mexican accent, and finally, Bugs Bunny's "moider" of the English language with a blend of Bronx-Brooklynese.

Studio head Leon Schlesinger wishes Porky Pig good luck on his
brief attempt to leave the studio for feature film stardom as Bette
Davis' leading man in "You Ought to Be in Pictures," an outstanding
combination of animation and live-action produced in 1940, nearly
a half century before "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" in 1988, which,
by the way, was the last time Mel Blanc voiced Porky Pig.

After Mel Blank's death in 1989, a number of various voice artists provided the voices for the variety of Warner Bros. cartoon characters. However, in 1991, the National Stuttering Project picketed  Warner Bros., demanding that they stop belittling stutterers and urging the studio use Porky Pig as an advocate for child stutterers. Warner Bros. subsequently granted $12,000 to the Stuttering Foundation of America and created public service posters featuring Porky Pig saying, "Everyone's unique and th-that's good, folks!"

When Walt Disney Productions' "The Fox and the Hound," a familiar and comforting animated tale from 1981 about the unlikely friendship between a red fox (voiced by Mickey Rooney) and a hunter's hound dog (voiced by Kurt Russell) was released on home video, the National Stuttering Project protested the character of a stammering woodpecker named Boomer, performed by ventriloquist-comedian Paul Winchell, utilizing pretty much the same pipes he did as the voice of Tigger in Disney's "Winnie-the-Pooh" cartoons (pictured below).

Boomer's onscreen straight man in "The Fox and the Hound," a wise-guy finch called Binky, was voiced by Dick Bakalyan, whose lengthy career as a character actor portraying juvenile delinquents, thugs, and gangsters included playing an LA detective opposite Jack Nicholson in 1974's "Chinatown" (pictured below).

Martin Short provided the voice for Hubie, a clumsy, lovelorn Adélie penguin with an embarrassing stutter in 1995's "The Pebble and the Penguin," based on the natural courtship ritual in which the male penguin presents a female with a pebble before they mate for life. From the animation studio of Don Bluth (best known for "An American Tail" and "The Land Before Time"), the film featured the voices of Jim Belushi as Hubie's pal, Rocko, a rockhopper penguin who wants to fly, Annie Golden (memorable as one of Berger's "tribe" in the 1979 screen version of "Hair" and as the mute stutterer Norma Romano on "Orange Is the New Black") as Hubie's beloved, Marina, and Tim Curry (the original Pennywise in 1990's "It") as the brutish, bullying penguin called Drake. Oh, and there are several treacly, forgettable songs written by Barry Manilow and longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman.

Jimmy Valmer is a disabled boy who walks on crutches and stutters in "South Park." He calls himself "handi-capable" and fancies himself a standup comedian. The stutter is used for comic effect when Jimmy delivers the punchline to a joke or to make otherwise inoffensive words sound offensive. He was originally conceived as a onetime character for the June 27, 2001 episode titled "Cripple Fight," in which Jimmy, the new kid in town, and Timmy, the mentally and physically boy in the motorized wheelchair, face off in an epic street brawl. The lengthy melee is a shot-for-shot remake of the legendary alley fight between Roddy Piper and Keith David from director John Carpenter's "They Live."

Jimmy's last name was originally Swanson, but by the time he became a continuing character, "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't feel the need to dig through old scripts to find out his name, so they just gave him a new one. Melanie McFarlane of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer described the show's portrayal of Jimmy and Timmy as Parker and Stone's declaration of their opposition to political correctness as a social restriction. The late Seattle Times columnist Jeff Shannon, who was left a quadriplegic following an accident two weeks after graduating from high school, praised Jimmy and Timmy as "goodwill ambassadors." 


V. Stuttering Celebrities

The list of real-life celebrities who contended with stuttering or still struggle with the impediment is a long one, but a few deserve mention. In a 1960 interview, Marilyn Monroe admitted she stuttered in childhood, then later in her teens. Some claim that her trademark breathy manner of speaking came about in response to her stuttering. A speech therapist supposedly taught her how deliberate breathing before talking could help her fluency.

Had it been wrapped and released as planned, "Something's Got to
Give" would have been the first modern Hollywood motion picture
to feature a mainstream star in the nude.

During the filming of her last film, the uncompleted "Something's Got to Give," costarring Dean Martin and directed by George Cukor, who ultimately fired the platinum blonde, Marilyn was under such stress from various health issues and suffering from the abuse of prescription medications that her stuttering returned and was noticeable in surviving outtakes from the unfinished movie.

It's not widely known, but Rowan Atkinson, the British comedian and actor, is an admitted stutterer. Although his popular TV and film character Mr. Bean rarely speaks, engaging instead in the kind of comedy inspired by the physical humor of French director-actor's Jacques Tati's character Monsieur Hulot, Atkinson uses over-articulation to control problematic consonants in such portrayals as the roguish Blackadder and inept secret agent Johnny English.

The three faces of Rowan Atkinson (top to bottom):
Mr. Bean, Black Adder, Johnny Enhlish 

In an August 2007 edition of Time magazine, when Atkinson was asked if he ever overcame his "serious stutter," he said, "It comes and goes. I find when I play a character other than myself, the stammering disappears. That may have been part of the inspiration for pursuing the career I did."

Another British actor, Hugh Grant, who stuttered as a child, seemingly built his early screen career on his disarming stammer, from "Four Weddings and a Funeral" to "Bridget Jones's Diary," with "Sense and Sensibility," "Nine Months," and "Notting Hill" (pictured below) in between. One critic who was not impressed with his beguiling charm was Stephanie Zacharek, who wrote for Time, The Village Voice, and Salon.com. She remarked, "What's maddening about Grant is that he never cuts the crap. He's become one of those actors who's all shambling self-caricature, from his twinkly crow's feet to the time-lapsed half century it takes him to actually get one of his lines out."

By the time Grant starred in "About a Boy" in 2002, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman was impressed with the actor's maturing process, commenting, "The eyes that used to peer with 'love me' cuteness now betray a shark's casual cunning." Noting that the trademark nervousness was absent, Gleiberman observed, "Hugh Grant has grown up, holding on to his lightness and witty cynicism but losing the stuttering sherry-club mannerisms that were once his signature."

With the release of 2012's "Cloud Atlas," in which Grant costarred with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Susan Sarandon, he declared, "What I don't want to play anymore are stuttering British guys with disheveled hair that are confused by love These times are definitely over."

In a different light, Bob Newhart's trademark deadpan stammering reactions served as his bread-and-butter, on stage as a standup comedian and on TV sitcoms, specifically "The Bob Newhart Show" in the 1970s. He once said, "I stammer...it's not something I affect. It's not a stutter, it's a stammer, the highest form of being a stutterer." In another interview, he commented, "Stammering is different than stuttering. Stutterers have trouble with the letters, while stammerers trip over entire parts of a sentence. We stammerers generally think of ourselves as very bright. My own private theory is that stammerers have so many ideas swirling around their brains at once that they can't get them all out, though I haven't found any scientific evidence to back that up."

Bob's stammer came to full fruition during his many one-sided
phone conversations on "The Bob Newhart Show." Now, if only
he could do something about that appalling leisure suit.

Newhart recalled, "During the first season of 'The Bob Newhart Show,' the first episode was running a little long, and one of the producers came up to me and asked me I could run the words together a little more...I had to explain to him that the stammer had gotten me a home in Beverly Hills and they had better take out some of the words because I wasn't about to drop the stammer." He declared, "I'm not about to screw with it now."

Emily Blunt, whose performances in "The Devil Wears Prada," "Young Victoria," "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen," and "Into the Woods" were all nominated for a Golden Globe Award, grew up in a posh London suburb, where she developed a debilitating stutter. "I was a smart kid and had a lot to say," she recalled, "but I just couldn't say it." She claimed she found an answer when she became interested in acting and adopted accents that freed her from stuttering.

Emily Blunt stars as The Baker's Wife in 2014's "Into the Woods."

Drew Lynch, 26, graduated from high school intending to become a film actor in Los Angeles. At 19, he got hit in the throat with a softball, damaging his vocal cords. Unknowingly suffering from a concussion as well, Lynch awakened the next day with a severe stutter. Lynch utilized his life-changing injury to fuel a passion for writing and performing standup comedy, bringing to light the everyday hardships of dealing with an impediment.

A regular contributor to YouTube, often accompanied by his service dog Stella, Lynch finished in second place on the tenth season of "America's Got Talent" and made his network late-night talk show show debut on "Conan" in April of 2017. Drew's motto is: "Do something every day that scares you."

Bruce Willis stuttered as a child. The man repeatedly celebrated by David Letterman as "action superstar," then "Mr. Mega-Blockbuster" who's been "upgraded to giga-star," remembered, "There was a lot of bullying in my life, and I had to fight my way out. Kids got mean."

Willis said, "The hardest thing I remember was being a kid stuttering. My advice...is to never let anyone make you feel like an outcast." He quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."