Daniel Martin

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (Sept. 17, 2012) — Jane Fraser, president of the Stuttering Foundation, made the following comments concerning the Sept. 15, 2012, Saturday Night Live skit ridiculing those who stutter:

We are deeply troubled by Saturday Night Live’s recent decision to make light of stuttering, a communication disorder faced by more than three million Americans and 68 million people worldwide. The release of The King’s Speech was a giant step forward for the stuttering community, bringing understanding and acceptance to those who stutter. SNL’s poor judgment was an equally huge step backwards.

The most troubling part was the obvious research conducted by producers, writers and cast into stuttering, evidenced by their use of the term ‘fluency.' They clearly did their homework but chose to overlook the pain felt by many who stutter and their families for just a cheap laugh.

The Stuttering Foundation supported SNL’s Seth Meyers when Donald Trump chose to call him out as a ‘stutterer’ after the White House Correspondents’ dinner. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Not funny, SNL. Not funny at all.

— Fraser (2012)

Our starting-point is again ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living.’ Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have just seen, the garment was to the body itself—inert matter dumped down upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be produced as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the other. And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown the soul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. But that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena may be formulated as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OUR ATTENTION TO THE PHYSICAL IN A PERSON WHEN IT IS THE MORAL SIDE THAT IS CONCERNED.

— Bergson (1912)

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Bergson’s theory that laughter functions as social correction

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

— Bergson (1912)

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In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but then it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease to change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a like animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the complete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.

We begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.

The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.

— Bergson (1912)

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Alanka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008)

• Zupančič argues Bergson misunderstood the primary thrust of his theory that we laugh when we recognize the mechanical encrusted upon the living.
• The missed revelation of Bergson’s theory is comedy’s unceasing vacillations between the living and the mechanical.

I would say in a few words that if either of these methods is able to be adopted with success on occasions in an easy and agreeable manner, a real step has been gained towards overcoming the affection; but if the sufferer is told to persist in uttering er, or to sing or roar out his words on all occasions, and trust to these as his infallible remedies, he will probably fail, for the remedies are so much worse than the disease that all sensitive minds would instinctively shun them with horror, and despond the more in consequence.

— Monro (1850)

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Other Examples of Stuttering Humour in Victorian Culture

• Humorous songs such as “The Stuttering Lass”.
• Minor characters in Victorian popular fiction.
• The celebrated theatrical character of Lord Dundreary performed by Edward Sothern. First appearance in the play Our American Cousin (1858). “Dundrearyism” in the periodical press.

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• Anthologized throughout the nineteenth century in numerous anthologies of wit and humor, as well as  recitation manuals.
• In many of its incarnations, the “two stammerers” joke concludes with two people who stammer coming to blows because they each misperceive the other’s stammer as mockery.  

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