Stuttering in popular culture

There are many references to stuttering in popular culture. Because of the unusual-sounding speech that is produced, as well as the behaviors and attitudes that accompany a stutter, stuttering has been a subject of scientific interest, curiosity, discrimination, and ridicule.

Stuttering was, and essentially still is, a riddle with a long history of interest and speculation into its causes and cures. Stutterers can be traced back centuries to the likes of Demosthenes, who tried to control his disfluency by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. The Talmud interprets Bible passages to indicate Moses was also a stutterer. Partly due to a perceived lack of intelligence because of his stutter, the man who became the Roman Emperor Claudius was initially shunned from the public eye and excluded from public office. His infirmity is also thought to have saved him from the fate of many other Roman nobles during the purges of Tiberius and Caligula.Isaac Newton, the English scientist who developed the law of gravity, also had a stutter. Other famous Englishmen who stammered were King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who led the UK through World War II. Although George VI went through years of speech therapy for his stammer, Churchill thought that his own very mild stutter added an interesting element to his voice: "Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience..." The Stuttering Foundation has a list of Famous People Who Stutter.

The disorder is variable, which means that in certain situations, such as talking on the telephone, the stuttering might be more severe or less, depending on the anxiety level connected with that activity. In other situations, such as singing (as with country music star Mel Tillis or pop singer Gareth Gates) or speaking alone (or reading from a script, as with actor James Earl Jones and broadcast journalist John Stossel), fluency improves. (It is thought that speech production in these situations, as opposed to normal spontaneous speech, may involve a different neurological function.) Some very mild stutterers, such as Bob Newhart, have used the disorder to their advantage, although more severe stutterers very often face serious hurdles in their social and professional lives.

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