Not-So-Great Moments in Presidential Debates: Al Gore's Subliminal Lisp Crisis, 2000

Joe Biden’s unfortunate performance last week reminds me that Presidential debates are notoriously ineffectual at helping voters make up their minds where they come down upon the great questions of national policy facing the Republic, but they sometimes assist people who haven’t been playing close attention to a candidate in deciding whether or not they can stand the guy.

One of the funnier examples of this was the first debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush on October 3, 2000, which appeared to somewhat undermine the Vice President’s popularity when his mannerisms proved slightly less manly than those of the Texas governor. Here’s an article I wrote for United Press International at the time, 24 years ago:

Does Al Gore lisp?

By STEVE SAILER 
UPI National Correspondent

LOS ANGELES, Calif. Oct. 11, 2000 (UPI) -- Does Vice President Al Gore lisp? "Thufferin' thuccotash! Of course Al Gore has a lisp!" thunders Sam Karnick of the conservative Hudson Institute. Although most people have not consciously noticed it, a diverse collection of observers agrees with Karnick that the Vice President has intermittent problems pronouncing the letter "s." These include comedian Harry Shearer, lesbian social critic Camille Paglia, and L. Brent Bozell, head of the Media Research Center, which tries to expose liberal bias in the press.

Could insensitive stereotypes about lispers be contributing to Gore's difficulties appealing emotionally to voters, especially to men? While numerous criticisms of the Vice President's speaking style have been offered over the years, a growing body of opinion asserts that his nearly subliminal lisp might be an overlooked key to the cool reception American men have given his personality. In the public's imagination, lisping seems to conjure up distracting connotations of effeminacy, childishness, or general ridiculousness. 

On the other hand, a spokesman at Gore headquarters in Nashville responded, "It's not that he has a lisp, but that he has a southern drawl." Even some of Al Gore's enemies agree. Rob Long is a TV sit-com producer who is one of the few out-of-the-closet Republicans in Hollywood. Although he pens for each issue of National Review an acid parody of the Vice President called "Letter from Al," Long admits, "I'm not sure I've heard his lisp."  

Even speech experts disagreed during interviews over whether the Vice President lisps. Linguistics professor Angela Della-Volpe, says, "He does occasionally seem to have a slight lisp." In contrast, MIT cognitive scientist Steve Pinker, author of the bestseller The Language Instinct, responds, "I never heard a lisp, but I do hear a speech style that people in my business call 'motherese:' the register one uses in the presence of a small or not-too-bright child. (Listen for Gore's pauses before the big words.)" 

Splitting the difference, speech pathologist Richard K. Adler of Seattle observes, "I don't think Gore has a lisp. But sometimes he places his tongue too far forward for making an ‘s’ sound and it sounds like a lisp."

As this last statement suggests, there are technical disputes among speech scholars over how broadly too define "lisping." The narrow definition focuses merely on replacing ‘s’ with ‘th.’ The broader conception of lisping extends to also cover other problems with pronouncing ‘s.’

Comedian Harry Shearer, who provides the voices for such Simpsons characters as the evil billionaire Mr. Burns and his devoted male secretary Smithers, emailed a precise description of Gore's speaking style. "It's not a lisp--as in ‘lithp.’ Rather, it's a sibilant problem, in which the sibilants are pronounced in a thinner, more ‘hissy’ fashion than is normal among American males." 

In theory, these should be purely academic questions. As speech pathologist Howard Grey states, "Let's listen to what Gore has to say, not how he says it." Yet, how Gore says it seems to be holding him back, especially now that the general public has finally started paying close attention to the campaign. For example, polls reported that Gore "won" the first debate, yet it was George W. Bush who came away with a small bump upwards in the only polls that really matter: the ones that predict who will win the election.

Gore's problem appears to be the widespread public prejudice against men who have trouble with the "s" sound. Della-Volpe, who is an associate dean at Cal State Fullerton, points out, "There is a common stereotype linking lisping and effeminacy." 

As ludicrous as this popular convention linking lisping to homosexuality is in the case of the Vice President, who is a happily married father of three, some experts see this stereotype as undermining Gore's appeal. Karnick, who edits the magazine American Outlook, suggests via email that "Gore's lisp helps explain his gender gap--women usually don't mind if a guy is a bit prissy (at least, if they're not thinking about marrying him), but most men certainly do. That's why Gore's poll numbers went up after he kissed his wife for 3.5 seconds on national TV--most of us didn't know he had it in him. But now the kissing is over and the lisp remains, and the gender gap is growing apace. Unless he punches somebody, and soon, he is almost certainly doomed among male voters."

Likewise, Paglia, whose Sexual Personae was voted the best academic book of the Nineties in a survey conducted by Lingua Franca magazine, wrote in Salon.com this week, "Gore isn't gay, but his hothouse upbringing by his dominating parents probably produced his prissy, lisping Little Lord Fauntleroy persona, which borders on epicene."

Comedians are picking up on this perception, too. Shearer jokes that the Vice President sounds like a "gay robot." Similarly, the New York Post's "Page Six" gossip column reported Tuesday on an appearance by a superstar stand-up. "Billy Crystal, who starred in When Harry Met Sally, noted that the sibilant serial embellisher [Gore] was not in the house - and took the opportunity to lambaste Gore's lateral lisp. 'What, is Al practicing sighing for his next debate?' Crystal quipped. 'Is he trying to sound more like a gay waiter?'"

In a phone interview, Cathy Renna, a spokesperson for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) responded to Crystal's implication that gay waiters are readily distinguishable from straight waiters. "That's his opinion. God love us, we all have our opinions." She notes, "Lisping is part and parcel of the whole stereotype of gay men as effeminate."

All observers agree that the majority of gay men do not lisp. And it's likely that the majority of lispers are straight. 

Nonetheless, there remains the unfashionable but unanswered question whether lisping is indeed more common among gay men. Renna asserts, "It's impossible to make any generalizations." She does, admit, however that she possesses a certain amount of what she calls "gaydar." "I can at times walk into a cocktail party and notice that there are ‘family’ there. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't."

Scientists who study male homosexuals are uncertain whether the stereotype of the lisping gay has any basis in reality. Della-Volpe argues that political correctness has caused a shortage of studies on gays and lisping. "It's a very touchy subject. Many reputations could be unmade," she contends. "People have a tendency to avoid researching the subject."

Northwestern psychology professor J. Michael Bailey, who specializes in research on gays, says, "There is definitely a ‘gay voice,’ although by no means all gays have it. I am less sure, however, that there is a ‘gay lisp.’ Of course, when it comes to politics, the reality may not be important as the perception."

A leading sexual orientation researcher who wishes to remain anonymous recalled a study in which laboratory subjects could reliably distinguish tape recordings of gay men and straight men reading a standard passage. He believes that gay men, rather than suffer from significant speech impediments, tend to speak with more precise articulation than heterosexual men do. In his career, this scholar has come across very few gays who substitute "th" for "s." Yet, he does find that some gays have a speech tendency that resembles Shearer's description of Gore's penchant for a hissy "s" sound. "One of the patterns of exaggerated articulation in the gay voice might be exaggerated ‘s’ sounds, which give a hissing quality to the speech." 

Likewise, in 1995 Cecil Adams' The Straight Dope column tackled this sensitive topic. "One fellow, a member of a gay chorus, wrote: ‘I always thought the most identifiable stereotypically gay speech mannerism wath not a lithp, but rather an overly ssssssibilant esssssss sssssound, which is the bane of gay men's chorus conductors everywhere.’"

Evolutionary biologist Gregory M. Cochran offers the most radical theory about the origin of this apparent tendency toward super-sibilance among gay males. He argues that geneticist Dean Hamer's celebrated "gay gene" theory violates basic Darwinian logic, since families with the gay gene would die out within a few generations from lack of offspring. Cochran's controversial replacement for the gay gene theory is his "gay germ" hypothesis. Since bacteria or viruses have shorter generation times than humans, these microscopic parasites can evolve new offensive weapons faster than we can evolve new defenses against them. Thus, he thinks it likely that an infection causes male homosexuality. This remains completely speculative since no such gay germ has ever been found; but, then, no one has ever looked for a gay germ, either. Cochran tentatively suggests that this super-sibilant "s" might be a very mild neurological side effect of the supposed "gay germ."

Cochran admits, "No careful statistical study has been done (as far as I know). But my informants (trained linguists) say that the homosexual lisp exists in all the countries and languages they are familiar with - which means at this point North America, all of Europe, and Japan. I think it would be very interesting if someone knew of a country where gay men do not have this lisp - this would help us find out if it were a learned thing, like an accent, or an unlearned thing, possibly related to a biological cause of homosexuality."

Most stereotypes about gay men attribute feminine traits to them. The lisping cliché is odd, though, in that while many consider lisping effeminate, few consider lisping feminine. Straight women aren't said to lisp more than straight men, or vice-versa. 

Instead, besides connecting lisping with male homosexuals, people also think of lisping as associated with children. In fact, one definition of "lisp" is "to speak imperfectly, as a child does." Della-Volpe observes, "Children lisp a lot as they try to learn to control sounds." Also, the loss of a baby tooth can cause a temporary lisp.

While most people find a kid's lisping cute, even endearing, this connotation of childishness probably isn't helping Al Gore to win the male vote either.

Finally, American popular culture's third stereotype about lispers is that they are all-purpose figures of fun who are always good for a laugh. Mel Blanc's famous voice characterizations for Looney Tune cartoons are such a compendium of speech defects that Stanley Ritterman, a Cal State Fresno professor of communication disorders, uses Elmer Fudd and Tweety Bird as examples in his talks. 

Neither of Blanc's two main lispers, Sylvester (the "puddy tat" who was always trying to eat Tweety) and Bug's Bunny's great rival Daffy Duck, use the super-sibilant "s" that some expert associate with homosexuals. Instead, they tend to be "lateral lispers." They make what Ritterman, whose mother worked at Warner Brothers, calls the "juicy s" sound. In other words, they sound like their mouths are full of saliva. According to Della-Volpe, who also uses Looney Tunes characters as illustrations, an arched roof of the mouth sometimes causes this in flesh and blood humans. 

The story told by cartoonist Chuck Jones of how Daffy Duck got his famous "thloppy" lisp illustrates that lispers, whether cartoon waterfowl or Vice Presidents, suffer a definite lack of respect in American society. By the late Thirties, head Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger's creative contributions had dwindled down to merely offering his workers such helpful advice as, "Put in loth of joketh, felloweth. Joketh are funny!" In revenge, the animators decided to give Schlesinger's lisp to the newly hatched Daffy Duck. Fearing they'd be fired by an enraged Schlesinger, they finally got up the courage to screen the cartoon for their boss. When the lights came up, however, Schlesinger enthused, “Jethuth Critht, thath’s a funny voithe! Where’d ya get that voithe?”