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
I'm impressed that not only were you able to get Harry Shearer to email you so readily, but also that he was so candid in his response.
Also, I think this article goes to show that American reading standards have declined in the last 24 years, as this was quite long by modern standards, yet wouldn't have seemed out of place then.
Or maybe it is just me who isn't as mentally energetic as I was 24 years ago. To me while rereading it, I kept thinking, "Wow, how did I have the energy to contact all these people?"
I was disappointed, though, that I didn't figure out a way to get Noam Chomsky to weigh in on lisping. Around that time, he'd given me a quote or two on some other topics, like bilingual education.
I had to go back and listen to part of the debate to hear what you wrote about. Thanks a lot. I'd say it's part of the mild Southern accent that he somehow got growing up in DC and probably cultivated at Harvard to stand out.
One of the occasional announcers on WCPE "The Classical Station" has a severe whistle with esse sounds. I wondered how he got on radio--turns out he's the manager.
The way a 2020s version of this article would work (probably starting ca. the mid-2010s) would be not to reach out directly to all these people but to quote from people's tweets.
Now, that is a funny article. I did not know UPI (Sailer) could be so funny in every paragraph "back in the day." We've certainly lost a lot in our humor these days.
Actors including Humphrey Bogart (along with many other people) have disguised a lisp by substituting an "sh" sound instead, as in Bogart's "shweet-hawt".
It doesn't surprise me how much the voice actor and comedian Harry Shearer understands Al Gore's "gay robot" voice. He has been parodying Gore on Le Show for decades. And quite well in fact.
Do Jews more than non-Jews have a 'lisp,' or related speech pattern? Apparently the "Jewish lisp" was an old theater 'trope' that held through generations' worth of actors, directors, producers of stage-plays in the 19th century and into the early 20th century, in Western Europe and North America.
You hear echoes of it, maybe, in Harry Shearer's comments quoted in this article. But most of all you see it in the final scene in which Sailer pokes fun, across time, at Leon Schlesinger, the producer behind "Looney Tunes," quoting or paraphrasing a joke-retold joke about him and the late-1930s origin of Daffy Duck.
Leon Schlesinger was a Jew, b.1884 in Philadelphia, active in the U.S. northeast in his twenties and thirties in theater; then he went to Hollywood in 1919. By then, it was past the twenty-five-year mark of the "motion-picture industry" (counting the first successful experiments in real motion-pictures, by Edison and others, revealed to the world in 1893). And Jews were not yet a major part. (The very-un-Jewish D. W. Griffith was the dominant name in the 1910s; it's hard to imagine a Jewish director-producer making "Birth of a Nation" [1915], the biggest-ever movie to the time.)
Jews became a big part of "Hollywood" starting with a gold-rush-like movement starting about the time Leon Schlesing arrived and consolidating in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ku Klux Klan, by some time in the early 1930s, I think, was producing anti-Jewish propaganda using a trope of Jewish producers taking advantage of young Middle-American women aspiring to be move-stars (on the Harvey Weinstein model).
Leon Schlesinger was highly active in Hollywood for the important twenty-five years of 1919-1944. At some point in his career, the very word "Hollywood" started to become tacitly synonymous with Jews. One century later, they still hold majorly disproportionate influence, which is what makes that old memory of D. W. Griffith, and some other early efforts, and the occasional effort even decades later) seem so jarring, so out-of-place, to a 21st-century audience.
By the 1920s you see H. L. Mencken mocking the output of Hollywood as trite and ridiculous and shallow, if mesmerizing to many. Perhaps Some would see Mencken, the wordsmith who lived and breathed words of the written-page, was annoyed at the glitz and gaudiness and moral-cheapness of the "movies," but there may be an ethnic angle as well. Mencken, the great noticer, could not have failed to notice the Jewish origin of much Hollywood output. I don't know if Mencken ever commented on "Looney Tunes," as he was a few decades too old to have been 'raised' on it, as seventy-five- and one-hundred-year-younger "Menckens" out there were.
I presume Leon Schlesinger's origin was with an 1870s-or-1880s-arriving German-Jewish family (like the Jewish branch of the Arthur Schlesinger family). Perhaps Leon Schlesinger was of 'better' (more western-European) Jewish stock than the "Warner Brothers" with whom he worked. The original "Warner Brothers" were Jews from Russian-Poland who arrived in 1889. They were only a few years into the hugely influential great migration of the Eastern-European Jews (mid-1880s to mid-1910s, with still-significant if slower later flow). The Warner Brothers had, tellingly, Germanized their name from the originally Yiddish-sounding name.
As for the "Jewish 'lisp' trope," said to be so common on the stage in the 19th- and early-20th centuries: it's interesting that by the time Jews became so influential in Hollywood, the trope is gone. Instead, by about the 1940s, you have Elmer Fudd, a White-Middle-America character. By now a long-recognizable "figure of fun," Elmer Fudd has some kind of speech-impairment. Is there any statistical plausibility that the Elmer Fudd demographic (White Middle-America male who engages in hunting) would have a lisp or similar? It seems unlikely.
Now compare Elmer Fudd with his antagonist Bugs Bunny, the quasi-hero of the Looney Tunes world. People have long said Bugs Bunny has Jewish traits and reflects Jewish psychology or humor. He's always "getting one over" on the hapless, dimwitted, speech-impaired Elmer Fudd. It would seem the "lisp trope" on stage flipped, between the opening years of the 20th century and its middle-years.
Mabel Normand, of Irish and French descent, was one of the most influential early movie pioneers. She made her name with the starring role as the daughter in D.W. Griffith's 1911 "The Awakening."
She teamed with Mack Sennett to create the Keystone Kops, inventing the car chase. She also invented the pie-in-the-face routine, smashing a cream pie into Fatty Arbuckle's face in 1913. She was also the first woman to get a pie in the face.
She made Charlie Chaplin a star, training him in acting, inventing his tramp character in 1914, and writing, directing and starring as his leading lady in his early films.
For a time she had her own studio at 4319 Effie St. in East Hollywood. It's still there today, still used by the movie industry. It has a 60-by-100 foot stage and 10 dressing rooms, with offices, scene docks, and property rooms.
Homage was paid to her in the movie "Sunset Boulevard," Gloria Swanson's character being named Norma Desmond, a pastiche of her name and that of her lover director William Desmond Taylor.
We have a photo of my great-grandmother with Mabel Normand, Mary Pickford and Anne Morrow (before she married Charles Lindbergh) at some social function at Pickfair. The architect who originally designed that house, A.H. Cogswell, was employed by one of my relatives to design a number of upscale houses for his properties in Los Angeles. Cogswell designed many of the lovely Swiss Chalet-style Craftsman homes that were once a hallmark of L.A.
I was working as a staff reporter for one of the big Hollywood trades at the time of this piece. Different world back then. I dare anyone to do a gay waiter joke today. Reading this, it's like uncovering some Mayan ruin.
I'm impressed that not only were you able to get Harry Shearer to email you so readily, but also that he was so candid in his response.
Also, I think this article goes to show that American reading standards have declined in the last 24 years, as this was quite long by modern standards, yet wouldn't have seemed out of place then.
The Sailer article "Does Al Gore have a lisp?" (October 2000) is 1,950 words. Is that really excessively long for the 2020s?
Or maybe it is just me who isn't as mentally energetic as I was 24 years ago. To me while rereading it, I kept thinking, "Wow, how did I have the energy to contact all these people?"
I was disappointed, though, that I didn't figure out a way to get Noam Chomsky to weigh in on lisping. Around that time, he'd given me a quote or two on some other topics, like bilingual education.
I had to go back and listen to part of the debate to hear what you wrote about. Thanks a lot. I'd say it's part of the mild Southern accent that he somehow got growing up in DC and probably cultivated at Harvard to stand out.
One of the occasional announcers on WCPE "The Classical Station" has a severe whistle with esse sounds. I wondered how he got on radio--turns out he's the manager.
Does Al Gore have any college buddies? I wonder what it would be like to have hung out with him as a student.
Actor Tommy Lee Jones was one of his roommates.
Did they like each other?
I can’t believe how much work you put into that one UPI article. Yes, everybody’s attention span has shriveled to a nanosecond. Good stuff!
The way a 2020s version of this article would work (probably starting ca. the mid-2010s) would be not to reach out directly to all these people but to quote from people's tweets.
Now, that is a funny article. I did not know UPI (Sailer) could be so funny in every paragraph "back in the day." We've certainly lost a lot in our humor these days.
Definitely one of the more humorous articles.
Actors including Humphrey Bogart (along with many other people) have disguised a lisp by substituting an "sh" sound instead, as in Bogart's "shweet-hawt".
It doesn't surprise me how much the voice actor and comedian Harry Shearer understands Al Gore's "gay robot" voice. He has been parodying Gore on Le Show for decades. And quite well in fact.
Do Jews more than non-Jews have a 'lisp,' or related speech pattern? Apparently the "Jewish lisp" was an old theater 'trope' that held through generations' worth of actors, directors, producers of stage-plays in the 19th century and into the early 20th century, in Western Europe and North America.
You hear echoes of it, maybe, in Harry Shearer's comments quoted in this article. But most of all you see it in the final scene in which Sailer pokes fun, across time, at Leon Schlesinger, the producer behind "Looney Tunes," quoting or paraphrasing a joke-retold joke about him and the late-1930s origin of Daffy Duck.
Leon Schlesinger was a Jew, b.1884 in Philadelphia, active in the U.S. northeast in his twenties and thirties in theater; then he went to Hollywood in 1919. By then, it was past the twenty-five-year mark of the "motion-picture industry" (counting the first successful experiments in real motion-pictures, by Edison and others, revealed to the world in 1893). And Jews were not yet a major part. (The very-un-Jewish D. W. Griffith was the dominant name in the 1910s; it's hard to imagine a Jewish director-producer making "Birth of a Nation" [1915], the biggest-ever movie to the time.)
Jews became a big part of "Hollywood" starting with a gold-rush-like movement starting about the time Leon Schlesing arrived and consolidating in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ku Klux Klan, by some time in the early 1930s, I think, was producing anti-Jewish propaganda using a trope of Jewish producers taking advantage of young Middle-American women aspiring to be move-stars (on the Harvey Weinstein model).
Leon Schlesinger was highly active in Hollywood for the important twenty-five years of 1919-1944. At some point in his career, the very word "Hollywood" started to become tacitly synonymous with Jews. One century later, they still hold majorly disproportionate influence, which is what makes that old memory of D. W. Griffith, and some other early efforts, and the occasional effort even decades later) seem so jarring, so out-of-place, to a 21st-century audience.
By the 1920s you see H. L. Mencken mocking the output of Hollywood as trite and ridiculous and shallow, if mesmerizing to many. Perhaps Some would see Mencken, the wordsmith who lived and breathed words of the written-page, was annoyed at the glitz and gaudiness and moral-cheapness of the "movies," but there may be an ethnic angle as well. Mencken, the great noticer, could not have failed to notice the Jewish origin of much Hollywood output. I don't know if Mencken ever commented on "Looney Tunes," as he was a few decades too old to have been 'raised' on it, as seventy-five- and one-hundred-year-younger "Menckens" out there were.
I presume Leon Schlesinger's origin was with an 1870s-or-1880s-arriving German-Jewish family (like the Jewish branch of the Arthur Schlesinger family). Perhaps Leon Schlesinger was of 'better' (more western-European) Jewish stock than the "Warner Brothers" with whom he worked. The original "Warner Brothers" were Jews from Russian-Poland who arrived in 1889. They were only a few years into the hugely influential great migration of the Eastern-European Jews (mid-1880s to mid-1910s, with still-significant if slower later flow). The Warner Brothers had, tellingly, Germanized their name from the originally Yiddish-sounding name.
As for the "Jewish 'lisp' trope," said to be so common on the stage in the 19th- and early-20th centuries: it's interesting that by the time Jews became so influential in Hollywood, the trope is gone. Instead, by about the 1940s, you have Elmer Fudd, a White-Middle-America character. By now a long-recognizable "figure of fun," Elmer Fudd has some kind of speech-impairment. Is there any statistical plausibility that the Elmer Fudd demographic (White Middle-America male who engages in hunting) would have a lisp or similar? It seems unlikely.
Now compare Elmer Fudd with his antagonist Bugs Bunny, the quasi-hero of the Looney Tunes world. People have long said Bugs Bunny has Jewish traits and reflects Jewish psychology or humor. He's always "getting one over" on the hapless, dimwitted, speech-impaired Elmer Fudd. It would seem the "lisp trope" on stage flipped, between the opening years of the 20th century and its middle-years.
Who was it that said "If you want to know who is in control, look to whom you are not allowed to mock"
Mabel Normand, of Irish and French descent, was one of the most influential early movie pioneers. She made her name with the starring role as the daughter in D.W. Griffith's 1911 "The Awakening."
She teamed with Mack Sennett to create the Keystone Kops, inventing the car chase. She also invented the pie-in-the-face routine, smashing a cream pie into Fatty Arbuckle's face in 1913. She was also the first woman to get a pie in the face.
She made Charlie Chaplin a star, training him in acting, inventing his tramp character in 1914, and writing, directing and starring as his leading lady in his early films.
For a time she had her own studio at 4319 Effie St. in East Hollywood. It's still there today, still used by the movie industry. It has a 60-by-100 foot stage and 10 dressing rooms, with offices, scene docks, and property rooms.
Homage was paid to her in the movie "Sunset Boulevard," Gloria Swanson's character being named Norma Desmond, a pastiche of her name and that of her lover director William Desmond Taylor.
We have a photo of my great-grandmother with Mabel Normand, Mary Pickford and Anne Morrow (before she married Charles Lindbergh) at some social function at Pickfair. The architect who originally designed that house, A.H. Cogswell, was employed by one of my relatives to design a number of upscale houses for his properties in Los Angeles. Cogswell designed many of the lovely Swiss Chalet-style Craftsman homes that were once a hallmark of L.A.
Well, I digress.
Should have been in your anthology. Maybe the next one.
I was working as a staff reporter for one of the big Hollywood trades at the time of this piece. Different world back then. I dare anyone to do a gay waiter joke today. Reading this, it's like uncovering some Mayan ruin.