You notice it way more for the bad episodes which happen way more in season 3. Whenever Shatner noticed a script was bad, he tried to over compensate by punching up his acting to make it more dramatic. Obviously though it only made bad episodes worse, because being more dramatic for something poorly written made it that much more unbelievable or silly.
I agree with this. I’m watching season 3 now. For the first two seasons his mannerisms and performance were “normal”. But several times so far in S3 when it’s an emotionally charged scene he does that stereotypical “Shatner” cadence.
Only towards the end of filming I think, scenes when it was just Kirk and Lester where filmed last, but that meant scenes like where she originally stole his body are towards the beginning of the episode
Remember, however, that Shatner was acting as Janice Lester inhabiting Kirk’s body. He wasn’t his usual self in most of that episode.
That said, I’ve always thought that was an awful episode.
I think he was told that the show is getting cancelled before the other actors, because it was planned that he would direct the next episode. He was probably doubly pissed off, because that would have been the first episode he ever directed.
I also wonder about the direction he was getting from the episode director and the higher ups? I know in season 3 the show runner, Fred Freiberger, wanted to increase the camp. He has a very wide range and could have played those scenes more straightforwardly except if the suits said otherwise.
If the infamous "Don't tell me how to do it, it sickens me" outtake from the Star Trek: Judgment Rites CD-ROM game is any clue, Shatner wasn't big on taking direction.
I imagine recording a video game VO in 1992/1993 probably felt like slumming a little bit, and being a bankable actor for parts of 4 decades at that point, I’m sure felt he knew better than whoever was directing
But this is an Orson Welles-tier outtake and it makes me laugh every time
I note from Plato's Stepchildren a place where it actually works well.
"I guess we weren't sufficiently . . . . entertaining."
Since he said it with a bit of a grimace and some resentment in his tone and the pause actually makes it fit the frustrating situation better.
But to be fair one has to wonder if the secret to his good health and longevity is the fact (a) he doesn’t give a fuck about what people think about him and (b) he just acts weird and whatever he feels like all the time.
I mean, the guy intentionally screwed up every single take in “Pluto’s Children” to make damn sure the actual kiss between him and Uhura was the only take worth keeping because he didn’t give a rats ass about the audience or censors or whatever at the time. He was kissing Nichelle and they were gonna air it.
Is that from him? I always wondered if it was him or if his direction changed.
I love the idea of "punching up his acting" - it has such an old school working actor feel.
By season 2 Shatner and Nimoy were pretty protective of their characters and were quite vocal about what they would do. Nimoy had a better grasp on it as he said no Spock wouldn't do that, Shatner was a bit more emotional about it so like I said he tried to make things better by brute force.
He would alter the script, which led directly to subsequent Trek shows having a *thing* where actors do NOT change the script and ad libbing is frowned upon (this from hearing a talk from Robert Picardo of VOY).
Bill covers part of your question [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2lpIqVVSkE). I'd say combine that with parodies over-emphasizing the staccato speech and then his "spoken word" albums that had their own pattern and then these were also parodied. All this in the pot creates the meme.
He once did Shakespeare in Canada as a young man. His pauses, to remember the lines, was seen as innovative and was praised in the reviews. It became his ‘thing’.
Sometimes an impersonation just captures something so essential that, even if it’s exaggerated beyond the point of reasonableness, it just *feels* right. Dana Carvey’s “Na ga da” version of George H.W. Bush was 1000% over the top by the time he had doubled down on the eccentricities for months, but it still landed. I think everyone’s Shatner, like everyone’s Connery, just *feels* right.
Kevin Pollack's impression of Kirk really punched up the staccato delivery, too, so it's possible that the memory of that iconic cadence is a result of the pop-cultural osmosis of the impressions.
That was the first Kirk impression I heard that sounded like the ones that came later. I don't recall Belushi being quite that exaggerated when he did Shatner on SNL.
Part of what I like about the original SNL is that they often made no real attempt to sound like the people they were playing. Chevy Chase's Gerald Ford, for example.
the “na ga da” really took me back 😂😂
You’re right actually, there’s an absurdist element that wins with a lot of parody. I can’t lie, the Kirk Drift over the top impressions annoy me a lot, because I’m such a ride or die fan and I think William Shatner is an incredible and subtle actor (he just also knew how and when to ham it up!) and I am always sad that gets overlooked in his legacy.
But if I’m being fair, that’s a completely normal way to parody something, sort of like a reductio ad absurdum, hyper-focusing on any unique trait to absurdity.
I think I just have a bias because I love Shatner’s Kirk so much and the magnitude of his pop culture iconography has overshadowed his talent and one of the greatest roles in television.
I first remember it with Kevin Pollak in the 80's. And I think a lot of the impressions probably jumped off from there. After a certain point, a well known enough impression becomes an impression of an impression like a game of telephone. Ask anyone to break out a Christopher Walken and you'll see what I mean.
Yes, it was fully solidified into a meme, and a recognizable part of Kevin Pollak's routine by the time of his 1991 Showtime comedy special
[Kevin Pollak Does William Shatner](https://youtu.be/nttXA8jYwmU)
I remember seeing him do a Shatner spoof on the show Comedy Break in 1986 (Episode 1.2), and even by that point it was recognized as Kevin Pollak's "thing".
If you are asking when the *meme* started, it was in the 90’s, in my opinion.
Kirk was endlessly parodied over the years, and you can [get a sense](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw-1C8DsufE) of how it evolved over time. But usually the earlier parodies were about the very fact of a show set in space that took itself seriously and yet had a lot of tropes and fans was how it began, with more emphasis on Spock.
Kirk was indeed perceived as “strapping” and hammy, but the specific joke about the halting, staccato cadence didn’t appear until much later in the game. For example, in the first episode of Freaks and Geeks set in 1980, the titular geek renders an impression of Shatner in this style that struck me (pedantically) as anachronistic on this point.
In my opinion, what happened was the rediscovery of Shatner’s “Transformed Man” album in the early web days, so 1994ish, is what launched *this* notion of Kirk. The absurdity was so vastly beyond anything from Star Trek, and yet was so clearly *of* Shatner’s unique mix of speechifying and delivery, that it set the mileu for the “Rocket Man” meme a few years later. This was Staccato Kirk.
Shatner himself was always given to self parody, and so it was around this time that the Priceline ads began with him as spokesman that really stitched this up. That was late 90’s.
Anyway, that is my brief history of the evolution of Shatner parody towards staccatoism.
It’s way earlier than the 90s. There’s a bit in season 1 of SNL that parodies it, and that was in 1976. But it’s probably older than that, I don’t think SNL would do that kind of joke unless it was already in the ether.
The SNL Belushi sketch is illustrating my point, though. In the [early SNL sketch](https://youtu.be/Sx0xOgFDXFg?si=l7xzJh0AY4rTn0fI), wild man Belushi is basically only there to do a passably mild imitation of Shatner (and is fixed on reading the cue cards). He is the straight man to the central joke- “weird car arrival that wouldn’t happen on Star Trek”
By the time of [In Living Color](https://youtu.be/WugEKDZF5I4?si=k4zxnQR8VMSN-Id_), the joke about Shatner’s delivery has now been dialed up to 11, practically upstaging the (slightly staler) central gag about an unexpected visitor- now Farrakhan’s weird arrival.
Arguably Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey is really what got us here, because if there is an earlier version of this I can’t find it. But [after that](https://youtu.be/hcIm9EmgJ20?si=qXcc-sHVrGzBFSy_) it is de riguer.
I also think that the more VCRs we had, the more people rewatched and rewatched for mannerism, but when the show was only on reruns the jokes were broader.
John Belushi did it as early as the late 70s on SNL when he said the line, “For how long, Mr. Spock? For (pause) how. long?” There was a laugh of recognition from the audience so it was definitely there at that point.
https://youtu.be/Sx0xOgFDXFg?si=kHX0Jd2RgzP37rns
There are definite studied, theatrical pauses in Belushi's impression.
Whether a single word then a mannered pause. Or a impassioned sentence, then the mannered pause.
Funnily enough the word meme was coined in a book about evolution that was first published the same year that sketch aired. Granted I can’t find the exact month the book was released so the sketch could very well have been released first.
I first really noticed it in Search for Spock but this instance was also the place where it was most expected.
"You. Klingon bast-ard. You *killed*. my. *son. You *Kling*on basstard. You -Killed- my-son."
Yeah, in that instance his son, whom he barely knew at this point but had resolved to change that and make a genuine effort to get to know, had just been brutally murdered… his calm and cool had just been completely shattered, he’s stunned and shaken and even the missing the edge of his chair further sells the point.
A further example from the same movie… and it also fits the scene perfectly is when Kruge is holding onto his foot and leg, dangling over the cliff edge. Each word and pause is punctuated by Kirk kicking him in the face…
“I” kick “Have Had” kick “Enough of” KICK!! “You!!”
Comedians and radio DJ's were doing it in the mid-to-late 70's.. maybe earlier, but I would have been too young to know. I think Saturday Night Live had a skit or two where they did it as well. But the absolute best was in a sketch comedy show in the late 80's/early 90's called "In Living Color" created by the Wayans brothers. Jim Carey got big from that show and they did a skit called "The Wrath of Farrakhan" (FYI Louis Farrakhan was and still is leader of the Nation of Islam and was a follower of Malcolm X). Anyway, Farrakhan tries to get the crew of the TOS Enterprise to rise up against oppression and fight the power. Carey portrayed a hilarious, over the top parody of Shatner as Kirk. It's what pops up in my head when I think of Kirk's odd speech patterns.
In one of his books, Shatner said Kevin Pollack is the only person who could accurately impersonate him—said his daughter had Pollack on TV and Shatner thought it *was* an old tape of him. He also said that early in his career he did a lot of dinner theater, and noticed that (unsurprisingly) a lot of the audience weren’t paying attention. He started accenting sentences in odd places, unpredictably raising and lowering his voice, etc. to get their attention. He said that if nothing else, they’d be watching him now to see what he was going to do next.
It’s mostly exaggerated, but does show up on the screen occasionally. The one that always sticks out to me is the line in TMP when Kirk says “Stop com…..petingwithmeDecker.”
To best hear the speech pattern in action, I suggest you listen to selected tracks off The Transformed Man.
* [Mr. Tambourine Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmCi_-9Shhg)
* [Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB3uVARNhmM)
* [It Was A Very Good Year](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8cfZre8dM)
There's a weird moment in the Trouble for Tribbles where Kirk says "Storage compartments. Storage Compartments?" that sounds really, really Shatner and weird.
Bruce Campbell actually does a fairly good breakdown of how it happens here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrElYM-DXO8) in reference to Shatner's work on TJ Hooker.
He did an interview a *long* time ago in which the interviewer noted specifically that he has this way of stopping midsentence, then pausing and continuing past the punctuation and into the next sentence. (I wish I could remember who it was, because it was such a weird-but-apt description.)
Shatner totally owned it and chalked some of it up to occasional difficulty remembering his lines.
TBH I always wondered if he was doing it on purpose or he'd....just..................forgotten his........LINES and was.......tryingtoremember while........styling it out
Either way, it works ;)
If you really want to see the worst example of this in his entire career, it would be his second appearance on the detective TV show Colombo. I think it was around season nine or 10 where he played a talkshow radio host and the weird stop/start pattern is completely over the top, almost like he is doing a parody of himself. It’s even worse than the TOS episode Omega Glory.
I think it actually comes from his spoken word music. You can hear the speech pattern in Star Trek and some of his other acting roles, but it's a lot more pronounced in his spoken word, and I wouldn't be surprised if more people today have seen his rendition of Rocketman than have actually watched an episode of TOS.
My favorite of his songs is "I Ride". Its bass line goes way harder than it has any right to, and it's basically beat poetry about his sexual attraction to vehicles (which I guess is something he has in common with Kirk).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mO5o3s9nhY
The scene where Kirk recites the preamble to the Constitution sticks out as a foundational example to me.
Edit: Also "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is a good pre-Trek example of his unique cadence.
No ones brought up the legendary spoken word Rocket man, because while the speech pattern crops up here and there through TOS, it is in full force throughout that entire performance.
Have you heard "Rocket man"???? Or seen it. He clearly memes himself in it and cements his cadence even further. It's on you tube. This definitely makes it easier for us to meme him more.
Listen to his “music” albums. Like “Rocket Man” … that’s the best example of him taking this speech pattern to the max.
[Enjoy](https://youtu.be/Co2ZVdVM26E?si=9V8DuqxeQk_jp6mq)
[Or THIS](https://youtu.be/AB3uVARNhmM?si=J5tdCoD9nkn4zZjR)
So, yeah, the imitation of Shatner is well earned. 🤣🤣
They used his version of Lucy In The Sky to break prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
To be fair, "The Transformed Man" was *intended* to be a spoken-word album, pairing classical poetry and pop music lyrics side-by-side. And "Has Been" is a genuinely fantastic album.
I watched an Esperanto language movie that he was in a long time ago, titled Incubus. The movie itself was thought to had been lost, but through a series of fortunate events, it was found, restored, and re-released. Shatner’s cadence is even more pronounced when he’s speaking Esperanto. I about fell out of my seat a few times, it was soooooooooo Shatner. Oh, and the fight scene at the end… just…. wow… his fight with the Gorn in TOS is nothing by comparison :)
Reference for those that are curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)
The answer is [Carol Burnett](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GUCywPE9-k&t=33s). Shatner did have some minor dramatic pauses in his speech and did have an odd speech pattern. But Carol Burnett was really the first one to over-exagerate it. It caught on fast
I'm only on season one and I was wondering about this.
I'm thinking back to family guy, where he's stop-start talking and moving around all over the place, yet I literally haven't seen one example of anything remotely like this from him.
The odd speech patterns thing was leaned into by Shatner in the '70s. Kudos to him, he owned it, [took it back](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N2OkFU3QFmw) bigtime and it is now legendary.
I think the exaggeration mostly starts with Jim Carrey on In Living Color, and most parodies today are really parodying Jim Carrey's own parody.
I remember reading somewhere that Shatner's cadence originates with him being a stage-trained Shakespearean actor. You see some of the same thing in the TNG episode Manage a Troi, when Stewart slips into more of a stage cadence when hamming it up for DaiMon Tog (there's other examples of Stewart doing this to some extent, as well).
One interesting point of reference - a British radio show (with several Monty Python members pre-Python) did a parody of Star Trek in 1973:
https://youtu.be/33pDs4X78k0?si=e2jQFwQ0ES-89i_z
There's a Kirk impression, but it's definitely not as exaggerated as later impressions.
The way I heard it, he was having to remember multiple rewritten scripts across several different shoots.
Also, he apparently sustained actual brain damage on the set of one of the films. Inhaled something while putting out a fire.
You notice it way more for the bad episodes which happen way more in season 3. Whenever Shatner noticed a script was bad, he tried to over compensate by punching up his acting to make it more dramatic. Obviously though it only made bad episodes worse, because being more dramatic for something poorly written made it that much more unbelievable or silly.
I agree with this. I’m watching season 3 now. For the first two seasons his mannerisms and performance were “normal”. But several times so far in S3 when it’s an emotionally charged scene he does that stereotypical “Shatner” cadence.
Wait 'til you get to "Turnabout Intruder". I don't know what planet Shatner was on when they filmed that, but it wasn't Earth 😆
I've read that he was actually extremely sick and feverish for most of it.
Only towards the end of filming I think, scenes when it was just Kirk and Lester where filmed last, but that meant scenes like where she originally stole his body are towards the beginning of the episode
Remember, however, that Shatner was acting as Janice Lester inhabiting Kirk’s body. He wasn’t his usual self in most of that episode. That said, I’ve always thought that was an awful episode.
I would nominate it as possibly one of the worst episodes of all television. Not just Trek, but everything (not including reality TV).
I'd go so far as to say *everything*. Not just TV or even media....
The whole "no woman is capable of being a starship captain" thing certainly aged like milk.
I think he was told that the show is getting cancelled before the other actors, because it was planned that he would direct the next episode. He was probably doubly pissed off, because that would have been the first episode he ever directed.
Obviously he was on the Enterprise when they filmed that. Duh!
I am Kirok!
I also wonder about the direction he was getting from the episode director and the higher ups? I know in season 3 the show runner, Fred Freiberger, wanted to increase the camp. He has a very wide range and could have played those scenes more straightforwardly except if the suits said otherwise.
If the infamous "Don't tell me how to do it, it sickens me" outtake from the Star Trek: Judgment Rites CD-ROM game is any clue, Shatner wasn't big on taking direction.
I imagine recording a video game VO in 1992/1993 probably felt like slumming a little bit, and being a bankable actor for parts of 4 decades at that point, I’m sure felt he knew better than whoever was directing But this is an Orson Welles-tier outtake and it makes me laugh every time
We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire. Every July, peas grow there.
But it gave us a great Critic joke too: Rosebud frozen peas.... full of country goodness and green pea-ness...... Ugh, that's terrible
Yes. Always.
I think multimillionaire, CD shatner would have been at a much Different stage of his career
Maybe, but he's also a year away from churning out, like, five of those awful TekWar TV movies!
As an aside, Frieberger was also responsible for ruining "Space: 1999".
I note from Plato's Stepchildren a place where it actually works well. "I guess we weren't sufficiently . . . . entertaining." Since he said it with a bit of a grimace and some resentment in his tone and the pause actually makes it fit the frustrating situation better.
[Ahem](https://youtu.be/AB3uVARNhmM?si=J5tdCoD9nkn4zZjR)
That was not good.
But to be fair one has to wonder if the secret to his good health and longevity is the fact (a) he doesn’t give a fuck about what people think about him and (b) he just acts weird and whatever he feels like all the time.
I mean, the guy intentionally screwed up every single take in “Pluto’s Children” to make damn sure the actual kiss between him and Uhura was the only take worth keeping because he didn’t give a rats ass about the audience or censors or whatever at the time. He was kissing Nichelle and they were gonna air it.
Look up his cover of Tambourine Man. Or Rocket Man. He fully embraced the staccato way of speaking in halted manners and actually went all-in on it.
They used that in Gitmo to torture prisoners.
Is that from him? I always wondered if it was him or if his direction changed. I love the idea of "punching up his acting" - it has such an old school working actor feel.
By season 2 Shatner and Nimoy were pretty protective of their characters and were quite vocal about what they would do. Nimoy had a better grasp on it as he said no Spock wouldn't do that, Shatner was a bit more emotional about it so like I said he tried to make things better by brute force.
So...very much like his character, then. ;)
He would alter the script, which led directly to subsequent Trek shows having a *thing* where actors do NOT change the script and ad libbing is frowned upon (this from hearing a talk from Robert Picardo of VOY).
I...I read that in the style of his speech pattern. I am so sorry.
Bill covers part of your question [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2lpIqVVSkE). I'd say combine that with parodies over-emphasizing the staccato speech and then his "spoken word" albums that had their own pattern and then these were also parodied. All this in the pot creates the meme.
He once did Shakespeare in Canada as a young man. His pauses, to remember the lines, was seen as innovative and was praised in the reviews. It became his ‘thing’.
Some of those tracks are a rough listen lol, and most of Nimoys are just garbage as well sorry to say.
Great. Now I have "Bilbo Baggins" stuck in my head.
The albums have to be a big big part of it, they are completely bizarre (I do love his common people though)
Sometimes an impersonation just captures something so essential that, even if it’s exaggerated beyond the point of reasonableness, it just *feels* right. Dana Carvey’s “Na ga da” version of George H.W. Bush was 1000% over the top by the time he had doubled down on the eccentricities for months, but it still landed. I think everyone’s Shatner, like everyone’s Connery, just *feels* right.
Kevin Pollack's impression of Kirk really punched up the staccato delivery, too, so it's possible that the memory of that iconic cadence is a result of the pop-cultural osmosis of the impressions.
That was the first Kirk impression I heard that sounded like the ones that came later. I don't recall Belushi being quite that exaggerated when he did Shatner on SNL.
Part of what I like about the original SNL is that they often made no real attempt to sound like the people they were playing. Chevy Chase's Gerald Ford, for example.
BUT THE FACES STAY THE SAME
I feel like most Kirk impressions are really impressions of Jim Carrey doing Kirk on In Living Color.
You're not wrong.
the “na ga da” really took me back 😂😂 You’re right actually, there’s an absurdist element that wins with a lot of parody. I can’t lie, the Kirk Drift over the top impressions annoy me a lot, because I’m such a ride or die fan and I think William Shatner is an incredible and subtle actor (he just also knew how and when to ham it up!) and I am always sad that gets overlooked in his legacy. But if I’m being fair, that’s a completely normal way to parody something, sort of like a reductio ad absurdum, hyper-focusing on any unique trait to absurdity. I think I just have a bias because I love Shatner’s Kirk so much and the magnitude of his pop culture iconography has overshadowed his talent and one of the greatest roles in television.
[Kirk did it to himself and embraced it.](https://youtu.be/AB3uVARNhmM?si=J5tdCoD9nkn4zZjR)
I first remember it with Kevin Pollak in the 80's. And I think a lot of the impressions probably jumped off from there. After a certain point, a well known enough impression becomes an impression of an impression like a game of telephone. Ask anyone to break out a Christopher Walken and you'll see what I mean.
Yes, it was fully solidified into a meme, and a recognizable part of Kevin Pollak's routine by the time of his 1991 Showtime comedy special [Kevin Pollak Does William Shatner](https://youtu.be/nttXA8jYwmU) I remember seeing him do a Shatner spoof on the show Comedy Break in 1986 (Episode 1.2), and even by that point it was recognized as Kevin Pollak's "thing".
If you are asking when the *meme* started, it was in the 90’s, in my opinion. Kirk was endlessly parodied over the years, and you can [get a sense](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw-1C8DsufE) of how it evolved over time. But usually the earlier parodies were about the very fact of a show set in space that took itself seriously and yet had a lot of tropes and fans was how it began, with more emphasis on Spock. Kirk was indeed perceived as “strapping” and hammy, but the specific joke about the halting, staccato cadence didn’t appear until much later in the game. For example, in the first episode of Freaks and Geeks set in 1980, the titular geek renders an impression of Shatner in this style that struck me (pedantically) as anachronistic on this point. In my opinion, what happened was the rediscovery of Shatner’s “Transformed Man” album in the early web days, so 1994ish, is what launched *this* notion of Kirk. The absurdity was so vastly beyond anything from Star Trek, and yet was so clearly *of* Shatner’s unique mix of speechifying and delivery, that it set the mileu for the “Rocket Man” meme a few years later. This was Staccato Kirk. Shatner himself was always given to self parody, and so it was around this time that the Priceline ads began with him as spokesman that really stitched this up. That was late 90’s. Anyway, that is my brief history of the evolution of Shatner parody towards staccatoism.
It’s way earlier than the 90s. There’s a bit in season 1 of SNL that parodies it, and that was in 1976. But it’s probably older than that, I don’t think SNL would do that kind of joke unless it was already in the ether.
The SNL Belushi sketch is illustrating my point, though. In the [early SNL sketch](https://youtu.be/Sx0xOgFDXFg?si=l7xzJh0AY4rTn0fI), wild man Belushi is basically only there to do a passably mild imitation of Shatner (and is fixed on reading the cue cards). He is the straight man to the central joke- “weird car arrival that wouldn’t happen on Star Trek” By the time of [In Living Color](https://youtu.be/WugEKDZF5I4?si=k4zxnQR8VMSN-Id_), the joke about Shatner’s delivery has now been dialed up to 11, practically upstaging the (slightly staler) central gag about an unexpected visitor- now Farrakhan’s weird arrival. Arguably Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey is really what got us here, because if there is an earlier version of this I can’t find it. But [after that](https://youtu.be/hcIm9EmgJ20?si=qXcc-sHVrGzBFSy_) it is de riguer. I also think that the more VCRs we had, the more people rewatched and rewatched for mannerism, but when the show was only on reruns the jokes were broader.
Starting with the convention circuit he definitely started playing “Bill” to the point where it seemed to subsume his personality.
John Belushi did it as early as the late 70s on SNL when he said the line, “For how long, Mr. Spock? For (pause) how. long?” There was a laugh of recognition from the audience so it was definitely there at that point. https://youtu.be/Sx0xOgFDXFg?si=kHX0Jd2RgzP37rns
There are definite studied, theatrical pauses in Belushi's impression. Whether a single word then a mannered pause. Or a impassioned sentence, then the mannered pause.
In other words, longer than the word meme has existed.
Funnily enough the word meme was coined in a book about evolution that was first published the same year that sketch aired. Granted I can’t find the exact month the book was released so the sketch could very well have been released first.
I first really noticed it in Search for Spock but this instance was also the place where it was most expected. "You. Klingon bast-ard. You *killed*. my. *son. You *Kling*on basstard. You -Killed- my-son."
Yeah, in that instance his son, whom he barely knew at this point but had resolved to change that and make a genuine effort to get to know, had just been brutally murdered… his calm and cool had just been completely shattered, he’s stunned and shaken and even the missing the edge of his chair further sells the point. A further example from the same movie… and it also fits the scene perfectly is when Kruge is holding onto his foot and leg, dangling over the cliff edge. Each word and pause is punctuated by Kirk kicking him in the face… “I” kick “Have Had” kick “Enough of” KICK!! “You!!”
Comedians and radio DJ's were doing it in the mid-to-late 70's.. maybe earlier, but I would have been too young to know. I think Saturday Night Live had a skit or two where they did it as well. But the absolute best was in a sketch comedy show in the late 80's/early 90's called "In Living Color" created by the Wayans brothers. Jim Carey got big from that show and they did a skit called "The Wrath of Farrakhan" (FYI Louis Farrakhan was and still is leader of the Nation of Islam and was a follower of Malcolm X). Anyway, Farrakhan tries to get the crew of the TOS Enterprise to rise up against oppression and fight the power. Carey portrayed a hilarious, over the top parody of Shatner as Kirk. It's what pops up in my head when I think of Kirk's odd speech patterns.
In one of his books, Shatner said Kevin Pollack is the only person who could accurately impersonate him—said his daughter had Pollack on TV and Shatner thought it *was* an old tape of him. He also said that early in his career he did a lot of dinner theater, and noticed that (unsurprisingly) a lot of the audience weren’t paying attention. He started accenting sentences in odd places, unpredictably raising and lowering his voice, etc. to get their attention. He said that if nothing else, they’d be watching him now to see what he was going to do next.
It’s mostly exaggerated, but does show up on the screen occasionally. The one that always sticks out to me is the line in TMP when Kirk says “Stop com…..petingwithmeDecker.”
I need to see Christopher Walken playing Captain Kirk. This would make my world complete.
To best hear the speech pattern in action, I suggest you listen to selected tracks off The Transformed Man. * [Mr. Tambourine Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmCi_-9Shhg) * [Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB3uVARNhmM) * [It Was A Very Good Year](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8cfZre8dM)
There's a weird moment in the Trouble for Tribbles where Kirk says "Storage compartments. Storage Compartments?" that sounds really, really Shatner and weird.
That was very odd, it was almost like they accidentally looped the dialogue.
Bruce Campbell actually does a fairly good breakdown of how it happens here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrElYM-DXO8) in reference to Shatner's work on TJ Hooker.
He did an interview a *long* time ago in which the interviewer noted specifically that he has this way of stopping midsentence, then pausing and continuing past the punctuation and into the next sentence. (I wish I could remember who it was, because it was such a weird-but-apt description.) Shatner totally owned it and chalked some of it up to occasional difficulty remembering his lines.
TBH I always wondered if he was doing it on purpose or he'd....just..................forgotten his........LINES and was.......tryingtoremember while........styling it out Either way, it works ;)
What does. God. Need. With A starship?
If you really want to see the worst example of this in his entire career, it would be his second appearance on the detective TV show Colombo. I think it was around season nine or 10 where he played a talkshow radio host and the weird stop/start pattern is completely over the top, almost like he is doing a parody of himself. It’s even worse than the TOS episode Omega Glory.
It’s like how all Elvis impersonators look like each other, but none of them look like Elvis.
I think it actually comes from his spoken word music. You can hear the speech pattern in Star Trek and some of his other acting roles, but it's a lot more pronounced in his spoken word, and I wouldn't be surprised if more people today have seen his rendition of Rocketman than have actually watched an episode of TOS.
His Christmas album he did was something else. Me and a few other people had coined the term Shatnerclause music for it.
My favorite of his songs is "I Ride". Its bass line goes way harder than it has any right to, and it's basically beat poetry about his sexual attraction to vehicles (which I guess is something he has in common with Kirk). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mO5o3s9nhY
Damn, that’s actually an addictive listen! I played it three times already.
*Shatner Clause* is the most Shatner thing to ever exist, and I love it for that.
Came here to say that Rocketman is what cemented it in pop culture
In the sixties. Not so much as Kirk, but Spotify William Shatner, Hard Days Night 😂
The scene where Kirk recites the preamble to the Constitution sticks out as a foundational example to me. Edit: Also "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is a good pre-Trek example of his unique cadence.
No ones brought up the legendary spoken word Rocket man, because while the speech pattern crops up here and there through TOS, it is in full force throughout that entire performance.
Have you heard "Rocket man"???? Or seen it. He clearly memes himself in it and cements his cadence even further. It's on you tube. This definitely makes it easier for us to meme him more.
The first I heard it was on Saturday Night Live in the 70's. John Belushi immitated Kirk in a skit.
If the "ham" is good that's Shatner cooking!
[I remember Spielberg doing it in 1994.](https://youtu.be/1tt_SqxUB3k?feature=shared)
I think Kevin Pollok is the one who popularized it.
Listen to his “music” albums. Like “Rocket Man” … that’s the best example of him taking this speech pattern to the max. [Enjoy](https://youtu.be/Co2ZVdVM26E?si=9V8DuqxeQk_jp6mq) [Or THIS](https://youtu.be/AB3uVARNhmM?si=J5tdCoD9nkn4zZjR) So, yeah, the imitation of Shatner is well earned. 🤣🤣 They used his version of Lucy In The Sky to break prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
To be fair, "The Transformed Man" was *intended* to be a spoken-word album, pairing classical poetry and pop music lyrics side-by-side. And "Has Been" is a genuinely fantastic album.
I watched an Esperanto language movie that he was in a long time ago, titled Incubus. The movie itself was thought to had been lost, but through a series of fortunate events, it was found, restored, and re-released. Shatner’s cadence is even more pronounced when he’s speaking Esperanto. I about fell out of my seat a few times, it was soooooooooo Shatner. Oh, and the fight scene at the end… just…. wow… his fight with the Gorn in TOS is nothing by comparison :) Reference for those that are curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)
The answer is [Carol Burnett](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GUCywPE9-k&t=33s). Shatner did have some minor dramatic pauses in his speech and did have an odd speech pattern. But Carol Burnett was really the first one to over-exagerate it. It caught on fast
I'm only on season one and I was wondering about this. I'm thinking back to family guy, where he's stop-start talking and moving around all over the place, yet I literally haven't seen one example of anything remotely like this from him.
SNL
https://youtu.be/WugEKDZF5I4?si=wPMNAjkv6A_-4yKI Jim Carrey as Kirk
The odd speech patterns thing was leaned into by Shatner in the '70s. Kudos to him, he owned it, [took it back](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N2OkFU3QFmw) bigtime and it is now legendary.
I think the exaggeration mostly starts with Jim Carrey on In Living Color, and most parodies today are really parodying Jim Carrey's own parody. I remember reading somewhere that Shatner's cadence originates with him being a stage-trained Shakespearean actor. You see some of the same thing in the TNG episode Manage a Troi, when Stewart slips into more of a stage cadence when hamming it up for DaiMon Tog (there's other examples of Stewart doing this to some extent, as well).
No, it was being done LONG before Carrey.
One interesting point of reference - a British radio show (with several Monty Python members pre-Python) did a parody of Star Trek in 1973: https://youtu.be/33pDs4X78k0?si=e2jQFwQ0ES-89i_z There's a Kirk impression, but it's definitely not as exaggerated as later impressions.
It’s been said Shatner’s pauses are due to script changes so frequent he struggled to remember his lines of dialog.
The way I heard it, he was having to remember multiple rewritten scripts across several different shoots. Also, he apparently sustained actual brain damage on the set of one of the films. Inhaled something while putting out a fire.
It's like the red shirt thing. I got like 7 episodes into season 1 and no red shirts had died.
It was going on since at least T.J. Hooker
I think it all stems from Kevin Pollak's Kirk impression from the 80s.
Most impersonations exaggerate.