Aidan Greene choose to study software engineering because he thought he wouldn’t have to speak to people so much in this kind of work. “But, of course, as with any other job, you have to collaborate and interact with other people,” says the 35-year-old Cavan man.
His choice of career was influenced by the fact that, at the age of four, he developed a stammer and struggled with the fear of speaking to people – particularly during his teenage years – in case he stammered.
“I used to joke that I developed my stammer when my family moved from Northern Ireland to the South but we only moved a mile down the road over the border from Fermanagh to Cavan,” says Greene, who does stand-up comedy based around his experiences of stammering.
“I never wanted to be a stammering advocate, but, by being a stand-up comedian, I’ve inadvertently become one because I’m open and confident about being dysfluent as part of my comedy.”
RM Block
Greene recently spoke at the launch of the position paper on stammering from the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists (IASLT). Dr Mary Dwyer, speech and language therapy manager at HSE Kerry, is one of the lead authors of that paper. “We support the rights of people who stammer to experience living without discrimination and without the expectation to conform to a norm of fluency. But we also acknowledge their right to seek increased fluency as and how they wish to do so,” says Dwyer.
About one in 20 young children stammer, but many grow out of it during their childhood. About one in 100 adults stammer openly or hide their stammer.
Greene says his mother brought him along for all kinds of treatments to help reduce his stuttering. “At the time, it felt normal to go for these treatments, but, in hindsight, they fed into the shame. By insinuating that it’s a problem to be fixed makes you think subconsciously that you are broken,” he explains.
He says he gets annoyed when people say that they had a stammer as a child and they fixed it. “Because, statistically, many people grow out of it. I’ve got coeliac disease and ADHD as well, but neither of these would have made me cry at school – but stammering did.”
He tells the story about how in an effort to not treat him any differently to his classmates, his English teacher had him take his turn to read aloud during class. But, Greene’s passage contained mentions of Hepzibah, one of the central characters from the Junior Certificate book Carrie’s War. Hepzibah was a word he really struggled to say.
Eventually, his teacher said he didn’t have to read aloud any more. “He tried to treat me like everyone else and when it didn’t work, he treated me completely differently. It would have been easier if he had asked me, ‘Are you okay to read aloud’?”
As a teenager, Greene also followed the Maguire Programme, an internationally recognised coaching programme to help people overcome stuttering. “I was probably too young to stick with the discipline of it. It’s about pausing, taking a deep breath before you speak and if you start to stutter, releasing the air and starting again,” he explains.
He says the Maguire programme helped him to be relatively fluent, when fluency was his goal. But, at a certain point, he decided to embrace his stammering instead.
“A lot of my shame was built around how I thought other people perceived me. The stammering character in films is always the one to be laughed at or felt sorry for, so everything changed for me when I started to do stand-up comedy.”
While acknowledging that stand-up comedy won’t work for everyone with a stammer, he says the fact that some people told him he would never be able to be a stand-up comedian actually spurred him on. “I can’t say, do what I do just because it worked for me. But you just need to learn that nobody cares about your stammer as much as you do. I hope that’s a freeing thought. You have to let go of the shame around stammering. That’s what held me back.”
It’s such a cocky thing to think you know what someone is going to say next
— Aidan Greene
Looking back on his childhood, he said that he loved to talk and was fed up feeling bad about stammering. “I was naturally a chatterbox as a child. But I had allowed stammering to dominate my life. I was going into my final year at college when I did my first stand-up. Speaking in public was my way of giving the middle finger to the thing I used to fear.”
Greene now incorporates much of his early experience of stammering and the different ways he tried to overcome it into his comedy sketches. “I don’t ever intentionally stammer to trick the audience into thinking I’m stammering and I don’t ever make fun of stammering but I make fun out of people’s reactions to my stammering.”
He gets annoyed when people stammer intentionally at the end of his performances, thinking they are funny by saying “that was vvvvery gggggood”.
[ ‘Finishing their sentences isn’t helpful’: How to talk to someone who stammersOpens in new window ]
He also dislikes when people offer him advice. “People say things like ‘if I ever trip over my words, I breathe and relax’. And he hates when people try to finish his sentence for him. “It’s such a cocky thing to think you know what someone is going to say next. I’ll change what I’m going to say if someone tries to finish my sentence for me.”
Really, he says, “it’s about treating other people as human beings and not thinking you know more about their disability than they do.”
Greene also suggests that public figures who stammer offer other stammerers lifelines when they speak in public about it. “I think Joe Biden missed an opportunity to be a stammering advocate. I know he had lots of other important work to do but anytime he stammered, it was seen as a sign of his cognitive decline. Why didn’t he own it and have some pride in it? That way he could have controlled the narrative a bit.”
[ Stammering: It’s just a different way of talkingOpens in new window ]
Greene’s latest project is a 14-minute film, Stutterbug, in which he stars alongside David Peter Meads, known professionally as Scroobius Pip. The latter is an English actor, podcaster and former spoken-word and hip hop recording artist who is also a stammerer. “It’s not ideal. But it’s allowed me to become more comfortable with myself. It’s just how I talk,” says Scroobius Pip in one of his many videos for STAMMA, the British Stammering Association.
The film, Stutterbug – which Greene is currently pitching at film festivals, is about how a stammering man’s attempts to hide his stammer, results in him insulting sick children and ruining his chances with his college crush.
“My main hope with Stutterbug is that it will give other people who stutter the authentic representation they’ve never had. For people who don’t stutter, I hope it will give them a chance to laugh with, and not at, people who do stutter,” says Greene.
