It's the difference between saying it and telling it.
Great speakers have the power to incite action and movement. This control lies not only in their words, which lie still on the page. It thrives in the delivery. The right balance, the right control can bring a speaker's meaning out, so it is being told with more than the throat or the lips. A good speech is told from the chest.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood delivery. He was hardly a man for posturing, but when he spoke, his chest rose like he was breathing truth. Delivery tells of a man's composition. King made his apparent every time he spoke, whether it was in humbly accepting the Nobel Peace Prize or giving one of the most enduring speeches of all time.
His voice had a wavy feel, not that it was shaky, but more that the air trembled in its presence. He had an impeccable instinct for when to speak softly and just how to rise and fall in a slow crescendo to his full-blown Baptist minister volume.
The 1960s heralded a number of great speakers whose style has influenced the way entertainers get their messages across to listeners. Entertainers have taken a lot away from King, the Kennedy brothers and Malcom X. There are a few actors, comedians and singers who deserve recognition for their deliveries.
Samuel L. Jackson's speech in "Pulp Fiction" is the one most obviously directly influenced by King's performance on the list. "And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to poison my brother," there is so much to dissect in the delivery of that sentence.
The way he drags the vowels in "great" and "furious," and the punch he uses in "those" and "poison" is so King, he honors the name. It's worth mentioning that King was an advocate for peaceful resistance while Jackson was just making a dude soil himself before shooting him in the face. But I'm talking style, here, not context.
Christopher Walken, Christopher Walken, Christopher Walken. It doesn't matter what this guy says, people want to hear it. He keeps people hinged on things like, "What word is he going accent next? Where will he put the dramatic pause in this sentence?" He's held the screen with best in the business: DeNiro in "The Deer Hunter," Dennis Hopper in "True Romance" and Denzel Washington in "Man on Fire." He did this all on the basis of his delivery.
He doesn't have astounding emotional depth like DeNiro once had, he doesn't have the crazy act down like Hopper and doesn't have the commanding presence of Washington, but his lines are the ones viewers remember.
Benicio Del Toro deserves brief recognition for blowing away a studded cast, with his complete character overall in "The Usual Suspects." Nobody told him to say, "I'll flip you, flip you for real" like that. They changed portions of the script to accommodate his creation. With those kinds of ideas, I'm waiting for him to make his mass production directorial debut. Fact checking informs me that he directed the barely-seen "Submission" in 1995.
Close readers of this publication understand that Aaron Weiss, vocalist for indie rock act mewithoutYou, is high on our list of good writers. His uniquely expressive delivery has, however, allowed him to get away with less great lines occasionally.
Above other notable singers/writers like Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die, Weiss's voice carries his thoughts. Walken-esque pauses break his poignant analogies into separate moments but juxtapose the subjects.
From his first album to his second, he all but ditched his high scream in favor of more complex dynamic variations with smoother transitions. This may have been a change made to more easily facilitate nightly performances, but it was an improvement nonetheless.
Lewis Black is not the funniest writer in the business. He doesn't tackle enormously original issues - at least half of any given performance is dedicated to the in-office President. He can, however, read a newspaper clipping aloud and keep an audience roaring.
His vocal tools include frustrated growls that don't creep people out, which is difficult in stand-up comedy. He also employs the cheek-flapping headshake, always a sure sign of confusion. The two can happen within the same word, and though there's no word to ascribe to that feeling, listeners understand Black's pain.
It's just like my mother used to tell me. "It's not what you say, it's how you say it."
