Time & Perspective Quote by George Jessel

Few one-liners roast public speaking as efficiently as this: the brain hums along faithfully from birth, then short-circuits the instant you face a room. Jessel’s joke works because it treats a common fear as a mechanical failure, not a moral weakness. The punchline isn’t that speakers are stupid; it’s that the social pressure of being watched can temporarily turn competence into static. Everyone recognizes the sudden dryness of mouth, the vanished vocabulary, the eerie sense of listening to yourself from outside your body. The line flatters the audience by admitting what they already suspect: the podium is an unnatural habitat.

Coming from a judge, the barb carries extra bite. Courtrooms are theaters where language has consequences - reputations bruised, money lost, freedom altered - and where people perform under scrutiny: witnesses, lawyers, even judges. Jessel is winking at that ritual. In a legal setting, speech isn’t just expression; it’s evidence, strategy, and self-defense. No wonder the brain “stops”: the stakes make every sentence feel like it could be entered into the record.

The subtext is also a small democratic joke about authority. Public speaking is where ordinary people are expected to sound like leaders, experts, or moral exemplars on demand. Jessel punctures that expectation with a gag that’s really a kindness: if you freeze, it’s not because you’re unfit; it’s because being publicly articulate is a high-wire act disguised as basic adulthood.