New York Times
Friday October 15, 1999

THEATER REVIEW

THOUGH LIFE’S BEEN A PAIN, SHE GETS THE LAST LAUGH

You’d think Kathy Buckley was making this stuff up.  She was wrongly labeled retarded as a child, run over by a Jeep while lying on the beach (pronounced dead by a paramedic who later kept saying, “I’m so sorry”) and stricken with cervical cancer, all before she was 30.  

And from this she builds a standup-comedy routine. 

Apparently these things really happened to Ms. Buckley, who bills herself as “America’s first hearing impaired comedienne,” and “Now Hear This!”- her one-woman show making fun of it all-is a winner.  The show, beautifully directed by Sue Wolf, is at the Lamb’s Theater.

Ms. Buckley, who looks something like Paula Prentiss in her “Where the Boys Are” days, knows how to win over an audience fast.  Part of her charm is her avowed bitterness.  “I’m not deaf,” she says early in the show.  “I just don’t listen.”  In elementary school, where teachers thought she was “slow,” Ms. Buckley recalls a report card that assessed her as “poor in using time profitably.” She quickly adds, “Which, as we all know, is the cornerstone of second grade.”

She also gets away with murder.  Like using the kind of material that was stale when vaudeville was young.  She recalls that when a manager told her, “You brought the house down,” she quickly answered, “I didn’t touch anything.” And she peppers her anecdotes with sentimentality (remembering a teacher who died, declaring that the most beautiful sound in the world is a baby laughing) that would be treacle in most comedy routines.

The rest of the time, she has a devilish sparkle in her eye, which goes well with her knowing observations: she’s certain that the reason she didn’t date much as a teen-ager is that she couldn’t hear the phone ring.  When she starts wearing a hearing aid again as an adult, she goes home and thinks, God knows how long that toilet’s been running.

If the audience does cut Ms. Buckley some slack because of her handicap (a word she hates, not surprisingly), she’s savvy enough to take advantage of that.  Too bad she can’t enjoy some other comedians’ work.  As she says, “Robin Williams’s lips move too fast.”