She’s Deaf, But Not Unfunny

Several exciting people are currently making memorable contributions to New York after dark. From humble, impoverished roots in a hick town in Ohio where, in ignorance, her schoolteachers declared her retarded, Kathy Buckley is a hearing-impaired Wunderkind who spent the first 20 years of her life contemplating suicide. She is making up for lost time. From her misfortunes she’s managed to mine a rich vein of humor and pathos in Now Hear This!, a one-woman show at the Lamb’s Theater on West 44th Street that is entirely mesmerizing.

“I’m not deaf,” she says, “I just don’t listen.” But what fun she is when it’s the audience that does the listening. Willowy, attractive and exuding sparks of warmth and love, she makes you laugh even when describing the most harrowing circumstances in a life that would make strong men crumble. She was an abused child, she lived on food stamps, she was fired from an endless array of jobs, she was given last rites five times, the one day she escaped from her travails to sunbathe at the beach she was run over by a Jeep and ended up for five years in a hospital and two years in a wheelchair. (Did I fail to mention her cervical cancer?)

The deck of cards she was dealt seems positively diabolical, but the show is about how she gained control of her life, made peace with her past, got new hearing aids, learned to speak, threw away her prescription drugs and reinvented herself as a standup comic. Now a walking career testimonial to survival and hope, she gets a standing ovation every night and, boy, does she deserve it. In an ugly, disconsolate and unfair world, her way of finding a crucible of humor in everything is an object lesson that is both refreshing and unconventional. (New definition of optimism: When a deaf child steals a blind child’s lunch, the blind child never sees the deaf child do it, and the deaf child never hears the blind child complain about it.) Ms. Buckley is the first deaf comedian I have encountered, but I hope to see – and hear – a great deal more of her.

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