New York Times
August 8, 2001
A Comic Sees Humor in Years of Disability
By JULIE SALAMON
Kathy Buckley covers familiar ground in her comedy act, making
jokes about the telephone company, relationships and her mother.
Like many comedians, she thrives on the alienation and bitterness
she feels toward people who haven't understood her. But because
this comic has a severe hearing impairment, the familiar becomes
exotic, and her ability to extract humor from pain takes on
extra meaning.
Four years ago she shaped her stand-up routine into an autobiographical
play called "Now Hear This!" Imagine the Book of
Job written for laughs. Ms. Buckley described how she was
incorrectly labeled retarded as a child, told she had cervical
cancer when she was 27, and was run over by a lifeguard's
jeep while lying on the beach.
Now PBS is presenting "Kathy Buckley: No Labels, No Limits,"
a one-hour program tonight based on her play. She's an extraordinary
performer who unabashedly indulges in shtick and sentimentality
as she slyly probes her unusual world view. Her rendition
of her life is fascinating, even when she lapses into her
other professional role — that of motivational speaker
— with jokes like, "I've put a deaf ear on negativity."
Ms. Buckley's autobiographical material is funny and painful
in part because it's so recognizable. What child hasn't been
cruelly treated by a teacher or a classmate over a misunderstanding?
But in her case, the misunderstandings were catastrophic:
her hearing impairment was undiagnosed for years, a problem
that affected her schoolwork so severely that she was considered
retarded.
"I was 8 years old when they caught on it was a hearing
loss," she recalls. "And they call me slow?'
Her mother becomes part of the punch line in a story about
a hearing aid Ms. Buckley's parents bought her when she was
a girl. It so distorted and amplified sound that the swish
of corduroy trousers became a distracting noise. "All
I could hear were my pants and my mother," she says in
her routine, explaining why she threw the hearing aid away.
Later, as an adult, she benefited from a hearing aid, though
she found disadvantages, like traffic noise.
Tall and skinny, Ms. Buckley speaks in the sluggish rhythms
of someone who had to learn speech without hearing it. Her
fierceness is most palpable when she blows up a balloon and
puts it against her throat to demonstrate that she has figured
out how to sing. She proceeds with "Over the Rainbow"
and stays remarkably on key.
KATHY BUCKLEY: NO LABELS, NO LIMITS
WLIW, tonight at 9 (Channel 21 in New York)
Produced by TPT St. Paul/Minneapolis. Richard Hudson, Jay
Bakerink and Kathy Buckley, executive producers; Lee Carey,
producer; Jeff Weihe, director; Allison Brown, editor; Gerald
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