TV REVIEWS : Making Disabilities a ‘Laughing’ Matter

Pushing out his words laboriously, Chris Fonseca, who has cerebral palsy, sits on a stage in front of a microphone cheerfully recalling his boyhood and the time his sister taught him to ties his shoes. Together .

Such amiable self-mockery--not to be confused with self-loathing--is typical of “Look Who’s Laughing,” a PBS documentary produced by Randy Johnson and starring six comics with disabilities. They range from veterans Alex Valdez (blind) and Geri Jewell (cerebral palsy) to Fonseca, Kathy Buckley (hearing impaired), J.D. Englund (paraplegic) and Brett Leake (muscular dystrophy), who seems to stand almost at a backward tilt while performing in front of an audience: “Someone wants to know what happened to me, I tell ‘em. I broke a chain letter.”

Although the program extends the menu of mainstream comedy material to include even “gimp”-style jokes, some of these comics are clearly unwilling to rely solely on their disabilities for laughs--with Valdez, for example, doing jokes on his Chicano background in addition to his blindness. Nevertheless, Fonseca comes across as funniest (on this segmented show, at least) precisely because the images of cerebral palsy-caused clumsiness that he evokes are themselves so funny.

Unfortunately, little of the comedy here is inventive, and for the most part “Look Who’s Laughing” could be described as comedically challenged, its disjointed format of sound bites and selected punch lines failing to capture either the flow of a comics’ stand-up work or the club environment in which these performers so often work.

* “Look Who’s Laughing” airs tonight at 10:30 on KCET-TV Channel 28 and at 9 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.