“You have your hat backward,” Gallagher sneers at a twentysomething man in the front row. “Are you a homosexual? Because it seems you have a problem figuring out the front from the back.” Big laugh. “I see people every day I can’t figger out what sex they are,” he continues. Even bigger laugh. The old man—1980s fixture, incessant smasher of fruit, and “comedy legend,” according to the marquee outside—is onstage in front of a sold-out Admiral Theatre in Bremerton, Washington. An hour earlier, my friend and I had disembarked the packed rush-hour ferry in downtown Bremerton and wandered uphill through oddly deserted streets (our hundreds of fellow passengers seemed to have vaporized when they reached land) until we found the Admiral. Gallagher stood on the sidewalk. He was small and old—his back bent a bit, his trademark dark curls faded to a dank grayish-blond. He scuttled around the corner and through a side door.
It’s cocktail seating inside the Admiral—small tables of four—and we are placed at #B32 with a largish lady in pink and her mustachioed gentleman friend. “Oh, you’re sitting with my daughter!” the elderly usher crows. “This is my daughter!” We aren’t sure how to respond, so we say, “Cool!” Things are immediately awkward. They would only get worse.
My memories of watching Gallagher during my 1980s childhood (Comedy Central was my third parent) were pretty much apolitical—silly props, innocuous puns, and, of course, all the smashing, smashing, smashing. Tonight, we’re expecting much of the same, only older, sadder. We are smug and a little bored. “Gallagher’s gotta be, like, 90 now, right?” I joke. “Because he was, you know…” “Bald?” my friend offers. “In the ’70s?” “Right.” The stage is swathed in thousands of yards of black plastic sheeting. Spray-painted on the back wall is a banner (created, if the internet is any indication, by Gallagher himself before each show) that says: “G-[watermelon]-L-L-[space]-[watermelon]-R-R-R.” It is… sad. We were right about that much.
Then Gallagher gets going. And fuck. Bremerton is a military town and a conservative one: It’s more than just a slide into obscurity that delivered Gallagher to the Admiral rather than, say, the Moore in Seattle. You see, Gallagher is—how best to put this?—a paranoid, delusional, right-wing religious maniac. I HAD NO IDEA.
“Hey, President Obama,” he spits out the name like a mouthful of burning hair. “You ain’t black. I don’t care what you say—you’re a latte. You’re half whole-milk. It could be goat milk—you could be a terrorist!” I am too busy losing my mind to catch the next joke, which is about Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer. Aaaaand we’re off.
Gallagher is upset about a lot of things. Young people with their sagging pants (in faintly coded racist terms, he explains that this is why the jails are overcrowded—because “their” baggy pants make it too hard for “them” to run from the cops). Tattoos: “That ink goes through to your soul—if you read your Bible, your body is a sacred temple, YOU DIPSHIT.” People naming their girl-children Sam and Toni instead of acceptable names like Evelyn and Betty: “Just give her some little lesbian tendencies!” Guantánamo Bay: “We weren’t even allowed to torture all the way. We had to half-torture—that’s nothin’ compared to what Saddam and his two sons OOFAY and GOOFAY did.” Lesbians: “There’s two types—the ugly ones and the pretty ones.” (Um, like all people?) Obama again: “If Obama was really black, he’d act like a black guy and get a white wife.” Michael Vick: “Poor Michael Vick.” Women’s lib: “These women told you they wanna be equal—they DON’T.” Trans people: “People like Cher’s daughter—figure that out. She wants a penis, but she has a big belly. If you can’t see your dick, you don’t get one.” The Rice Krispies elves: “All three of those guys are gay. Look at ’em!” The Mexicans: “Look around—see any Mexicans? Nope. They’ll be here later for the cleanup.” The French: “They ruin our language with their faggy words.”
Above all, everything is gay, gay, gay to Gallagher. He leans into it with the borderline-nonsensical, icked-out, ignorant glee of a boy—or the protest-too-much vigor of a GOP senator. Gallagher delivers your Bible verse for the day: “Without God, we are nothing but dust. What is butt dust? Is that what you get if your homosexual isn’t properly lubricated?” He relates a story about spilling mouthwash onto his crotch during a show: “Lucky for me, there was no homosexuals in the area—’cause my balls was minty fresh.” At other points during the show, Gallagher says, “Men and women can’t live in the same house” and “There’s no way men and women can have a relationship.” He says he can’t remember why he used to feel pleasure in looking at a woman. And, “There’s only one kind of homosexual guy, and that’s the pretty ones—why do homosexual men have to be so good-looking?” Gallagher. Listen. Is there something you want to share with us?
Gallagher commands the stage with the weary, sure hand of a touring comic closing out his third decade on the road. He knows what he’s doing, and even I’m not a big enough dick to dispute the “comedy legend” designation on the sign outside. The people of Bremerton eat it up, and despite the discomfort of sitting in a room full of rabid, frothing conservative dickwads (especially when the “comedy” veers creepily close to white-power rhetoric: “We’re descended from an Anglo-Saxon Viking tradition!”), it’s a relief to have them there. Gallagher needs them, and I need to not witness the complete mental breakdown of Gallagher.
“This is why I’m not on TV,” he keeps repeating. “I am powerful. They can tell. I’m an American and I’m gonna speak my mind.” He tells the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth, and everyone else is afraid. The TV talk-show hosts are afraid, the network executives are afraid, the American people are afraid. It’s our fault that he’s not a superstar—not his—and he needs us to know it. We owe him. “Dave Letterman ain’t comin’ here. Robin Williams ain’t comin’ out here. You gotta say, you know, Gallagher came here, and he did two hours.”
In a section entitled “Additional Facts,” the program describes, with heartbreaking false bravado, a 2008 interview that Gallagher seems to regard as his big comeback: “The Howard Stern Show. The interview lasted at least 1 hour and the callbacks were amazing. It was a chance for everyone to see and hear Gallagher in a new light.” I couldn’t track down an audio file of the Stern interview, but the show’s website maintains detailed recaps of each episode:
Howard welcomed watermelon smashing comedian Gallagher to the studio and was surprised that he was wearing a suit… Gallagher then railed against the late night hosts; Jay Leno is impersonal, Conan isn’t funny, and Letterman used his watermelon-dropping bit. Gallagher said, “I’m an authority on comedy. I was a comedian in another life,” and listed some of his lesser-known credits, like random parody songs… Gallagher then continued to list his crazy ideas; fart ring tones, a face-paint-focused environmental presentation for Al Gore, and something about photons and electrons.
Ugh. Devastating. It sounds just like the Gallagher show I watched—less a triumphant comeback and more the perversely fascinating but ultimately insignificant ramblings of a desperate has-been.
At last, after two hours of his tedious, hacky, right-wing manifesto, Gallagher gets to the part his (willing) hostages have been waiting for. It’s time to smash some shit. There are the watermelons, there is some cottage cheese (“It’s got the curds that blow up, just like on the news!”), there is sauerkraut and syrup and honey. Then Gallagher gets a tin pie plate. He opens a giant can of fruit cocktail and pours it in. He opens a can of some Asian vegetable—water chestnuts, maybe—and pours that in, too. “This is the China people and queers!!!” he screams and takes his sledgehammer to the thing with a fury that is no fun at all. Wet chunks of China people and queers fly everywhere. The hateful, bitter old man laughs. I cannot believe Bill Hicks is dead and this motherfucker is still touring.
On our way out the door, my friend says to me, “Hey—do you want to go beat up some queers? I heard they’re really faggy.” We laugh. But it isn’t really funny. 
A lot of comedians make jokes like this, and HAVE been making jokes like this for a looong time, he just rolls them all into one.
I do hate all the stupid spiteful jokes that aren’t even jokes, but just snide remarks about society. It’s annoying. I paid to laugh, not cringe and feel awkward.
Some of that stuff was overtly racist, though, and a little beyond what other comedians do.
But he’s not, as you say, “a paranoid, delusional, right-wing religious maniac”… he’s pretty much homophobic and racist. That does not make one a right-wing religious maniac, it makes them bigoted. Right-wing does not mean “cruel” like people think it does these days.
He seemed more liberal when I saw him in 2001. I think he plays the crowd and this time he was performing to a military audience. Still isn’t very funny though.
What the hell happened to him? I also grew up watching his comedy specials Friday nights on VH1 then on Comedy Central. Even though the jokes now are outdated, their still pretty funny.
I saw him preform maybe about 10 years ago at the Westberry Music Fair on Long Island and he was still doing outdated Bobbit and OJ Simpson jokes. Hell, he even pulled out the “Bat-Mobile” from one of the old 80s shows. Trying to watch him struggle with the sledge was pretty sad.
Reading this and the other page with the “bonus jokes” made me sick. When I saw him he did make fun of people with backwards baseball caps, baggy pants and bib overalls, but not in a hate filled raciest tone. I think I would have walked out and demanded a refund after ten minutes of him spewing that garbage. What a has-bin.
It’s a shame to read that someone who used to make people laugh and had real talent has basically fallen to this level. I never thought of Gallagher as a top-tier comic, but he could usually find odd and unique ways of looking at the world and seemed to have a zest for life. Yet I always had a vague sense of meanness lurking just under his surface, like a stranger in a bar who’ll buddy up to you and tell you dirty jokes all night then mug you in the parking lot afterwards.
I don’t know what’s to blame for his turn to the dark side, but some folks are one-shot wonders who basically have no second act in them. Dennis Miller is an excellent example of someone who’s lost his way and slipped into political pandering as a substitute for being funny, but in Miller’s case I think 9/11 damaged his worldview and confidence so badly that he’ll never truly be able to find the abundant humor in everything around him anymore.
For Gallagher’s sake, I hope he’s not aware of just how unfunny he is now. But something tells me he knows, and that’s why he’s given in to his bitterness. And oh yeah, long-term self-hating closet case–I thought that even back in the ’90s.
BTW, Lindy, Sullivan’s linked to your article:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/th…
#64: “I could barely understand your article because I read on a 2nd grade level.”
Fixed that for you.
Gallagher was one of my favorite comedians for a long time, not because he was that great, different, thought provoking or genius, but because he was entertaining and ridiculous.
I saw his shows on Comedy Central as a kid, and finally went to his local show around 2004. I was probably his biggest fan at the show, and I was probably the most disappointed person there too. He signed an autograph (on a t-shirt I bought) in a very pissed off manner before the show. He seemed like the fans he came out to greet (why prior to the show, I didn’t understand) were bothersome to him, and he had better things to do. I found out later he meet and greets before the show because most people walk out. His show was an awful, 1.5 hour plus rant about this or that, stupid stuff that wasn’t funny. Then, he just basically said screw this, let’s do what everyone came here see, the Sledge-O-Matic. Everything was similar to the writer’s entry, appearing to be completely made by Gallagher in a last-minute effort, as if he only knew about the show an hour beforehand. Spray-painted background, black tarps, a table with various foodstuffs he would smash as soon as someone he invited up on stage would prepare it. Yes, someone from the crowd had to prepare it, he evidently had no stage hands. It wouldn’t even be an issue if he commanded the crowd like he could before, make them feel like a part of the show. Instead he seemed like Kaufman’s Tony Clifton, insulting the people coming to the stage. Some of them walked off before they helped with his fruit smashing.
He made a little girl cry. I’m serious, a girl under the age of 8 he made cry as he was insulting her. I thought it was too crazy to be real, it was a set up, right? No, it was real. This guy was berating, belittling and insulting various small children throughout his show, all of whom he invited on stage. He didn’t even have a stage hand and was performing at a small local show, how could he have had so many people in on the act?
Either he’s a Kaufman-esque genius, or the biggest a-hole that has ever lived. And according to personal experience, anecdotal evidence and past history of the guy, I believe the latter. No one cares about how offensive his jokes are, as there are many great comedians with “offensive” jokes about many groups; the focus should be on the comic himself, the amateur nature of the act and the alienation of his audience, all of which are so far removed from the incredibly successful Gallagher of the 1980s.
I wonder if defunct 80’s comedians turning out to be tea-bagger nutjobs isn’t a growing trend. Two weeks ago I had my vaguely positive childhood memories of Ray Stephens destroyed by being shown one of his psycho youtube rants (look for it, its fascinatingly horrible). I feel like he would not like that my 8-year-old proto-homosexual mind found his naked cartoon streaker-man to be indescribably interesting.
Wow. Seriously sorry to hear what an asshat he’s become. I first saw him before he began a comedy career. He used to be a roadie or the road manager for Jim Stafford (guy who had a couple of hits in the 70s for comic songs, probably best known for “Spiders and Snakes.”) Stafford filled in as host for a local talk show that my mother watched every day, which I hated. Stafford himself was so funny and fast on his feet in interacting with the audience that I watched the whole week that he filled it (the guy really should have had his own show). At one point during the week STafford brought Gallagher on, introing him as his (I’m thinking it was road manager) and saying he was really funny. He did the Sledge-O-Matic, and when you were unspoiled for it, it was even funnier. I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard — and my mom, who has always hated comedy based on destruction of things, laughed her head off too.
Such a shame that he’s turned into such a bitter, unfunny prick.
I’m all for comedians and radio personalities and whatnot being able to speak their minds. Make fun of gays, do some racial stereotyping, get a few yucks by making people squirm, or play to the political leanings of your audience — whatever.
But there is something really sinister and deranged about the sledgehammer bit with the “China people and queers.” One would think that, with acts of atrocity still a daily occurrence in our world, an American comedian performing for an audience in “the land of the free” could muster just the slightest bit of decency for his fellow man.
Not only is this sad, hateful fucktard obviously a latent homosexual [not that there’s anything wrong with that — and wouldn’t he and the world be so much better off if he could just admit that?] he is probably also a closeted Chinese.
Bummer. My sister and I went up onstage with this guy for a few minutes back when we were in high school. Share the same last name, slipped a security guy some goofy note before the show. Dude’s gone off the rails. Ah, whatever.
By the way, can someone at The Stranger tell me if Bethany is still hot? I ran into her in BK a few years back and she was still hot then, so I’ma go ahead and guess yes. I do hope so. Hey Bethany, it’s John! Some long-distance pigtail-pullin’…
Another hacking voice of a dying generation. His material is not only wrong is dated, so as it turns out, you can suck at life and at your trade. Double failure.
The Glenn Beck’s of the world, on the other hand, scare the shit out of me.
This one is just a bad joke.
Amen to Bill Hicks…
One thing this guy NEVER was – and I do mean NE-VER – was funny.
Odd that you claimed to be a child of the 80’s raised on comedy central when the channel wasn’t created until november of 1989.
Awesome. I’m going to see the Nuge this August for what promises to be an equally depressing spectacle. Care to tag along?
Oh, I may be a horrible person, but I did find this line kinda funny, seeing as I’m a guy with a big belly “She wants a penis, but she has a big belly. If you can’t see your dick, you don’t get one.”
Weird, he used to seem like a hippie comic back in the ’80s; he seemed imaginative and good with words (“I wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s one that says ‘brightness’ but it didn’t do anything”). There’s one ‘uncensored’ video where he was smoking dope onstage. WTF happened?
I never knew. I’ve got to go get some tickets so that I can support him and help him keep spreading the word. Thank goodness that there is still someone with the balls to speak out and tell it like it is.
Hepcat @ #110:
If I remember correctly, Jim Stafford did have his own comedy-variety show back in the ’70s, but I think it only lasted one season. He had a great personality for TV, that’s for sure.
PLEASE don’t group this trash with tea party people. To do so would make you as bigoted as Gallagher. Any decent person, progressive or conservative, would have gotten up and left.
PLEASE don’t group this trash with tea party people. To do so would make you as bigoted as Gallagher. Any decent person, progressive or conservative, would have gotten up and left.
ouch! I didn’t realize that Gallagher was Ann Coulter’s alter ego…. or maybe he’s her puppet with her hand shoved up his ass… either way, really.
Gallagher should go on tour whith glen beck, and ted nugent.
It’s rather comforting knowing the far right have a hate equivilant for Bill Maher.
sad little bald bastard….. 🙁 He used to be funny. Must have “gone south” at some point, eh? 🙁
Thanks a fucking lot, Lindy. It’s like the part of my childhood I never gave a shit about or actually even watched just died. And you’re right about Bill Hicks.
after reading the entire article, and all 127 comments, im still trying to pick my jaw up off the floor…….
Maybe he had a head injury. I remember that he was in some kind of accident and was seriously injured. The memory isn’t clear but I think he flew a watermelon blimp into light or radio tower.
M
I saw him in Arlington, VA in late 2009 and had the exact same experience, except he was down-right MEAN and insulting to the people he involved from the audience. The whole thing was pathetic, and I think people probably would have left except it was kind of a fascinating train wreck.
This article just gave him street-cred for his own Fox tv show. Coming soon. You heard it here first.
the only hate I have heard is from the asswads in the comment section.He told the truth and you think it is hate. You spew hate and in your sick and twisted minds somehow think it is the truth
We act like our world is Lakers vs. Celtics, Republican vs. Democrat, Left-wing vs. Right-wing when in reality we all play for or are fans of the Washington Generals, and we are getting the shit beat out of us by the Globetrotters. Gallagher just wears Nikes and hustles and Louis Black wears Reeboks and makes smooth passes; and we argue over the colors of the uniforms and the starting lineup and whether or not this star or that star should have the ball in his hands when the shot clock is winding down; and we forget that we are playing the Globetrotters, and we haven’t won in a long, long time.
I saw his show last night at the Snoqualmie Casino and I came away with the EXACT same impression that you did. Today on my Facebook page my status reads “I don’t remember Gallagher being racist and homophobic” The whole show felt eerily like being at a Tea Party rally (bearing in mind that I would never go to one). He kept pointing out ALL politicians will lie to you, but I couldn’t help noticing that though he had 8 years from which to draw, there were no jokes about George W. Bush. Where was the joke about Cheney shooting a man in the face? I mean if you’re going to do a show about “being smart and thinking for yourself” there really is no better example of what NOT to do than the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney!
#132 Let me get this straight, Gallagher says “If Obama was really black, he’d act like a black guy and get a white wife.” and you don’t hear hate? Somehow that is him telling “the truth”?
“This is the china people and queers – SMASH” somehow that’s not hate either?
I ridiculed bush for years because he’s a moron, not because he’s white. I continue to ridicule wingnuts and teabaggers because they’re idiots, not because they’re (overwhelmingly) white.
And another part of my childhood dies a lonely, destitute death in a darkened corner of my heart.
interesting review. i remember liking gallagher years ago. (and he’s 64 years old. i swear, 4 years older than i. (than me?)) anyway, i’m sorry to hear about how ‘sorry’ he’s become. i’m a gay man since the 60’s and he never once offended me, but i haven’t seen him in many years so…..shit happens. look at michael richards. (never knew the truth til the outburst). so keep up the good work. i love your blog…….
if you get a minute……
http://davidkron.blogspot.com/
david
Great article!
Wow, from the wiki it sounds like he was kind of a huge douche to his brother, Gallagher Two, who was the poor man’s Gallagher, playing small venues that couldn’t afford the regular Gallagher. I suppose he wouldn’t really be needed now, though, as Gallagher is playing small venues.
Oh. Oh God. Oh my dear sweet non-existent Lord. This… this article made me want to die inside to find out that somehow this counts as comedy somewhere in the world, that some bitter, balding old creeper can go up onstage and slur the whole world and get paid. Granted, it’s redneck money, but still. That’s no way to live.
I kinda wonder if this isn’t mental illness masquerading as politics. Seriously. There was a prof once at my college who went off the deep end and (totally out of character) started popping really offensive racist shit into his lectures. Turns out he wasn’t just a right-wing asshole, he was a schizophrenic — though people didn’t realize it till he disappeared and was found weeks later wandering the streets.
I actually really liked him as a kid, and as many hear have noted, he seemed more like a vaguely lefty counter-cultural type back then. The smashing stuff was brilliant at first and then quickly got old, but he had this pair of… not sure what to call them, one skate and one shoe with giant springs on it, so he’d BOING and glide, BOING and glide… pure genius. I’ve wanted some my whole life.
Don’t know if you know it or not, but there are/were two Gallaghers, Leo, the original, and his brother Ron. Not sure which one you saw, but I suspect it was Leo.
teh gallagehr is teh ghey buttdust lol
The sad thing? Like you, I remember him from the 80s. No politics. Just weird-assed one-liners and the “sledge-o-matic.” He was funny at the time.
Now? He’s just gotten pathetic. It’s sad, really. and, worse still, he gives (well, he and several others) legitimate conservatives a bad name.
His Grand crap smashing Finale should be impersonating a Taliban suicide bomber
I’m a Republican and I would feel the same way the author did. Gallagher sucks. Racism and hack comedy are not based on party.
“You see, Gallagher is—how best to put this?—a paranoid, delusional, right-wing religious maniac.”
Replace “Right” with “Left” and add “smoker” after the word “religious” and you’ve pretty much described the unfunny Angry Idiot stylings of your beloved Bill Hicks.
I was aware of Gallagher and his shtick with the sledgehammer without ever seeing more than a few minutes of his act in passing while switching channels. When he played recently in a local rural upstate NY college venue (SUNY Delhi) I said to myself it’s a cheap ticket, I’ve got nothing to do that night, let me finally check out the watermelon man and see first hand what he’s like. I didn’t expect much.
Gallagher is like an old whore, going through the motions, with not much enthusiasm or freshness, but using the professional skills he has accumulated over the years to deliver an adequately crowd pleasing performance.
The first 15 minutes of his show consisted of him feeling out the audience with some town/gown stuff, some rural farmer/pickup truck material, and some right wing pleasing gay/political/God stuff.
None of what Gallagher says is terribly original or terribly funny. He seems to have absorbed and reworked things that others have done better and adapted them to a kind of comedy hash which is generally mildly amusing, but never particularly outstanding. I think he knows he’s a has-been and his bitterness shows through.
He does a meet and greet before the show and is a somewhat sad looking figure with a slight potbelly, sagging shoulders, scraggly hair, and a weary demeanor.
While not impressed by his humor I was impressed by his professional skill. He read his audience well, strung together routines tailored to that particular crowd, paced his performance, and built to a big debris filled food smashing finale.
I don’t like his politics, and am unamused by his material. Some of it is pandering and distasteful. I did find myself looking back on his show and appreciating the experience and skill with which he constructed and tailored a show, on the fly, uniquely suited to that audience.
Gallagher is a strange contradiction, a skilled comedian who is not very funny.
OK, the hot dog in his pants, that was funny.
Al who are biased or prejudiced against Gallagher enough to type shit about him are deluded liars. And you, Lindy, are one of them.
If you people hate Gallagher so much, leave him the hell alone and get on with your damn lives. You’re just wasting your times when you crap on him.
I’ve always hated his act, as I do the acts of virtually all prop comics (the Amazing Jonathan has one or two bits that make me smile, but that’s it). Now he’s given me even more reason. I know this performance was in a Crewcutville, but I can’t believe that even one or two people didn’t walk out. I know I would have. The first few “jokes” repeated in this article made my stomach turn. What an absolute pig.
http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-26344…