My Introduction To The Comedy Stylings of Mr. Leo Gallagher

I guess I was about 14 the first time I saw Gallagher. My mom and I were visiting my brother in Colorado. The three of us and his girlfriend were sitting around the living room in their old, rundown, single-wide trailer when Gallagher’s “We Need A Hero” special came on HBO after whatever movie had previously been playing. The general consensus from the 3 adults in the room was something along the lines of, “😒 Oh, it’s Gallagher,” the way you might speak under your breath at the sight of an old, forgotten acquaintance who was always sort of creepy or annoying. I thought he was funny right away. That seemed to surprise everyone else which made me feel like I was simultaneously missing a joke and the butt of one.

I grew up listening to Bill Cosby – I had a collection of his tapes – and I was familiar with George Carlin but I don’t think I had ever seen a comedian perform. I had only ever heard them on tapes and records.

In fact, when I would listen to my Bill Cosby tapes I would always wonder about the context of the performance. There was clearly an audience and he was obviously doing visual gags that the audience was responding to but where was it all happening? Was he just alone on an empty stage? I always pictured him sitting in a big, comfortable chair holding court with his audience. Then I saw a picture of a stool in the liner notes. I began to imagine him telling jokes while seated on the stool. My perspective was widening. It was such a foreign concept to me that someone would literally stand on a stage in a theater and just monologue to a group of people. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw Gallagher’s act for the first time.

He was such an odd man both in appearance and behavior. Throughout the 80s he looked like someone drew David Crosby from memory but in 1992 he shaved his head but not his mustache. A bold move considering that by that time the mustache was synonymous in many people’s, minds with serial killers, pedophiles, and other creepy, infamous, and otherwise undesirable deviants.

Watermelon Man

Fortunately, for the public at large, his only victims were the watermelons that he pulverized with a giant wooden mallet at the end of every show, and the unwitting or possibly masochistic audience members he splattered with watermelon goo like some sort of alt-life bukake fetish. It was the sort of buffoonery that could only have come to be in the 1970s or 80s. You could never develop an act like that today. You would be banned from every club and theater in the country not just for the expense of cleaning up the mess but for the lawsuits that would inevitably follow. 

I wonder, though, if his tomfoolery didn’t overshadow his perspicacious observational comedy, as anyone only ever talks about the watermelons. Perhaps he was just a shit comedian that only a teenage boy would find funny. Whatever the case, some of his jokes are still as fresh in my memory as they were the first time I heard them.

Jokes from his “We Need A Hero” special like how disappointing it is to see a million-dollar football star running down the field with a referee running backward alongside him with his hands in the air while blowing on a whistle. Or like how to the rest of the world America is a bunch of lazy-ass drunks that can’t keep their shit together because Budweiser, Lazy-boy, and some medicine that keeps you from getting the runs sponsored the Olympics.

To this day I still tell anyone who offers me soup that soup isn’t food, it’s what’s left over in the dishwasher after a good meal. Then there’s the image of Madonna hanging around a truck stop, blowing on a tire gauge, and wearing a Dr. Scholl’s footpad as a panty liner. Certainly a cancel-worthy joke by today’s standards, but nobody could argue that it doesn’t paint a picture. And whenever I hear Michael Jackson singing The Way You Make Me Feel I always think, who, the monkey?

I even mastered his bit on the inconsistencies and peculiarities of the English language. I performed it for my English teacher one day during sophomore year and she called on me to perform it for the class a few weeks later. She thought it was my original bit. I hadn’t tried to pass it off as my own but I also didn’t correct her when I got the sense that she thought that I had come up with it.

As I stood there before the whole class I tried to convince myself that if my teacher had never heard this bit before then surely none of the kids in my class had either. (I was kind of a dumb, naive kid.) I felt like a fraud when I finished and a girl in the class said, “Hey, isn’t that a Gallagher bit.” So acute was my embarrassment it’s a wonder I was ever able to speak in public again.

The Party of The Century

Gallagher would largely fade from my radar until he reentered my life in December 1999. This time, though, it wasn’t through some corny premium cable special, but in person. It was Y2K and everyone was out of their minds. We thought the world was going to end and we were dealing with our excitement and confusion in myriad ways. Some folks were stockpiling weapons, others collected antique tools to survive when the grid failed. Most people, however, were just throwing parties. Gallagher’s daughter, Aimee, belonged to the later group.

She was throwing a New Year’s Eve party in a vacant rental property that her father owned. Now, the rumor was, Gallagher had evicted his tenants just before Christmas with the sole purpose of throwing this party. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it’s more likely that they just conveniently moved out at that time but who knows? All I know is that they booked me as the DJ for the big Y2K event. 

Never Meet Your Heros

I showed up around 6 pm. I was slightly taken aback when I saw the state of the house. It was totally vacant. There was no furniture anywhere. They weren’t messing around. This was going to be the party of the century. Or at the very least the last party of the century. They staged me in a tiny loft overlooking the empty living room that would soon become the dance floor. While I was in the middle of setting up Gallagher came up to the loft. He was wearing his standard newsboy hat and a sport coat. Under his coat, he was wearing a t-shirt with his face on it. He stood there before me holding his coat open while making the same face depicted on his shirt.

Then he handed me a C.D. and said, “Play my hit.” It was a comedy song, as one might imagine, but I can’t remember now what it was about. I put it on and thought, wow, this guy’s kind of a pain in the ass. When the song was finished playing he came back up to the loft and took his C.D. back. I was surprised. I thought he’d let me keep the C.D. because it seemed like he was trying to promote it. It was reminiscent of so many movies where a businessman asks for their card back because they only have one. I did end up with a free C.D. that night, though. Someone gave me MTV Party 2 Go 1998 so I could play a song that I didn’t have. C.D.s were expensive so I took any chance I had to add to my collection for free.

Gallagher Fades Into The Night

Midnight came and went and as far as anyone could tell civilization had not collapsed. After the party, one very drunk girl admonished me because I “didn’t even mess with the EQ”. As the worst complaint of the evening I can say the party was a success. Her boyfriend dragged her back downstairs and I finished tearing down. Then I loaded up the truck and drove off into the year 2000 and a brand new century. 

Gallagher was almost entirely off my radar for the next 2 decades until I heard about his death this morning. Over the years I would occasionally see his name in the news. Usually, it was regarding a lawsuit or one of his many heart attacks. I never saw him again in person or on t.v., though, and I’m happy about that. I’m glad my final memory of Gallagher was more interesting, strange, and amusing than any joke he could have told or any fruit he could have smashed.

After I played his “hit” that night on New Year’s Eve I expected to see him milling around the party supervising things, and making sure the kids didn’t get out of control, but I didn’t. He seemingly disappeared. Then, later in the evening, I was walking out to my truck to get a cable, when he suddenly emerged from the bushes planted along the front of the house. Our eyes met as he passed in front of me but he didn’t say a word. He just disappeared around the side of the house, into the dark night, and I never saw him again. It was exactly the sort of unexpected thing you would expect an eccentric, mustached, watermelon-smashing man to do; leave them going, hmm? 🤔