In Passing - 11/11/2022

I got a passing text that told me Gallagher died. Normally, I'd have some odd sense of nostalgia or complicated sadness about how something that was part of my life was now passed, demonstrating my age, etc. But that wasn't really the case with this guy, no offense. I sat with that for a second and tried to figure out why the odd feeling was not having one, and the best I can reason is this...

I saw Gallagher at the Roanoke Civic Center, probably in 1991 or 1992. He was performing in the Performing Arts Center, which felt odd to me given both the nature of his watermelon smashing show and just in general seeing him on television; that center was reserved for my sister's dance recitals, not famous people. This seemed like a noteworthy event for sure, me and my family were going as well as several of my friends and their families too. It was that kind of show and looking back on it that's also probably why there's no real pang there.

Gallagher was on heavy rotation on Comedy Central when it first showed up. I feel like he had a dozen specials which were part of their early attempts to just fill air time, most of which were from the early and mid 80s. His comedy was dumb / smart, the perfect kind when you're starting to think more abstractly as a kid, getting reflective about things like Calvin & Hobbes, and in general staring at the edge of puberty. In a lot of ways, generationally and metaphorically, he was a lot like the Doors for me (see extremely long winded link and emo article I did called Into the Night); a safe counter culture, leftover from freakniks and hippies. And that's how his comedy specials hit for me, genuine surprise at the spectacle, the hilarity of his absurdity, which worked in such a way that it kept kids like me focused and thinking about standup comedy in a way that probably would have lost our attention otherwise.

He did his act, I remember being a little jealous of the people in the front rows who had been given clear plastic drop cloths to cover themselves but also glad I wasn't that close either. I remember the stage feeling very empty, spray painted black plywood floors and an equally nondescript black curtain which lined the stage and seemed to be miles behind where Gallagher was. In some since, I suppose all he needed were here props, wooden hammer, and that weird smashing / cutting block; but I had this expectation because of the specials I had seen, so I supposed it would have been something more. Similarly, he was much older now and I don't know if this is hindsight or not but he appeared to just be going through the motions, which felt melancholy (no pun intended) even as a kid. To his credit, disenfranchised or otherwise, it doesn't take too much to recapture an audience or a kid's attention when you're destroying things on stage to the shock and delight of even an audience who was expecting it. The show ended, I conversed and compared notes about it with some of my friends. As he began to fade away from Comedy Central, and I found myself gravitating more to things like Kids in the Hall and the Young Ones, I don't know if I ever really thought of Gallagher again.

He was kind of like an imaginary friend, gateway comedy, that you both appreciate but also were a little embarrassed by as you got to be a "cool teen". He wasn't super cerebral and that was fine, but I always felt like there was something dark about him after that time at the civic center. Later in life I would hear about him leasing the show to his brother, getting all right wing, and a hundred other rumors of unpleasantness and it all seemed to make sense. I think it's hard to have a gimmick that haunts you. He was the product of a weird imaginary time, free-love hangovers and self imposed / ashamed ethos from an era that was theoretically directly in conflict with money and fame, especially when those things then dry up. In the end, I'm leaving Gallagher on that shelf of quandaries with Jim Morrison, that narcissist that founded Woodstock, and at their best Shell Silverstein; lost boys who were conflicted and important and forgotten, victims of their own success, comedic foils to their comedy.

But in the true spirit and remembrance of Gallagher, just as this is getting a little too analytical and dark, a story going on for too long, how great would it be if after the funeral, they smashed his coffin with a giant wooden mallet?