…always bothered me. Okay, something very particular. Gallagher was “funny” in a dopey, good-natured, “egoistic drunk guy having fun at a rowdy party” way, but he lacked a hip aesthetic. He lacked thought. He wasn’t an iconoclast. There wasn’t so much as a tiny salt sprinkle of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor or Louis CK or Bill Burr in the man.
He didn’t seem to have any opinions about anything. I never had a clue if he was a rightwinger or a leftie or what. He just seemed to like goofing around and making people giggle and chortle and spit-take and whatnot, but why was it that I loved it when David Letterman threw watermelons off the top of four-story buildings but I didn’t crack a smile when Gallagher smashed them with a sledge-o-matic?
I didn’t like his face, to be honest. I didn’t like his long stringy ’70s hair and his bullshit golf cap and the threads he wore, and I literally hit the roof back in the ’80s when I noticed that Gallagher was wearing mandals. The first rule of comedy is that stand-up comics can’t wear mandals. He even performed barefoot at times…God.
Gallagher has passed at age 76. Respect and condolences.