Gallagher, the Watermelon-Smashing Comedian Whose Act Turned Bigoted, Dead at 76
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Gallagher, the mustachioed prop comedian who rose to prominence with smashed watermelons and garnered controversy later in life for racist and homophobic jokes, has died. He was 76.
Craig Marquardo, the comedian’s former manager, confirmed his death in an email to Rolling Stone. Gallagher had reportedly been living in hospice for several years after suffering a string of heart attacks. He “succumbed to his ailments and passed away surrounded by family in Palm Springs, California,” Marquardo said.
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“He was the #1 comedian in America for 15 years, with some of that due to the popularity of his stand-up specials airing on MTV in its early days, bringing him an entirely new audience,” Marquardo said, adding, “Gallagher was known for his edgy style, brilliant wordplay, and inventive props.”
Gallagher (born Leo Anthony Gallagher, Jr.) was largely raised in Florida and started pursuing comedy in the late Sixties after graduating from college. “I was watching comics, and I felt like I could do it better,” Gallagher told Marc Maron in an infamous 2011 interview (more on that later). “So I just stated, and I did it.”
Gallagher’s first major job was actually opening for Kenny Rogers, though he also appeared regularly at stand-up hotspots like the Comedy Store. Like so many comedians of that era, he started to garner national attention after being booked on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, though that wasn’t an easy gig for him to grab. Gallagher told Maron it took so long for him to get booked because Carson “didn’t like prop comics — but he’s a magician, figure that out!”
Gallagher scored his first comedy special, An Uncensored Evening, in 1980, kicking off a massive decade that turned him into one of the most famous comedians in the country. The defining part of his act was his frequent closing bit, the “Sledge-O-Matic” — a comically oversized mallet that Gallagher “marketed” as the ultimate food preparation tool. In demonstrating the product, Gallagher produced a series of increasingly larger fruits and vegetables — almost always culminating with a watermelon — and bashed them with the hammer, typically spraying the front row with chunks.
“It was a satire [of consumer culture],” Gallagher told Maron, though he said he often struggled to get his audience to see the bit in that light. “They just wanted the smashing, they didn’t care about my insightful satire about buying meaningless things.”
Though Gallagher’s popularity began to wane in the Nineties, thanks to his numerous stand-up specials, he’d successfully embedded himself in the pop culture consciousness. He earned a place on Comedy Central’s 2004 list of the 100 greatest stand-ups of all time (at number 100, but still). Even Dave Chappelle was spoofing Gallagher on Chappelle’s Show.
Gallagher himself was still performing regularly, though, at this time, his act began to take a hard right turn. In 2010, the Seattle-based alt-weekly The Stranger published a review of a Gallagher show, describing the comedian as a “paranoid, delusional, right-wing religion maniac.” The piece documented a set filled with xenophobic and racist jokes (including several directed at then-president Barack Obama), as well as a plethora of homophobic bits. At one point, Gallagher even reportedly encroached on serious white supremacy territory, proclaiming, “We’re descended from an Anglo-Saxon Viking tradition.”
It was jokes like these that Maron pushed Gallagher on during their interview a year later. Gallagher, in turn, defended his act, insisting his jokes were neither racist nor homophobic and rebuffed Maron’s assertion that he was attacking gay people. “It’s one area of our society is sensitive and can’t take a joke,” Gallagher claimed. “And what am I making jokes about? I’m making jokes about people who don’t complain.”
Maron continued to press Gallagher on these jokes, which Gallagher at one point claimed he didn’t even write (though he didn’t have much of an explanation when Maron asked him why he would even tell them in the first place). Ultimately, the conversation became so fraught that Gallagher stormed out of the interview.
Despite the controversy surrounding him — and suffering two heart attacks in 2012 — Gallagher kept performing and even earned a spot in a Geico campaign ad that (of course) brought back the Sledge-O-Matic. In 2013, he made his first movie appearance in The Book of Daniel. His last televised stand-up set was 2014’s Gotham Comedy Live.
Despite mounting health problems, he continued to tour and regularly perform, as Marquardo’s statement notes: “He was pretty sure he held a record for the most stand-up dates, by attrition alone. He toured steadily until the Covid-19 pandemic, after which he spent his time between visiting his son, Barnaby, and his daughter Aimee, who had appeared with him on his specials when she was little.”
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