Much like Dick Cheney, the comedian Gallagher is an asshole with a bad heart. (Correction: Cheney was an asshole with a bad heart. He just had a heart transplant. Congratulations, you asshole!) No one should waste a moment of life writing a great article about a bigoted prop comic with a vicious streak, but that’s what Alex Pappademas did for Grantland. An excerpt from Gallagher Retires, Sort Of:

“He got bitterer as time went on. As with [George] Carlin, there was always some trigger-hippie rage boiling in Gallagher’s eyes; unlike Carlin, Gallagher never got a Mark Twain Prize, wrote bestsellers, or saved the universe using a time-traveling phone booth. Former standup comedians who went on to become huge stars despite not being good at standup comedy, according to a 2005 interview with Gallagher: David Letterman, Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Chevy Chase, Michael Keaton (‘a terrible comedian’), Jim Carrey (’embarrassing.’)

‘It amazes me,’ he fumed, ‘that these comedians have serious acting careers.’

In his later years, when he wasn’t smashing fruit onstage, he was spraying bile—railing against gays, transsexuals, Mexicans, opponents of torture, people with tattoos, and the French, and spewing Arab jokes your most right-wing relative might have thought twice about mass-emailing even on the morning of 9/12/01. Most written accounts suggest that your average 21st-century Gallagher show played not unlike the way Wikipedia describes his 1992 laserdisc-based live-action shooting game, Gallagher’s Gallery: ‘Generally, the items that Gallagher deems broken or unnecessary, or those he simply dislikes, must be targeted.’ Reviewing a 2010 Gallagher performance in Bremerton, Washington for the Stranger, Lindy West described him spitting out the word Obama ‘like a mouthful of burning hair’ before impugning both Obama’s blackness and his loyalty to this country.”

••••••••••

Gallagher’s Gallery video game: