My Canon: Gallagher's Website
I keep saying I'm done and then I keep remembering things I need to write about.
When Gallagher died in 2022, the world lost a vital lode of joy: Gallagher's website. Luckily, Gallagher's daughter Aimee started paying the hosting fees after a few months and the site went back up, exactly as it had been, now with a note that this was a tribute to one Leo Anthony Gallagher, Jr.
The website maintains current booking information for Gallagher.
Gallagher fascinated me. His life was so interesting and he spoke about it so rarely that the little details I got became little worlds. Por ejemplo, here's his little box on Wikipedia:
There's no divorce date on that first spouse. I don't think Gallagher was practicing bigamy, but when did he get divorced? And what is it like to be Gallagher's child?
From the "Talk" section of Wikipedia, where editors discuss their pages:
The connection here– Gallagher was possibly going to star in a Roger Corman-produced TMNT film before the brand was worth millions– has nothing to do with ownership, but there are people walking around thinking Gallagher invented the Ninja Turtles. Everything about the man is weird. I would read a Gallagher biography in a second. A documentary has been playing festivals for a bit now and I can't wait to see it. His comedy isn't for me but he was hugely famous for a brief period of time and managed to build up lore like no one else.
The most famous Gallagher weirdness is probably Gallagher Too. I'm not going to argue that anything I discuss here is more interesting than Gallagher Too. Leo Gallagher's brother, Ron Gallagher, was a burnout who went to his older bro with a plan: What if Ron toured the country in smaller markets Leo wasn't playing, performing the same act for crowds who could perhaps not afford the main Gallagher?
This is, I think, unique in entertainment. Gene Simmons is always trying to make a buck and even he doesn't own a Kiss cover band. But Gallagher's own tribute act toured the country for years, until Gallagher Prime felt Gallagher Too wasn't making it clear that he wasn't the real thing. Leo sued Ron and won, but lost contact with his family after the lawsuit, as they sided with Ron. "What," they seemed to ask, "you too Hollywood to let Ronnie smash fruit?" Do you know how badly I want to interview Ron Gallagher? Do you know how deeply interested in his life I am?
I don't think Gallagher really wanted to do comedy toward the end of his life. He had a bad heart and had collapsed on stage multiple times. Had Gallagher been more financially secure, I'm sure he'd have been happy to cede the name and mallet to Ron. He wanted to be an entrepreneur.
It's been taken down, but there used to be a video on YouTube of Gallagher describing his idea for a hotel your entire extended family could rent out. The gist was that a hotel would offer a cluster of rooms for a reunion. I believe many hotels offer group rates. This was not a novel idea. But he talked about it on stage, with no jokes, for ten minutes, in the hope, I have to believe, some rich person in the audience would wait outside his dressing room after the show and offer to fund this exciting new venture ("Hotels, you called them?").
Gallagher's website preserves other ideas. Gallagher wanted to make a slot machine with little cartoon birds:
If that isn't detailed enough for you, he posted the entire nine-page patent:
Gallagher's website has an entire Poetry section, including "A Duck Poem (for Michelle Obama)":
The full poem is 1,012 words long. The connection to Michelle Obama is unclear.
There's also this:
and this:
There's a 1,563 word rant about football (what follows is but an excerpt):
and an incoherent political rant that runs over 1,600 words:
One of the entries in Poems is a Bucket List, written in a manor you could only really decode if you were Gallagher or are as diseased as I am. Here are the intro and first few entries:
Even putting aside the idea that Gallagher believes he has been resurrected, this is all incredible. There are those family reunion buildings I was talking about. He wanted to pitch them to Brad Pitt. If he met George Clooney, he wouldn't talk about the hotels, though. He'd talk about movie pitches for Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé.
It's almost syphilitic. It's like the last words of Dutch Schultz. He has ideas and he has the people he wants to tell those ideas to and good luck figuring out why, say, Tom Hanks couldn't hear about the New York-set Beyoncé film. That one's for Clooney.
The family reunion buildings come up a lot:
He wanted to pitch Jeff Bezos on online slots, so he could finally wrest control of the internet from AOL and Yahoo:
He wanted to pitch Disney and Universal on "everything":
Noted homophobe Gallagher (he defended his anti-gay jokes to Marc Maron by saying they were "street jokes" he didn't write himself) wanted to make bisexual dancewear:
He wanted to make high heel shoes for children and here are the family reunion buildings again:
Here's that Jennifer Lopez movie pitch:
Here's Wishing Eggs, incidentally the only part of this poem that works as a poem:
Do you get my obsession? Do you see that this is a man whose mind we should have dug further into? Why didn't I email him when he was alive? Why is there a phone number up now that he's dead?
This was the old internet, which is to say it was a loosely categorized auxiliary brain for a singular individual. This is where his memories went. This is where he wrote endless poems about being a penguin. This is where he posted the same picture of himself standing near a large couch again and again.
By all accounts, Gallagher was an asshole. He was mean, racist, sexist, everything. I listened to enough interviews with him that I know he thought Letterman was a lousy comic and Leno was even worse and neither should have hosted a talk show. "It should have been me" was the subtext of everything he said, and he said a lot, even if it never got too personal. There's a YouTube video where a stunned teen, fresh from a Gallagher audience, tells the camera the comedian kept making comments about a young girl's breasts. There's a YouTube video where Gallagher bitterly tears into his opening act on stage, during the opener's time, for putting his water bottle on a stool. I do not want to have spent time with Gallagher. But I am happy to know what was going on in there.
