Re: The Mike O'Meara Show
Posted by:
pekza hanging off Mikes nutsack
()
Date: February 28, 2018 07:14AM
Gallagher Smash Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One from the Gallagharchives that I think you'll
> like. Evidently, a while back Gallagher was a
> guest on Mark Maron's WTF podcast - and things got
> a little intense. Sit back and enjoy!
>
>
> $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
>
> In the history of pop culture, few have been given
> as much, and appreciated it as little, as the sad,
> troll-like creature professionally known as
> Gallagher. By seemingly every standard other than
> his own, Gallagher has been obscenely,
> undeservedly, surreally lucky. Against impossible
> odds and the better judgment of the American
> public, Gallagher has managed to ride a silly,
> scatological gimmick involving taking a
> sledgehammer to watermelons into decades of fame,
> fortune and television infamy.
>
> Gallagher has made millions of dollars, starred in
> special after special (14 one-hour pay cable
> specials, as he will be the first to mention) and
> has enjoyed a sex life far more active than a man
> of his non-existent charm and disturbing looks
> merits. Yet in Gallagher’s warped imagination,
> he has been fucked over as completely and
> inexcusably as any bluesman or hard-working Motown
> session musician.
>
> Oh sure, Gallagher has made millions and was on
> television regularly for decades, but in his mind
> he deserved tens of millions of dollars and his
> own late night television show. Gallagher’s
> monstrous and deluded ego won’t accept anything
> less than a David Letterman or Jay Leno level of
> fame, success, and money as his rightful due. I
> mean, he did smash all those fucking watermelons,
> right? What do you think he did that for, his
> fucking health? No, he did it so your moron son
> will fork over his cash for a t-shirt and a CD and
> your dumb slut of a daughter would give him a hand
> job after the show, as is his due (I don’t think
> your son’s a moron and your sister’s a slut,
> but Gallagher sure does, and he isn’t too keen
> on you, either).
>
> Gallagher truly hates his audience. Over the
> course of writing a book about Insane Clown Posse
> I attended four of their notorious yearly
> festivals of arts and culture and the only time I
> ever felt unsafe was during Gallagher’s racist,
> sexist, and homophobic performance, where he
> sprayed contempt on the audience along with
> watermelon fragments and bursts of rotten
> mustard.
>
> Gallagher hates his audience, he hates a world
> that has given him so much, and that in turn he
> has given so little, but perhaps more than
> anything he hates himself, so he tries to cover up
> that understandable, eminently justified
> self-loathing by professing to be better than
> everyone and everything he comes across.
>
> So when Gallagher’s people contacted Marc
> Maron’s people about Gallagher appearing on WTF
> it seemed likely that these two combustible, very
> different characters would clash. And clash they
> did, to the point where Gallagher stormed out of
> the interview, and Maron’s hotel room, after
> just a half hour.
>
> Maron begins the episode by pointing out that it
> was not his idea to book Gallagher, but that
> he’d heard reports in The A.V. Club and The
> Stranger about the homophobic, racist nature of
> Gallagher’s contemporary material. I suspect
> part of the reason Gallagher was so indignant was
> because he realized that Maron did not respect him
> enough to treat him as anything other than a mild
> annoyance, a dumb silly joke of a man from the
> 1980s who had somehow reinvented himself from a
> harmless dumb joke to a harmful, spiteful, and
> hateful mean joke.
>
> Maron didn’t have Gallagher on because he was an
> important figure with provocative ideas, as
> Gallagher undoubtedly sees himself, but because
> some folks were curious about just how awful this
> sad, silly little man had become so why the hell
> not spend an hour of his life talking to him?
> “Why the hell not?” seems the operating idea
> behind having Gallagher on WTF and it doesn’t
> take long for an answer to arrive.
>
> Introducing the episode, Maron reflects of his
> guest, “Obviously, I’ve only heard negative
> things about him recently. I know who he is. I
> know what he does. I do not have any particular
> problem with him.” Maron concedes that he did
> not handle Gallagher as well as he would have
> liked to, that he did not do a whole lot of
> research but instead was going off the current
> conception of Gallagher as a right-wing hate
> monger, which, it should be noted, was not overly
> flattering but also wasn’t exactly untrue.
>
> Gallagher’s storming out seems to have made
> Maron philosophical rather than angry, causing him
> to reflect on the nature of desperation and how
> it’s possible to feel cheated professionally no
> matter how successful you are, and at various
> points Gallagher was about as successful as a
> comedian got. He’s just doomed to be a Dane Cook
> rather than a Louis CK.
>
> Maron mentions more than once that there’s a
> good chance that listeners loved Gallagher as
> children and he wants to honor the intense
> emotional connection people once felt with
> Gallagher even as he reveals the awful man
> Gallagher has become. In that respect, Gallagher
> comes off a little like Bill Cosby in that it is
> difficult to reconcile the lovable clown children
> adored and thought was one of them with the awful,
> hateful, grotesquely entitled and bitter men they
> eventually became.
>
> Not long after the abbreviated interview began,
> Gallagher says that the kids today don’t know
> who he is. He says it with weary resignation
> rather than anger but it’s clear that Gallagher
> will not forgive the kids today for not knowing
> who he is or approaching him with the appropriate
> reverence.
>
> It doesn’t take long for the bitter has-been to
> get indignant. When Maron assures Gallagher he’s
> still a well-known comic, Gallagher retorts,
> “Why don’t I have my own TV show then, if
> I’m a well known comic?” in a way that
> suggests he angrily screams that question into the
> mirror every morning, then weeps uncontrollably
> when no comforting answer is forthcoming.
>
> For a brief moment, however, when Gallagher is
> breathlessly reciting Comedy Store lore from the
> 1970s and talking shit about contemporaries like
> Tom Dreesen it seems like this might be an
> enjoyably bitter, gossipy exploration of one
> man’s vitriolic delusions instead of a
> super-tense one.
>
> Gallagher rages against the ghost of Johnny Carson
> for the unforgivable crime of not liking prop
> comics (despite Carson being a magician!,
> Gallagher notes) and details his unlikely ascent
> in show-business as the opening act for Kenny
> Rogers, who did not care for Gallagher’s Iranian
> Hostage Crisis-themed dick jokes, especially since
> his mother was in the audience. It’s an early
> indication that Gallagher’s xenophobia/racism
> are not of a recent vintage.
>
> As long as Gallagher is in the world of old school
> comedy gossip, things are relatively civil.
> Gallagher derides Jay Leno as having an act that
> was “very forgettable” as a prelude for a very
> paranoid conspiracy theory that Gallagher was owed
> his own talk show but Gallagher had to leave town
> regularly to make a fortune performing before
> adoring audiences, so Leno and Letterman sneakily
> exploited his absence to steal the hit talk shows
> that rightly belonged to Gallagher by virtue of
> his incredible popularity and talent.
>
> “I wanted to make big money,” Gallagher
> insists, and brays that he did, but he did so
> under the most difficult, impossible of
> circumstances: selling live tickets in a down
> economy. Gallagher then recounts how he tried to
> sell the Veg-o-Matic routine that made him famous
> to George Carlin and Albert Brooks but they
> inexplicably turned him down. As a thought
> experiment, try to imagine an alternate universe
> where Carlin is famous for smashing watermelons
> and instead of being the brainiest, most comic’s
> comic in existence, Albert Brooks was beloved in
> Branson for his habit of smashing watermelons with
> a hammer.
>
> Gallagher tells stories that sound too good to be
> true, from how he travels the country teaching
> people about physics (he was a chemist by trade
> before he became a comedian) to owning the rights
> to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before they
> became the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
>
> About thirty three minutes in, however, things
> take a turn when Maron brings up the widespread
> conception that Gallagher’s act is racist and
> homophobic, in addition to being terrible (in this
> case, being terrible and hacky is somehow the
> least of Gallagher’s transgressions). Gallagher
> does not like that assertion at all. Gallagher
> perversely insists that he’s never written a
> homophobic joke because he tells jokes other
> people wrote, as if that is somehow an acceptable
> explanation, or something that will carry weight
> with a comic’s comic like Maron.
>
> Gallagher presents, “What does Seigfried have in
> common with the tiger? They both know what Roy
> tastes like” as the kind of gay joke too
> exquisite and delicious not to recycle even if he
> didn’t write it, and Maron somehow does not seem
> amused at all. “Can I pick on Arabs?”
> Gallagher then asks of what he sees as Maron’s
> hyper-sensitivity (which everyone else would see
> merely as “sensitivity”), before clarifying
> that Arabs are the enemy, as evidenced by the fact
> that Gallagher has to wait in security for hours,
> which probably completely fucks with the way he
> transports cocaine in his luggage during domestic
> flights.
>
> Digging himself even deeper into a hole of his own
> devising, Gallagher refers to homosexuals as
> “God’s joke.” Gallagher posits himself as a
> fearless truth teller opposed by the glowering,
> humorless forces of political correctness but his
> “I’m a comic!”, “It’s a nightclub!”
> and “It’s comedy! Take a joke!” do nothing
> to negate his misanthropic awfulness.
>
> Gallagher hauls out Lisa Lampinelli as someone who
> does more offensive racial humor than he does and
> gets a pass and when Maron points out that a lot
> of her jokes are about fucking black guys,
> Gallagher suggests that he’s not entirely
> convinced that she’s not merely pretending to
> have sex with black men for the sake of jokes.
>
> The tone grows progressively more tense and
> charged and the volume increases accordingly as
> Gallagher launches a progressively more
> nonsensical defense of gay jokes and insensitivity
> and not giving a fucking about what your audience
> thinks of your material. Though Maron criticizes
> himself for being too aggressive, his anger comes
> off as righteous and merited rather than
> self-righteous or shrill, as when Gallagher, who
> is damn near shouting at that point, insists,
> “I’m not angry” (in a very angry tone of
> voice), and he answers, “You’re a guy who
> smashes things.”
>
> Gallagher seems willing to defend to the grave his
> right, nay, his responsibility, to retain five
> lesbian jokes he heard from cab drivers in his
> act. Otherwise, the terrorists have won. Or
> something. Then Gallagher, shortly after asserting
> that all comedians want to work state fairs (take
> that, Mitch Hedberg!) storms the fuck out.
>
> “Oh c’mon, Gallagher!” Maron implores after
> Gallagher stomps off in a pique. The interview is
> only half finished, but it only took a half hour
> of gentle and then not-so-gentle questioning for
> Maron to get Gallagher to truly reveal himself in
> all his ugly awfulness.
>
> Gallagher’s sad decline is a rinky-dink echo of
> Bill Cosby’s fall from the grace. But the scale
> is different. What Cosby did is a goddamned
> American tragedy whereas what Gallagher did to
> himself, his career, and his image is merely
> unfortunate.
Gallagher Smash Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One from the Gallagharchives that I think you'll
> like. Evidently, a while back Gallagher was a
> guest on Mark Maron's WTF podcast - and things got
> a little intense. Sit back and enjoy!
>
>
> $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
>
> In the history of pop culture, few have been given
> as much, and appreciated it as little, as the sad,
> troll-like creature professionally known as
> Gallagher. By seemingly every standard other than
> his own, Gallagher has been obscenely,
> undeservedly, surreally lucky. Against impossible
> odds and the better judgment of the American
> public, Gallagher has managed to ride a silly,
> scatological gimmick involving taking a
> sledgehammer to watermelons into decades of fame,
> fortune and television infamy.
>
> Gallagher has made millions of dollars, starred in
> special after special (14 one-hour pay cable
> specials, as he will be the first to mention) and
> has enjoyed a sex life far more active than a man
> of his non-existent charm and disturbing looks
> merits. Yet in Gallagher’s warped imagination,
> he has been fucked over as completely and
> inexcusably as any bluesman or hard-working Motown
> session musician.
>
> Oh sure, Gallagher has made millions and was on
> television regularly for decades, but in his mind
> he deserved tens of millions of dollars and his
> own late night television show. Gallagher’s
> monstrous and deluded ego won’t accept anything
> less than a David Letterman or Jay Leno level of
> fame, success, and money as his rightful due. I
> mean, he did smash all those fucking watermelons,
> right? What do you think he did that for, his
> fucking health? No, he did it so your moron son
> will fork over his cash for a t-shirt and a CD and
> your dumb slut of a daughter would give him a hand
> job after the show, as is his due (I don’t think
> your son’s a moron and your sister’s a slut,
> but Gallagher sure does, and he isn’t too keen
> on you, either).
>
> Gallagher truly hates his audience. Over the
> course of writing a book about Insane Clown Posse
> I attended four of their notorious yearly
> festivals of arts and culture and the only time I
> ever felt unsafe was during Gallagher’s racist,
> sexist, and homophobic performance, where he
> sprayed contempt on the audience along with
> watermelon fragments and bursts of rotten
> mustard.
>
> Gallagher hates his audience, he hates a world
> that has given him so much, and that in turn he
> has given so little, but perhaps more than
> anything he hates himself, so he tries to cover up
> that understandable, eminently justified
> self-loathing by professing to be better than
> everyone and everything he comes across.
>
> So when Gallagher’s people contacted Marc
> Maron’s people about Gallagher appearing on WTF
> it seemed likely that these two combustible, very
> different characters would clash. And clash they
> did, to the point where Gallagher stormed out of
> the interview, and Maron’s hotel room, after
> just a half hour.
>
> Maron begins the episode by pointing out that it
> was not his idea to book Gallagher, but that
> he’d heard reports in The A.V. Club and The
> Stranger about the homophobic, racist nature of
> Gallagher’s contemporary material. I suspect
> part of the reason Gallagher was so indignant was
> because he realized that Maron did not respect him
> enough to treat him as anything other than a mild
> annoyance, a dumb silly joke of a man from the
> 1980s who had somehow reinvented himself from a
> harmless dumb joke to a harmful, spiteful, and
> hateful mean joke.
>
> Maron didn’t have Gallagher on because he was an
> important figure with provocative ideas, as
> Gallagher undoubtedly sees himself, but because
> some folks were curious about just how awful this
> sad, silly little man had become so why the hell
> not spend an hour of his life talking to him?
> “Why the hell not?” seems the operating idea
> behind having Gallagher on WTF and it doesn’t
> take long for an answer to arrive.
>
> Introducing the episode, Maron reflects of his
> guest, “Obviously, I’ve only heard negative
> things about him recently. I know who he is. I
> know what he does. I do not have any particular
> problem with him.” Maron concedes that he did
> not handle Gallagher as well as he would have
> liked to, that he did not do a whole lot of
> research but instead was going off the current
> conception of Gallagher as a right-wing hate
> monger, which, it should be noted, was not overly
> flattering but also wasn’t exactly untrue.
>
> Gallagher’s storming out seems to have made
> Maron philosophical rather than angry, causing him
> to reflect on the nature of desperation and how
> it’s possible to feel cheated professionally no
> matter how successful you are, and at various
> points Gallagher was about as successful as a
> comedian got. He’s just doomed to be a Dane Cook
> rather than a Louis CK.
>
> Maron mentions more than once that there’s a
> good chance that listeners loved Gallagher as
> children and he wants to honor the intense
> emotional connection people once felt with
> Gallagher even as he reveals the awful man
> Gallagher has become. In that respect, Gallagher
> comes off a little like Bill Cosby in that it is
> difficult to reconcile the lovable clown children
> adored and thought was one of them with the awful,
> hateful, grotesquely entitled and bitter men they
> eventually became.
>
> Not long after the abbreviated interview began,
> Gallagher says that the kids today don’t know
> who he is. He says it with weary resignation
> rather than anger but it’s clear that Gallagher
> will not forgive the kids today for not knowing
> who he is or approaching him with the appropriate
> reverence.
>
> It doesn’t take long for the bitter has-been to
> get indignant. When Maron assures Gallagher he’s
> still a well-known comic, Gallagher retorts,
> “Why don’t I have my own TV show then, if
> I’m a well known comic?” in a way that
> suggests he angrily screams that question into the
> mirror every morning, then weeps uncontrollably
> when no comforting answer is forthcoming.
>
> For a brief moment, however, when Gallagher is
> breathlessly reciting Comedy Store lore from the
> 1970s and talking shit about contemporaries like
> Tom Dreesen it seems like this might be an
> enjoyably bitter, gossipy exploration of one
> man’s vitriolic delusions instead of a
> super-tense one.
>
> Gallagher rages against the ghost of Johnny Carson
> for the unforgivable crime of not liking prop
> comics (despite Carson being a magician!,
> Gallagher notes) and details his unlikely ascent
> in show-business as the opening act for Kenny
> Rogers, who did not care for Gallagher’s Iranian
> Hostage Crisis-themed dick jokes, especially since
> his mother was in the audience. It’s an early
> indication that Gallagher’s xenophobia/racism
> are not of a recent vintage.
>
> As long as Gallagher is in the world of old school
> comedy gossip, things are relatively civil.
> Gallagher derides Jay Leno as having an act that
> was “very forgettable” as a prelude for a very
> paranoid conspiracy theory that Gallagher was owed
> his own talk show but Gallagher had to leave town
> regularly to make a fortune performing before
> adoring audiences, so Leno and Letterman sneakily
> exploited his absence to steal the hit talk shows
> that rightly belonged to Gallagher by virtue of
> his incredible popularity and talent.
>
> “I wanted to make big money,” Gallagher
> insists, and brays that he did, but he did so
> under the most difficult, impossible of
> circumstances: selling live tickets in a down
> economy. Gallagher then recounts how he tried to
> sell the Veg-o-Matic routine that made him famous
> to George Carlin and Albert Brooks but they
> inexplicably turned him down. As a thought
> experiment, try to imagine an alternate universe
> where Carlin is famous for smashing watermelons
> and instead of being the brainiest, most comic’s
> comic in existence, Albert Brooks was beloved in
> Branson for his habit of smashing watermelons with
> a hammer.
>
> Gallagher tells stories that sound too good to be
> true, from how he travels the country teaching
> people about physics (he was a chemist by trade
> before he became a comedian) to owning the rights
> to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before they
> became the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
>
> About thirty three minutes in, however, things
> take a turn when Maron brings up the widespread
> conception that Gallagher’s act is racist and
> homophobic, in addition to being terrible (in this
> case, being terrible and hacky is somehow the
> least of Gallagher’s transgressions). Gallagher
> does not like that assertion at all. Gallagher
> perversely insists that he’s never written a
> homophobic joke because he tells jokes other
> people wrote, as if that is somehow an acceptable
> explanation, or something that will carry weight
> with a comic’s comic like Maron.
>
> Gallagher presents, “What does Seigfried have in
> common with the tiger? They both know what Roy
> tastes like” as the kind of gay joke too
> exquisite and delicious not to recycle even if he
> didn’t write it, and Maron somehow does not seem
> amused at all. “Can I pick on Arabs?”
> Gallagher then asks of what he sees as Maron’s
> hyper-sensitivity (which everyone else would see
> merely as “sensitivity”), before clarifying
> that Arabs are the enemy, as evidenced by the fact
> that Gallagher has to wait in security for hours,
> which probably completely fucks with the way he
> transports cocaine in his luggage during domestic
> flights.
>
> Digging himself even deeper into a hole of his own
> devising, Gallagher refers to homosexuals as
> “God’s joke.” Gallagher posits himself as a
> fearless truth teller opposed by the glowering,
> humorless forces of political correctness but his
> “I’m a comic!”, “It’s a nightclub!”
> and “It’s comedy! Take a joke!” do nothing
> to negate his misanthropic awfulness.
>
> Gallagher hauls out Lisa Lampinelli as someone who
> does more offensive racial humor than he does and
> gets a pass and when Maron points out that a lot
> of her jokes are about fucking black guys,
> Gallagher suggests that he’s not entirely
> convinced that she’s not merely pretending to
> have sex with black men for the sake of jokes.
>
> The tone grows progressively more tense and
> charged and the volume increases accordingly as
> Gallagher launches a progressively more
> nonsensical defense of gay jokes and insensitivity
> and not giving a fucking about what your audience
> thinks of your material. Though Maron criticizes
> himself for being too aggressive, his anger comes
> off as righteous and merited rather than
> self-righteous or shrill, as when Gallagher, who
> is damn near shouting at that point, insists,
> “I’m not angry” (in a very angry tone of
> voice), and he answers, “You’re a guy who
> smashes things.”
>
> Gallagher seems willing to defend to the grave his
> right, nay, his responsibility, to retain five
> lesbian jokes he heard from cab drivers in his
> act. Otherwise, the terrorists have won. Or
> something. Then Gallagher, shortly after asserting
> that all comedians want to work state fairs (take
> that, Mitch Hedberg!) storms the fuck out.
>
> “Oh c’mon, Gallagher!” Maron implores after
> Gallagher stomps off in a pique. The interview is
> only half finished, but it only took a half hour
> of gentle and then not-so-gentle questioning for
> Maron to get Gallagher to truly reveal himself in
> all his ugly awfulness.
>
> Gallagher’s sad decline is a rinky-dink echo of
> Bill Cosby’s fall from the grace. But the scale
> is different. What Cosby did is a goddamned
> American tragedy whereas what Gallagher did to
> himself, his career, and his image is merely
> unfortunate.
Gallagher Smash Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One from the Gallagharchives that I think you'll
> like. Evidently, a while back Gallagher was a
> guest on Mark Maron's WTF podcast - and things got
> a little intense. Sit back and enjoy!
>
>
> $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
>
> In the history of pop culture, few have been given
> as much, and appreciated it as little, as the sad,
> troll-like creature professionally known as
> Gallagher. By seemingly every standard other than
> his own, Gallagher has been obscenely,
> undeservedly, surreally lucky. Against impossible
> odds and the better judgment of the American
> public, Gallagher has managed to ride a silly,
> scatological gimmick involving taking a
> sledgehammer to watermelons into decades of fame,
> fortune and television infamy.
>
> Gallagher has made millions of dollars, starred in
> special after special (14 one-hour pay cable
> specials, as he will be the first to mention) and
> has enjoyed a sex life far more active than a man
> of his non-existent charm and disturbing looks
> merits. Yet in Gallagher’s warped imagination,
> he has been fucked over as completely and
> inexcusably as any bluesman or hard-working Motown
> session musician.
>
> Oh sure, Gallagher has made millions and was on
> television regularly for decades, but in his mind
> he deserved tens of millions of dollars and his
> own late night television show. Gallagher’s
> monstrous and deluded ego won’t accept anything
> less than a David Letterman or Jay Leno level of
> fame, success, and money as his rightful due. I
> mean, he did smash all those fucking watermelons,
> right? What do you think he did that for, his
> fucking health? No, he did it so your moron son
> will fork over his cash for a t-shirt and a CD and
> your dumb slut of a daughter would give him a hand
> job after the show, as is his due (I don’t think
> your son’s a moron and your sister’s a slut,
> but Gallagher sure does, and he isn’t too keen
> on you, either).
>
> Gallagher truly hates his audience. Over the
> course of writing a book about Insane Clown Posse
> I attended four of their notorious yearly
> festivals of arts and culture and the only time I
> ever felt unsafe was during Gallagher’s racist,
> sexist, and homophobic performance, where he
> sprayed contempt on the audience along with
> watermelon fragments and bursts of rotten
> mustard.
>
> Gallagher hates his audience, he hates a world
> that has given him so much, and that in turn he
> has given so little, but perhaps more than
> anything he hates himself, so he tries to cover up
> that understandable, eminently justified
> self-loathing by professing to be better than
> everyone and everything he comes across.
>
> So when Gallagher’s people contacted Marc
> Maron’s people about Gallagher appearing on WTF
> it seemed likely that these two combustible, very
> different characters would clash. And clash they
> did, to the point where Gallagher stormed out of
> the interview, and Maron’s hotel room, after
> just a half hour.
>
> Maron begins the episode by pointing out that it
> was not his idea to book Gallagher, but that
> he’d heard reports in The A.V. Club and The
> Stranger about the homophobic, racist nature of
> Gallagher’s contemporary material. I suspect
> part of the reason Gallagher was so indignant was
> because he realized that Maron did not respect him
> enough to treat him as anything other than a mild
> annoyance, a dumb silly joke of a man from the
> 1980s who had somehow reinvented himself from a
> harmless dumb joke to a harmful, spiteful, and
> hateful mean joke.
>
> Maron didn’t have Gallagher on because he was an
> important figure with provocative ideas, as
> Gallagher undoubtedly sees himself, but because
> some folks were curious about just how awful this
> sad, silly little man had become so why the hell
> not spend an hour of his life talking to him?
> “Why the hell not?” seems the operating idea
> behind having Gallagher on WTF and it doesn’t
> take long for an answer to arrive.
>
> Introducing the episode, Maron reflects of his
> guest, “Obviously, I’ve only heard negative
> things about him recently. I know who he is. I
> know what he does. I do not have any particular
> problem with him.” Maron concedes that he did
> not handle Gallagher as well as he would have
> liked to, that he did not do a whole lot of
> research but instead was going off the current
> conception of Gallagher as a right-wing hate
> monger, which, it should be noted, was not overly
> flattering but also wasn’t exactly untrue.
>
> Gallagher’s storming out seems to have made
> Maron philosophical rather than angry, causing him
> to reflect on the nature of desperation and how
> it’s possible to feel cheated professionally no
> matter how successful you are, and at various
> points Gallagher was about as successful as a
> comedian got. He’s just doomed to be a Dane Cook
> rather than a Louis CK.
>
> Maron mentions more than once that there’s a
> good chance that listeners loved Gallagher as
> children and he wants to honor the intense
> emotional connection people once felt with
> Gallagher even as he reveals the awful man
> Gallagher has become. In that respect, Gallagher
> comes off a little like Bill Cosby in that it is
> difficult to reconcile the lovable clown children
> adored and thought was one of them with the awful,
> hateful, grotesquely entitled and bitter men they
> eventually became.
>
> Not long after the abbreviated interview began,
> Gallagher says that the kids today don’t know
> who he is. He says it with weary resignation
> rather than anger but it’s clear that Gallagher
> will not forgive the kids today for not knowing
> who he is or approaching him with the appropriate
> reverence.
>
> It doesn’t take long for the bitter has-been to
> get indignant. When Maron assures Gallagher he’s
> still a well-known comic, Gallagher retorts,
> “Why don’t I have my own TV show then, if
> I’m a well known comic?” in a way that
> suggests he angrily screams that question into the
> mirror every morning, then weeps uncontrollably
> when no comforting answer is forthcoming.
>
> For a brief moment, however, when Gallagher is
> breathlessly reciting Comedy Store lore from the
> 1970s and talking shit about contemporaries like
> Tom Dreesen it seems like this might be an
> enjoyably bitter, gossipy exploration of one
> man’s vitriolic delusions instead of a
> super-tense one.
>
> Gallagher rages against the ghost of Johnny Carson
> for the unforgivable crime of not liking prop
> comics (despite Carson being a magician!,
> Gallagher notes) and details his unlikely ascent
> in show-business as the opening act for Kenny
> Rogers, who did not care for Gallagher’s Iranian
> Hostage Crisis-themed dick jokes, especially since
> his mother was in the audience. It’s an early
> indication that Gallagher’s xenophobia/racism
> are not of a recent vintage.
>
> As long as Gallagher is in the world of old school
> comedy gossip, things are relatively civil.
> Gallagher derides Jay Leno as having an act that
> was “very forgettable” as a prelude for a very
> paranoid conspiracy theory that Gallagher was owed
> his own talk show but Gallagher had to leave town
> regularly to make a fortune performing before
> adoring audiences, so Leno and Letterman sneakily
> exploited his absence to steal the hit talk shows
> that rightly belonged to Gallagher by virtue of
> his incredible popularity and talent.
>
> “I wanted to make big money,” Gallagher
> insists, and brays that he did, but he did so
> under the most difficult, impossible of
> circumstances: selling live tickets in a down
> economy. Gallagher then recounts how he tried to
> sell the Veg-o-Matic routine that made him famous
> to George Carlin and Albert Brooks but they
> inexplicably turned him down. As a thought
> experiment, try to imagine an alternate universe
> where Carlin is famous for smashing watermelons
> and instead of being the brainiest, most comic’s
> comic in existence, Albert Brooks was beloved in
> Branson for his habit of smashing watermelons with
> a hammer.
>
> Gallagher tells stories that sound too good to be
> true, from how he travels the country teaching
> people about physics (he was a chemist by trade
> before he became a comedian) to owning the rights
> to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before they
> became the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
>
> About thirty three minutes in, however, things
> take a turn when Maron brings up the widespread
> conception that Gallagher’s act is racist and
> homophobic, in addition to being terrible (in this
> case, being terrible and hacky is somehow the
> least of Gallagher’s transgressions). Gallagher
> does not like that assertion at all. Gallagher
> perversely insists that he’s never written a
> homophobic joke because he tells jokes other
> people wrote, as if that is somehow an acceptable
> explanation, or something that will carry weight
> with a comic’s comic like Maron.
>
> Gallagher presents, “What does Seigfried have in
> common with the tiger? They both know what Roy
> tastes like” as the kind of gay joke too
> exquisite and delicious not to recycle even if he
> didn’t write it, and Maron somehow does not seem
> amused at all. “Can I pick on Arabs?”
> Gallagher then asks of what he sees as Maron’s
> hyper-sensitivity (which everyone else would see
> merely as “sensitivity”), before clarifying
> that Arabs are the enemy, as evidenced by the fact
> that Gallagher has to wait in security for hours,
> which probably completely fucks with the way he
> transports cocaine in his luggage during domestic
> flights.
>
> Digging himself even deeper into a hole of his own
> devising, Gallagher refers to homosexuals as
> “God’s joke.” Gallagher posits himself as a
> fearless truth teller opposed by the glowering,
> humorless forces of political correctness but his
> “I’m a comic!”, “It’s a nightclub!”
> and “It’s comedy! Take a joke!” do nothing
> to negate his misanthropic awfulness.
>
> Gallagher hauls out Lisa Lampinelli as someone who
> does more offensive racial humor than he does and
> gets a pass and when Maron points out that a lot
> of her jokes are about fucking black guys,
> Gallagher suggests that he’s not entirely
> convinced that she’s not merely pretending to
> have sex with black men for the sake of jokes.
>
> The tone grows progressively more tense and
> charged and the volume increases accordingly as
> Gallagher launches a progressively more
> nonsensical defense of gay jokes and insensitivity
> and not giving a fucking about what your audience
> thinks of your material. Though Maron criticizes
> himself for being too aggressive, his anger comes
> off as righteous and merited rather than
> self-righteous or shrill, as when Gallagher, who
> is damn near shouting at that point, insists,
> “I’m not angry” (in a very angry tone of
> voice), and he answers, “You’re a guy who
> smashes things.”
>
> Gallagher seems willing to defend to the grave his
> right, nay, his responsibility, to retain five
> lesbian jokes he heard from cab drivers in his
> act. Otherwise, the terrorists have won. Or
> something. Then Gallagher, shortly after asserting
> that all comedians want to work state fairs (take
> that, Mitch Hedberg!) storms the fuck out.
>
> “Oh c’mon, Gallagher!” Maron implores after
> Gallagher stomps off in a pique. The interview is
> only half finished, but it only took a half hour
> of gentle and then not-so-gentle questioning for
> Maron to get Gallagher to truly reveal himself in
> all his ugly awfulness.
>
> Gallagher’s sad decline is a rinky-dink echo of
> Bill Cosby’s fall from the grace. But the scale
> is different. What Cosby did is a goddamned
> American tragedy whereas what Gallagher did to
> himself, his career, and his image is merely
> unfortunate.
NIIIIIIIIIICE!