The comedian who smashed watermelons

Gallagher 1946–2022

Gallagher obliterated more than 15,000 watermelons during his 30 years in standup. The beret-wearing, mustachioed comedian played more than 100 shows a year, and every one closed with him smashing a melon with a sledgehammer. The fans in the front seats, the area known as Death Row, knew that Gallagher’s Sledge-O-Matic would splatter them—many showed up with raincoats and umbrellas. But that was just the finale to a madcap, prop-centered act that earned him a dozen specials on Showtime. He said he always aimed to provide an absurdist escape from the stresses of daily life. “If you make fun of it, the people laugh,” he said in 1984. “They release the tension and are somehow healed—a bit.”

Born Leo Gallagher Jr. in North Carolina, the future comedian was nicknamed “Butch” as a child. When he was about 10, his family moved to Tampa, where his father owned a roller-skating rink, and he soon became a regional skating champion. Gallagher “developed a talent for speed and freestyle skating that he later incorporated into his stage act, racing around on roller skates with a balloon tail,” said The Washington Post. On his final day of high school, he was expelled for insubordination, but a counselor intervened, and he was allowed to graduate and attend the University of South Florida, where he studied chemistry and literature. After college, he worked odd jobs while pursuing comedy, appearing on The Tonight Show in 1975 and releasing his first Showtime special in 1980. It was a “slow but steady” rise, said The New York Times, and he eventually became “one of the most recognizable comedians of the 1980s.”

Gallagher’s humor was based on wordplay and shock value, said the Los Angeles Times, but toward the end of his career, his political jokes fell flat, and he was criticized “for making racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks onstage.” In 2011, he stormed out of an interview for comedian Marc Maron’s popular WTF podcast after Maron pressed him on his penchant for punching down. But even if he sometimes missed the mark, Gallagher always aspired to go beyond just earning a cheap laugh. “You can get a laugh just by sticking your finger in your nose,” he said. “I want to do more. I want to say something, to feed the brain.”