I still see a lot of online discussion, especially in forums favored by comedians, about Leo Gallagher, the member of their profession who died November 11. Everyone seems to agree he was thorny and sometimes abrasive, and that he had an awful lot of negative things to say about most other comedians. Where there seems to be a fair amount of disagreement is over how good a comedian he was and whether his act was, at times, racist and sexist and a few other "ist"s.
I didn't see him in the last few decades so I don't feel qualified to have an opinion on some of this. As I wrote here though, I was real impressed with a performance of his I saw a long, long time ago.
I am amused though that some are saying that, for good or ill, there was no one else like him. There actually was someone almost exactly like Leo Gallagher. There was, for a time, a second Gallagher. His brother Ron cloned the look, feel and some of the material and toured as "Gallagher Too." At first, it was authorized, then it wasn't, then it was the subject of a long, bitter court battle and the two brothers not speaking for years.
Marc Maron has put online the podcast he did with the first and genuine Gallagher in 2011 — the interview that got so heated, Gallagher walked off it. I listened again to some of it and I thought Maron was being a bit too harsh with his guest but the guest was pretty harsh before it got to a two-way harshness. Maron may not keep this available for free listening forever so if you wanna hear it, hear it here and now.
But you want to know what Gallagher was really like? Really, really like? Well, my buddy Bill Kirchenbauer knew him as well as any non-relative could. A few days after his pal died, Bill spent a half-hour talking about the guy. This is about as accurate a picture as you could ever get of the late Leo…