Back in July, I posted an observation on the possible career choices that Gabe might have available to him based on his then current aptitudes and preferences. Usually, parents have a funny way of projecting typically optimistic predictions onto their children's futures based on their block stacking abilities or some such indicator--I, being the curmudgeon that I am, tried to "keep it real" a bit more and declared that, in all likelihood, Gabe was best suited to be a stunt man or daredevil.
And nothing about his personality has changed that would lead me to think otherwise. However, based on what I saw yesterday, I'm not willing to add one more possible career path that Gabe might follow: Gallagher.
Yes, yes. I know that Gallagher is a person and not a career path. But considering what Gabe was doing, there is really only one thing this skill would qualify him to do--be the next generation's Gallagher.
As I'm sure all of you remember, Gallagher was a prop comic who was popular in the 80s and early 90s. He was famous for the bit that he ended all of his routines with, a faux sales pitch for his wonderful "new" product, the Sledge-o-Matic. He would then bring out a big wooden mallet and proceed to smash everything, covering the first few rows in the crowd with smooshy bits of this and that--most famously, watermelons.
Not surprisingly, Gallagher was my favorite comedian when I was about 12 years old. What wasn't to love? He smashed things! Equally unsurprising is how poorly his routines held up to scrutiny as I grew older. In college, someone gave me a video of one of his stand-ups. I watched it and was not nearly as amused as I was eight or so years earlier.
Anyway, Gallagher more or less disappeared into the ether of irrelevant comics about two decades ago. He still occasionally makes the rounds, appearing at low-end venues (I think he came to our area a couple years back, appearing at a local comedy "shack" where has-beens and probably-never-will-bes come to mildly amuse smallish audiences), but, for the most part, his career is over.
Leaving the field wide open for his comedic successor to step in! I look forward to investing in tarps and large sheets of polyurethane (Holy crap! To make sure I was spelling that right, I did a search for "polyurethane sheets" and the first company that came up is called Gallaghercorp. I didn't see him anywhere on the site, but I hope that he is somehow involved. That would make me feel better about him disappearing into obscurity--knowing that he was still making a living somehow).
Here's the video of Gabe Gallaghering:
First off, this guy, http://www.gallaghercorp.com/about/presidents-greeting.shtml, is not related to the comedian. No way.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, Gabe is way too meticulous in his pear smashing. He does an awesome job smashing that pear though. Slow and steady wins the pear smashing race.