In the will-call line at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, I got
into a conversation with two guys who were nearly
indistinguishable from each other, both very pale and sober-
looking beneath their baseball caps and giant black-framed
glasses. They told me they see every comic who comes through
town. The marquee announced that Gallagher would be performing
the following month, so I asked, "Even Gallagher?" and made a
not-so-funny remark about the unimaginable number of watermelons
that guy must have smashed in the past thirty-plus years. Yes,
they said, they would be seeing Gallagher, and then they set me
straight on how hard it is to get up and do an hour of comedy
and how Gallagher tours all the time and still makes crowds
laugh, "and not just with the gigantic mallet." They'd both
grown up in Boston and had been going to clubs their entire
adult lives. There were so many comics they saw before anybody
else knew their names, Denis Leary and Sam Kinison and Steven
Wright and Bobcat Goldthwait...  I told them I wa