Photo courtesy of AP

LEWISVILLE, Texas (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The stage performer Gallagher was slowly taken out of sedation Sunday after suffering a heart attack Wednesday during a show in a suburban Dallas bar. The 65-year-old "comedian" made a name for himself throughout the 1970s and 1980s by smashing fruit, cracking innocuous puns and demonstrating unconventional uses for a variety of silly props. In recent years, Gallagher has reinvented himself as a comic champion of paranoid, xenophobic religious conservatives. His produce-based props now serve as gay (fruit salad) and ethnic (watermelon) effigies, which he pulverizes under the righteous judgment of his holy hammer. Interestingly, doctors used similar imagery to describe Gallagher's cardiac arrest: "To put it in terms his fans would understand, picture Gallagher's arteries as swollen, angry sledgehammers striking down upon a nearly rotten and largely unremarkable container of fluid."

Gallagher's 21st century shtick is a big departure from his original material, and now illustrates the funnier side of Ted Kennedy's fatal brain cancer, overcrowding in prisons from the inability of black youths in baggy pants to outrun police, the hapless worshipping of Satan via tattoos ("That ink goes through to your soul -- if you read your Bible, your body is a sacred temple, YOU DIPSHIT"), the value of immigrants to the housekeeping industry, and how everything frightening in the world is gay. Gallagher also authoritatively settled the debate about Obama's race by proving that the President can't be truly African American because he failed to marry an overweight Caucasian woman. Where his act once appealed to admirers of physical humor, it now attracts more discriminating fans who prefer their discrimination delivered in a strange voice and accompanied by graphic visual representations. For example, Gallagher's most popular bit has become filling a plate with fruit salad and Asian vegetables, smashing it with a mallet and then screaming in an affectation that mocks both hillbillies and stroke victims: "This is for the China people [sic] and queers!!"

Late Friday evening, doctors announced their decision to wait before bringing Gallagher out of his medically induced coma. A hospital administrator said: "Our first mission is to do no harm, which is why we decided to keep Gallagher under monitored sedation. Our actions were pleasantly supported by thousands of letters from comedy lovers who urged us to keep him under for as long as legally possible."

Unfortunately, Gallagher's promotional manager persuaded medical staff to take the comic out of his controlled coma on Saturday night. The hospital reports that Gallagher is moving around and telling jokes.

"Yes, he's very active and returning to normal," one orderly noted. "He's already accused me of being a Puerto Rican terrorist, of making the room gay because of my 'faggy French name,' and of trying to seduce him when I inserted his catheter. Hilarious."

Disappointed comedy enthusiasts said they would cope with the updated news of Gallagher's condition by watching The History Channel's current documentary on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or footage of Syrian military strikes against civilian protesters, both of which they called more entertaining and lighthearted than a Gallagher routine.

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