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."