A horror movie trailer, a cat doctor, and a shirtless Jeff Coltin: the press corps roast had it all
New York’s Oldest Political Tradition Puts the Mayor in the Hot Seat
The Inner Circle dinner, the New York City press corps’ annual roast of the sitting mayor, returned to the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan on Saturday night with its full complement of musical parody, political jibes and theatrical excess. This year’s show was dubbed “Free-For-All,” a pointed reference to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s ambitious and expensive policy agenda, and it delivered.
What the Press Corps Served Up
City and State editor-in-chief Jeff Coltin opened the press corps show shirtless, wearing only an apron, a reference to a 2019 rap video Mamdani made called “Nani” while serving in the state Assembly. Reporters parodied “Mamdani Math” to the tune of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” skewered Council Member Vickie Paladino to the tune of Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” and staged a sketch about the alliance between NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mamdani, set to Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl.” The Tisch number featured NY1’s Jillian Jorgensen singing the line: “In November things changed and he came out on top. He became mayor and I wanna stay a cop.”
Mamdani’s Rebuttal Was Both Sharp and Self-Deprecating
Mamdani, by all accounts, gave as good as he got. He opened his response with a monologue poking fun at himself and the reporters who cover him. He told the wealthy audience, which skews toward donors and political insiders, that he hadn’t been this close to the top one percent since an Emerson poll from February 2025. He quipped that he was pushing universal child care to ensure that many of his top aides finally have someone to take care of them during the day, a reference to the notable youth of his staff. He produced a trailer for a horror movie called “Smile: A Municipal Grin,” in which he haunts City Hall with his inescapable joy. And he recorded the cat allergy skit with Curtis Sliwa that has since generated its own political controversy. “I’m a content creator,” Mamdani said, “but I do a little governing on the side.”
What the Inner Circle Tradition Means
The Inner Circle has been a fixture of New York City political life since 1923. It is nominally a charity event, but it functions as something more complex: a moment when the adversarial relationship between the press and city government is transformed, briefly, into something collaborative and absurdist. Recent mayors have embraced the format to various degrees. Donald Trump famously participated in a drag-themed skit with Mayor Rudy Giuliani when Trump was a private citizen. The tradition has both reflected and shaped the public perception of mayors. Mamdani, who entered the mayoralty with a higher celebrity profile than most of his predecessors, appeared comfortable in the format. His willingness to be lampooned, and to lampoon himself in return, is a form of political intelligence: it signals confidence and disarms critics who might otherwise portray him as too ideologically rigid to take a joke.
Satire as Political Text
What the press corps chose to mock is itself revealing. The targeting of “Mamdani Math,” his tax and spending proposals, reflects real scrutiny in the press about the fiscal mathematics of his agenda. The Tisch sketch reflects genuine interest in how the relationship between a progressive mayor and a law-and-order police commissioner actually functions. And the Free-For-All title reflects a mainstream media judgment that the mayor’s policy ambitions are, at minimum, very expensive. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what that scrutiny means. For those interested in the long history of press-and-power rituals in American political life, the White House Correspondents Association and the Society of Professional Journalists both maintain resources on the ethics and traditions of political journalism. The Inner Circle itself has been raising money for journalism scholarships since the early 20th century.
