Three elected officials finally performed the oldest setup in comedy, and the borough’s joke writers have been stuck at the bartender’s line ever since.
QUEENS, New York (Spintaxi) – The borough’s comedy community has declared a state of emergency after a governor, a congresswoman and the mayor of New York City walked into a bar together, completing the oldest setup in the history of the form and leaving behind no punchline whatsoever.
The setup is entirely real. City & State filed it under a headline that every comic in the city has since printed out and taped above a urinal: Hochul, AOC and Mamdani walk into a bar on the last day of early voting. The borough’s own QNS covered the trio’s stop at a Queens bar, and by the next morning the moment had been described at no fewer than eleven open mics as “the Woodstock of the setup line.”
A Setup Without a Delivery
“This is a crisis for the profession,” said Marguerite Abernathy-Choi, recording secretary of the Astoria-Sunnyside Comedy Guild, which convened an emergency session in the back room of a karaoke bar on Steinway Street. “For centuries, three people walk into a bar and then something happens. A priest, a rabbi and a duck. A lawyer, a doctor and a horse. Now three elected officials actually do it, on the record, in front of cameras, and nobody can agree on what the bartender says next. We are a craft without a third act.”
The guild says it has received 1,312 proposed punchlines, which are being sorted by a committee of six comics and one retired MTA conductor who was brought in “for timing.” Each submission is read aloud, scored from one to ten, and then read aloud again in a heavier Queens accent to see whether that helps. According to the guild’s minutes, it helps 38 percent of the time.
The Shortlist, as Leaked to the Press
- “The bartender looks up and says, ‘Is this a joke?’ and the entire press pool writes it down.” Rejected as “too meta for a guild that still uses a fax machine.”
- “The bartender says, ‘What can I get you?’ and a staffer answers, ‘We’ll circle back.’” Shortlisted.
- “Three elected officials walk into a bar. By the time they leave, the bar has applied for a ribbon-cutting.” Shortlisted.
- “The regular on the end stool says, ‘We don’t get a lot of your kind in here,’ and the bartender says, ‘We will now, there’s a primary in June.’” Under review.
- “It’s the first room in New York where everyone agrees on the capacity limit.” Flagged by the legal subcommittee, which has not verified the capacity limit.
“Number two is getting the most traction,” Abernathy-Choi said. “It’s short, it’s cruel, and it works whether you’re left, right or a man in Bayside who thinks all of them are the same person in different coats.”
Scholars Trace the Format Back to the First Bar
Dr. Ignatius Ferreira-Holm, who teaches comparative joke structure at the Jackson Heights Academy of Oral Tradition, said the walk-into-a-bar format dates to “roughly the opening of the first bar, plus about twenty minutes.”
“The structure requires three types who would not normally share a room,” he explained. “Historically that meant a clergyman, a lawyer and an animal. In New York politics it means a moderate governor, a socialist mayor and a congresswoman with more followers than the state of Delaware has residents. The casting is perfect. That is what makes the missing punchline so painful. It is like building a stage, booking the room, and forgetting the microphone.”
Ferreira-Holm noted that the joke had a workshop run. City & State had already watched the governor spend the first weekend of early voting with the mayor in tow, which the professor called “the out-of-town preview. You never debut your best material at the preview. You hold it for closing night, at a bar, with a surprise guest. It’s textbook. It’s practically Broadway.”
The Hospitality Industry Demands Equal Time
Bar owners elsewhere in the borough were less amused. The Queens Boulevard Tavern Keepers Association issued a statement demanding that future candidate visits be distributed “fairly, by lottery, like a housing unit,” and announced a new Politician Walk-In Readiness certification. To qualify, a bar must have a back room, a beer that offends no one, and a television that is not tuned to any network a voter could later complain about.
The association also surveyed 200 bartenders across the borough:
Seventy-one percent said they would not recognize the state comptroller if he ordered a club soda. Eighty-eight percent said they would card a sitting governor “out of respect for the law.” Six percent said they would cut off a mayor “if he started explaining zoning.” And three percent asked, with what the survey described as “hope,” whether the congresswoman might be persuaded to cover a Friday shift, a reference to her well-documented years behind a bar before she ran for office.
“It’s not fair,” said a tavern owner on Queens Boulevard who asked to be identified only as Sal, because, he said, “everyone on Queens Boulevard who owns a tavern is named Sal. Look it up. It’s in the charter.” He added that he has kept a reserved sign on a corner table since early voting began. “It says ‘Governor.’ A guy from Rego Park sat there Tuesday. He’s not the governor. He did, however, order a very moderate lager.”
A Spike in Orders for Whatever They Were Having
Bartenders reported a surge in customers asking for “whatever they were having,” a request several described as “unanswerable, legally and emotionally.” One Woodside regular reportedly answered the question for everyone by reciting from memory the farm.fm lament about a man so worn out he asked someone to light him a drink and pour him a smoke, which the room agreed was the most coherent platform it had heard all cycle.
Political consultant Bartholomew Achebe-Lund, who has advised campaigns in all five boroughs and been fired by four of them, said the location itself was the message. “Photo ops used to happen at diners,” he said. “A diner says, ‘I eat eggs, like you.’ A bar says, ‘I, too, need a drink about all this.’ Next cycle it’ll be a laundromat. The cycle after that, a dentist. By the end of the decade, candidates will be shaking hands at the DMV, because that’s the only place left where New Yorkers are guaranteed to be waiting.”
The Guild Rules
Bohiney Magazine submitted its own entry to the guild, which turned it down on the grounds that it was “too close to the actual news to count as a joke,” a rejection the editors at bohiney.com have since had framed.
After four hours of debate and two pitchers of a beer the minutes describe only as “neutral,” the guild voted 4 to 3 to leave the joke permanently unfinished, on the theory that in New York, a setup with no resolution is simply called government. The retired conductor abstained. Asked why, he said he had been waiting on this punchline since Ed Koch was mayor, and as far as he could tell it was still being held at the previous station due to train traffic ahead.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/