The New Yorker Cartoonists Centoonial Party
Over a hundred New Yorker Cartoonists walk into a bar...
This is the final post celebrating the New Yorker’s Centenary Week— one epic blowout party to round out a century of cartoonery. Read my other post on the anniversary here.
February 22nd, 2025
TriBeCa, New York
"The Unofficial Party of the Century"
There's something distinctly New Yorkery about celebrating the centennial of its most iconic magazine at a secret underground club in Tribeca, where bookshelves open to reveal secret rooms, and cartoonists collide with debutantes.
The unofficial New Yorker cartoonists' party to celebrate the centennial year began at Maxwell Social at 7:00 PM, by which time most of the attendees had already spent their day shuffling between galleries displaying a century of illustrated wit. I arrived to find the Maxwell Social Club: an ostentatious old library that got drunk and decided to become a speakeasy. The walls were lined with leather-bound books and rolling ladders that dared you to clamber up them without spilling your third Martini. Cartoonists Zoe Si and Ngozi Ukazu had taken on the herculean task of herding cats, squeezing every cartoonist they could find into a room for one epic night.
I began sheepishly introducing myself to the legendary cartoonists whose work I'd pored over for years, as well as catching up with old familiar faces from the ‘in-person’ days. We used to pitch our jokes in batches of 10 or so to the Cartoon Editor every Tuesday. These days, it’s all remote, making this kind of occasion even rarer. It felt nice being around other people who do this strange little thing I do for a living.
Being scheduled to perform stand-up comedy later that evening, I did what any reasonable adult would do: drinking just enough booze to calm my intense nerves but not enough to forget my own name. It's a delicate balance that, like most things in my life, I managed to get slightly wrong. My hands were shaking so much I could have perfectly aped a George Booth cartoon.
Typically, when I do a show, it’s for an audience of strangers I’ll never see again. So performing to over a hundred people who write jokes for a living was the most anxiety-inducing —let’s be honest, borderline sociopathic— thing I’ve ever done. Expecting to tell jokes that make joke-writers laugh is madness. It’s like a magician doing tricks in front of a room full of magicians who all know the mechanics of every trick.
Gladly, every comedian who got up knocked it out of the park— Will Santino opened, followed by Ngozi and Hilary F Campbell. During my set (which I'll generously describe as "memorable"), our surprise guest, Ronny Chieng arrived—proving that even the most absurd late-night drinking promises sometimes come true. I’d asked him a few (very late) nights earlier if he’d drop in to do a guest spot, and, to his credit, he remembered— and showed up just in time. I introduced him as a promising young open-micer before he took the stage to rapturous, bewildered applause.
He had the room in the palm of his hand— doing a mix of new and old material, insisting that he didn’t know he’d been asked to come to a creepy New Yorker Illuminati party and would need to debrief with me after the show about what the hell this event really was. He roasted the bizarrely vague demographic in the room before we took a quick snap on stage of all the comedians who performed.
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