The tone-deaf 2016 Financial Follies

Our anonymous society correspondent attended the 2016 Financial Follies, hosted by the New York Financial Writers’ Association, on Friday night in New York and submitted the following report:

The Financial Follies is a decidedly not a decadent nor depraved affair, but it may be incredibly tone-deaf.

On Friday night, the liberal, coastal, elite financial media once again gathered in our cloistered little bubble to pretend not to like getting free booze from PR people at the something annual Follies (if you’re actually counting these things, you’re trying to hard).

While I may sound underwhelmed — and I was — it is nice for everyone to get one night to ignore the newsroom layoffs, the erosion of America’s willingness to compensate us for our work, and the fact that Bretibart and the Drudge Report are now more culturally relevant than all of us combined.

As was the case last year, the venue changed. The Follies was downgraded, once again, to the Sheraton in Times Square. Honestly, at this point I hope it ends up at a Motel 6 off the New Jersey Turnpike — at least it’d be a curveball.

The room — at least to start — was noticeably less drunk this year. They may have been because there was a premium pre-party for the TV people and a separate “cocktail” hour for the rest of us. I used the scare quotes because the plebeians were forced to stand in absurdly long lines to pay absorbent prices for a mediocre-at-best drink, like an actual Times Square bar.

There was hardly enough time to get through the line and gulp down one $16 cocktail before the lights flashed signaling the beginning of the dinner.

There was some sort of an introduction that hardly touched on the reason — to raise money for journalism school scholarships –we were all there. Most people don’t pay attention because most people are too busy drinking or pretending to enjoy each others company. (As an aside, to the 16 people earnestly banging their glass to get everyone to quiet down, good effort, you’ll get ‘em next year.)

Then came the skits. The half-baked, seemingly intentionally unfunny skits.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a friend that’s trying to make it in acting force you to go to an amateur production of Jesus Christ Superstar in the basement of an East Village bar. But as someone who has, this was much worse.

For one thing the sound was terrible, like everyone onstage was screaming through a running dishwasher. Unfortunately given my location, the sound was too high to ignore. Thus I had to eat a rubbery appetizer while being bombarded with violent screeches as the microphones got too close.

The jokes were not at all notable, as is traditional. There were the classic references to Fed rate hikes and new skits making fun of corporate mistakes such as the possible death of children due to the sky high prices of EpiPens. And they were all boring.

The only thing that got my attention was the mandatory Donald Trump skit. In this genius production, his supporters were depicted as hapless rubes with overalls, trucker hats and bad tattoos, falling for his tweets hook, line and sinker. I couldn’t help but notice that as people drank wine (and left full bottles of it on tables later) in tuxedos, politely chuckling at the depiction of Middle America as clueless, perhaps we may have missed the reason why the only thing Americans hate more than our industry is Vladimir Putin.

Since this is a rundown of the night, I should wrap up by noting the food. Most of us there (besides the aforementioned TV people) are gracious enough to swallow down two-day-old hotel steak drowned in a brown gravy from a can, but it’s one of those meals where the best part is the bread. You know the ones, where its perfunctory to shovel in the food so as to not appear ungracious.

Though I suppose there’s something liberal, coastal media elite-ish about complaining over steak.