Bring Back the Fun: What Mailer’s Madness Teaches Today’s NYC Campaigners

In the Vital City piece “Bringing the Fun Back to Fun City: Zohran Mamdani, Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin” Gabriel S. Tennen draws a line connecting Mamdani’s off‑beat 2025 mayoral push with Mailer and Breslin’s 1969 “51st State” NYC campaign. The article highlights how Mailer and Breslin injected playfulness and provocation into civic life—proposing absurd/serious ideas like neighborhood‑based policing, free bikes, “Sweet Sundays” without cars, and city‑statehood to reclaim power for the boroughs. 

Tennen argues that Mamdani, knowingly or not, channels that same spirit: a million‑dollar grin, scavenger hunts across neighborhoods, stretch‑the‑political‑playbook events that say: “yes, local politics can be fun.” While Mailer and Breslin lost big in the primary, their campaign remains legendary for insisting that city politics should not be boring or conventional.

This article offers a fresh perspective on Mailer’s political persona: less about winning elections than about challenging the mundane routines of urban governance. Mailer’s refusal to play by standard politician‑rules, his mix of wit and cynicism, and his imaginative take on civic structure emerge here as not just historical curiosities but as templates for injecting energy into today’s public life.