All eyes were on Maura Hennigan at the 2005 St. Patrick's Day breakfast.
Days earlier, the 24-year city councilor had announced her intention to challenge Emperor Menino, and her appearance at the often rambunctious annual roast, one of the city's hallowed political rites of passage, was widely seen as a test of whether she had the balls (as it were) to dislodge Hizzoner—who, incidentally, was seated in the audience. Undaunted, Hennigan took the mic and started in with what was supposed to have been the customary round of pointed jokes. Jokes that, in Hennigan's case, slapped to the floor one by one, like so many dead fish. "It was like watching a friend go skydiving the first time and realizing they didn't attach the chute," recalls City Councilor John Tobin, one of the funniest pols in town, who followed Hennigan onstage that day. "She just came hurtling to the ground. It was just silence. Most of it wasn't funny, but even the parts that were, people were afraid to laugh because they didn't want to incur the wrath of the mayor."

We all know where the story went from there. Menino spent the next eight months pretending he wasn't being challenged at all, before hitting the switch and effortlessly destroying the dedicated city councilor who'd had the audacity to test his primacy. Hennigan's flop sweat–soaked stab at comedy neatly prefigured the savage electoral beating she received. And for some observers, that sums up everything that's wrong with the St. Patrick's Day breakfast: A female public servant with, to put it lightly, no comedy experience, is compelled to stand before a room full of white guys who have been tacitly warned by Power to let her bomb horribly—which she does, leaving the cognoscenti wondering whether someone who can't even tell a half-decent joke is capable of running a town like Boston.

For several years now, in fact, there's been persistent grumbling among the press and the populace that maybe it's time to let this particular tradition die, that the current crop of pols are at best painfully unfunny, at worst sub-mental, and should no longer be given a platform to embarrass themselves—and, by extension, us—with their antics. Worse, frets the Hub's significant contingent of humorless ninnies, the event's inherent Irishness carries the sort of racist and sexist undertones that once plagued the city in its less diverse days, the ones dominated by wiseass Irish guys.

Well, like it or not, it's that time of year again. The breakfast is back, and with it, that new St. Pat's tradition: complaining about how lame and anachronistic the spectacle has become. But even though the breakfast has devolved to the point that it's about as pleasurable as listening to Keith Lockhart read Penthouse Forum aloud onstage for 12 hours (one imagines), the show must go on. It's a piece of living history for a city that's come unmoored from a past that, if a lot messier, was at least a lot more interesting than the present. The breakfast marks the one day a year our elected officials attempt to give us something other than their own folly to laugh at, when their backroom maneuverings and doublespeak give way to rare bursts of caustic public truth-telling. Think former Senate president Robert Travaglini joking last year about a new clothing line called "Deval": "As soon as we put the suit on, it all came apart at the seams." Or Governor Patrick himself chastising Tom Reilly in 2006 for obnoxiously overplaying the childhood-poverty card on the gubernatorial campaign trail. "By the time of the primary," Patrick said, "Tom Reilly will be a black man from the South Side of Chicago." More than all that, though, the breakfast, at its best, can help defuse some of the tensions of a rapidly diversifying political landscape, and help reconcile the dueling Bostons—the old one, and the practically unrecognizable new one. Rather than exacerbating that divide, the breakfast exposes it to the light of day, forcing everyone—observers and the political system itself—to recognize and deal with the fact that the power centers have begun to shift. Indeed, that purpose is encoded in the event's DNA. The breakfast, after all, grew out of the spirit of political change, with the Irish employing wit, drink, and song to take bites out of the hated Yankee elite. And that truth-to-power function is as necessary today as ever. Kill the breakfast? Nonsense. All it needs is a little updating.