Bombs Awaaaay!

Part of the breakfast's appeal used to lie in its setting: cramped spots like the old-school Bayside Club or the Ironworkers Hall, where hundreds of political insiders jammed into already packed spaces, poured sweat, and were forced to stumble across tables—and one another—to get at the bathroom. "It had this street-corner charm," says Southie state Senator Jack Hart, the current host. "It was a glimpse inside a small, crowded room of political chicanery." That ended after the fire at the Station nightclub in Rhode Island spurred Massachusetts to crack down on overcrowded venues. So Hart moved the breakfast in 2005 to the gleaming, antiseptic new convention center, where attendees no longer had to trip over their neighbors to make it to the urinal, and could be reasonably certain they wouldn't perish in a huge conflagration. These comforts came at a cost, however. With the added space, the audience soared to more than a thousand, which had the effect of killing off a good deal of the insider feel that had given the event its unique character.

The expanding audience had another consequence, as well: The risk of getting crucified for a politically incorrect joke, of being tarred as an unreconstructed racist/sexist cartoon character from Boston's Bad Old Days, increased exponentially. This, as you would expect, retards—sorry—cripples—sorry—impedes the likelihood of funny things ever being said, political correctness being the single most effective antidote to laughing. And if that weren't enough to suck all the funny out of the room, the pols now increasingly rely on prop gags, angling to land their pictures in the papers and on the newscasts. The breakfast is the worse for it: As anyone who's ever had the misfortune of catching Carrot Top can tell you, prop gags are about as funny as pediatric AIDS, and should be fought with a similar urgency.

To solve some of the most glaring problems, Hart has made a few needed changes recently. With the breakfast having swelled over the years to more than three mind-numbing hours, last year it was limited to two hours—so if it wasn't nonstop hilarity, neither was it nonstop. This year Hart hopes to trim the size of the audience, and plans to program the event less rigidly to allow for more of the kind of spontaneity unseen since Billy Bulger handed over emcee duties.

That's a start, but more-drastic steps are needed to whip this thing back into shape. The first is to get the event off TV. The commercial breaks make it too stagy, and the reach of the broadcast heightens the prevailing instinct to play it safe, when, of course, the whole point of the breakfast is to say things about your colleagues that you're not allowed to say the rest of the year. If some of the jokes touch on race, ethnicity, religion, or sex, so be it. In spite of the frequent cries of a city that often can't tell the difference between tolerance and pandering, that sort of japery can actually help bring people closer together—it's a form of sublimation. And that doesn't mean everyone needs to act the stereotypical Irish pol at this thing, either. The growing ranks of minority officials can take shots at the old white guys, the women can poke fun at the men, and the whole event can be subverted to meet the needs of modern Boston without throwing old Boston entirely into the garbage. If someone crosses the line, the audience can just boo him/her off the stage, or hurl tomatoes, or lobby the clergy on hand to condemn the offender to an eternal sulfur bath. Or even hiss the clergy. Democracy in action.

Finally, and this may be the most controversial suggestion, bring back Guy Glodis, the redheaded Worcester County sheriff, who was finally banned from the event after a series of brutally inappropriate one-liners that stretched over several years. I'm not endorsing the quality of the man's humor. But surely there's space for anyone who stands in front of a room full of Boston politicians, points to the mayor, and says he loved him in Planet of the Apes (to utter silence), or jokes (to mortified groans) about how, as a child, Tom Reilly was so poor he had only one thing to play with. Making room for someone with so little distance between his brain and his mouth is sure to reanimate this corpse, at least in the short term, even if he is ultimately treated to a barrage of flying cabbage and imprecations issued by the five remaining Catholic priests in Boston.

Just imagine: Glodis is at the mic when John Kerry (election year) shows up. Seeing him, Glodis expresses his fervent hope that the junior senator from Massachusetts will at last accomplish what Niki Tsongas couldn't—namely, losing to Jim Ogonowski. At this point, Kerry emits his halting, laughterlike sound. "Whatta you laughing at, you Jew bastid," Glodis snaps to scattered boos. Jack Hart walks up with a big hook, removes Glodis, and calls for a song. Someone in the back starts singing "Hava Nagila," but is silenced by Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea Cabral, who mounts the stage and shakes her head. "Jesus," she laughs incredulously, "no wonder no one wants you people in power anymore."