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NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch showed off her sense of humor at Thursday night’s Al Smith Dinner — leaving New York’s great and good in stitches with a series of well-timed cracks about far-left demands that Mayor Zohran Mamdani remove her as NYC’s top cop.
“There’s a lot of talk these days that the mayor’s friends don’t like me,” Tisch set up an audience that included Hizzoner before zinging: “That’s simply not true – President Trump and I get along great!”
Elsewhere in her remarks, the third-generation member of of the Loews Corporation dynasty claimed that Mamdani had told her last year he planned to keep her on as boss of the boys and girls in blue once he was sworn in because “Jessie, I ran on taxing the rich, you’re going to need a job.”
Tisch, 45, was honored with the Happy Warrior Award at the annual dinner hosted by the Archdiocese of New York, renowned as a chance for politicians to take off their partisan armor and rib each other in the name of supporting the city’s needy.
“It’s been delightful sitting next to you today at this dinner,” Archbishop Ronald Hicks, presiding over his first Al Smith Dinner, told Tisch. “You are our Happy Warrior. And I just want to thank you, and also to thank your true service of continuing your family’s legacy of public service. Thank you.”
Hicks’ precedessor, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, thanked the commissioner — who he referred to as “Wonder Woman” — for giving him the opportunity to serve as NYPD co-chief chaplain and said she was doing “a splendid job.”
Lynda Carter, the actress who originated the “Wonder Woman” role on the classic 1970s TV show, was also among the audience — but not even the DC Comics heroine’s famous Lasso of Truth could get a word out of Mamdani, who did not address the gathering and whose office had no immediate comment on Tisch’s jokes.