On Wednesday, they sold off the last traces of the shuttered New York Friars Club, a temple to comedy that was once the stomping ground of America’s leading jokesters and other entertainers.
A violin that had been owned by the comic Jack Benny drew a bid of $22,400.
A G.I. Joe-type action figure featuring Frank Sinatra in a suit went for $256.
A signed poster from the club’s roast of Quentin Tarantino sold for $5,120.
Much of the club’s treasured showbiz memorabilia — photo albums featuring Barbra Streisand and Sammy Davis Jr., paintings of big-time guests like Jerry Lewis, even the club’s liquor license and billiards table — drew prices well above the online auction estimates.
But the Friars, who like to think they can joke about anything, could find nothing funny about the sale. Some had hoped these relics of yesteryear might find their way into museums or back to various members. Instead they were sold off by the company that foreclosed on the club’s landmark East 55th Street building when the Friars could not pay back a loan.
“It leaves a very sour taste in all of our mouths,” said Tom Cotter, a comedian who joined the club in 1996 and who commiserated with fellow Friars as the auction unfolded. “We’re all very broken up about it.”
Titled “Legends of Comedy,” the auction of 140 lots featured thousands of individual images and documents, hundreds of framed items and even a bit of kitsch (think yellow trophies designed to look like real friars). The sale fetched a little more than $500,000 including the auction house’s 28 percent buyer’s premium.
The sell-off, organized by Julien’s Auctions of California, was set in motion by Kairos Credit Strategies Operating Partnership, which took control of the club — a Manhattan brownstone — for $17.2 million after a December 2024 foreclosure sale.
Along with the property came everything inside: a century’s worth of artwork, artifacts and ephemera that could serve as a chronicle of American comedy from the days of Will Rogers through the eras of Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball, Billy Crystal and Tracy Morgan.
The club was founded in 1904 and its “roasts,” often ribald but typically good-natured sessions of public ridicule were for decades the ultimate backhanded compliment reserved for show business big shots. The events, usually held at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom, often made newspaper headlines. Celebrities like Sinatra, Milton Berle, Hugh Hefner, Phyllis Diller and Arnold Schwarzenegger were pelted with waggish insults by a stream of comics and friends.
The auction material that captured much of that history had been carefully stored away on Staten Island by Anthony Trombetta, a former Friars general manager who described himself in an interview as “the last employee out who locked the doors for the last time.”
It was 2023, Trombetta recalled, and a combination of pandemic protocols and a flood had forced the club to close up. As one of the last Friar officials standing, he said, “I wanted to safeguard that collection.”
“I’d hoped these items would find themselves in museums or with the families of the people in them,” Trombetta added. In the end, though, he had to “wave the white flag” and turn over the storage keys to the new owners.
“I guess they’re trying to claw back some money,” he said.
Executives with Kairos Credit Strategies, which has listed the building for nearly $21 million, did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
Items sold included an old trunk filled with hundreds of jokes about farmers, plumbers, college professors and the like, written or pasted onto note cards. It fetched $28,800. A pile of yellowing boxes brimming with rare photos of the very famous sold for $38,400. One lot containing the club’s occupancy and liquor permits and other posted signs sold for $512.
The two top-selling items, a portrait and a bronze bust of Frank Sinatra, each went for $64,000,
Catherine Williamson, the managing director for Hollywood sales at Julien’s, saw a positive aspect to the sell-off.
“A lot of times these auctions come as part of the cycle of life,” she said. “Something or someone has had a big life and flourished, and the things they loved go to new homes where they will also be loved.”
Marvin Scott, senior correspondent for PIX11 news in New York, and a longtime “prior,” or vice president, of the Friars, said he felt sick because the auction really signaled the end of the club.
“It’s the final nail,” he said.
Scott said he was disappointed to see a time capsule filled with Friars memorabilia that he assembled during the club’s 100th anniversary, in 2004, was up for sale. (It sold for $8,960, well above its high estimate of $600.) The lid of the capsule, he pointed out, reads: “To be opened in 2104.”
“We are a victim of the times,” he said.
Cotter worried that items like the Sinatra memorabilia and the trunk of jokes would “end up forgotten in someone’s basement.”
“It leaves a hollow feeling in our guts to know that these priceless objects have been auctioned off to just whoever,” he added.
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