Months after Mayor Zohran Mamdani defeated Curtis Sliwa, his Republican opponent, in the November election, the two made nice on Saturday night in a comedy skit featuring “Dr. Cliwa,” a physician delivering allergy shots to Mr. Mamdani, an aspiring cat owner.
The crowd at the Inner Circle, the New York City press corps’ annual roast of the mayor, guffawed — with some noteworthy exceptions.
Former Gov. David A. Paterson, Democrat of New York, who left early because of hip pain, was inundated the next day with outrage from his dinner mates.
Not only had Mr. Sliwa refused their entreaties to bow out of the mayor’s race last year to help former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the moderate Democrat who was their preferred candidate to defeat Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist.
Now Mr. Sliwa was sharing laughs in public with Mr. Mamdani, further fueling longstanding Republican suspicions that the two had formed a mutual nonaggression pact that had helped hand the election to Mr. Mamdani.
“I’m very disappointed,” said John A. Catsimatidis, the grocery store magnate and oil billionaire who ran for mayor of New York in 2013. “Now we know why he was attacking Andrew Cuomo.”
After the mayor election, Mr. Cuomo’s staff members and supporters accused Mr. Sliwa of being a spoiler, even though Mr. Sliwa won fewer votes than Mr. Cuomo lost by. But Mr. Cuomo and his allies argue that Mr. Sliwa’s relentless criticism affected the race’s fundamental dynamics and its final outcome.
Mr. Catsimatidis owns the WABC radio station on which Mr. Sliwa used to host a talk show. But during the bitter mayoral race last year, Mr. Sliwa announced he would not be returning as host because of Mr. Cuomo’s frequent appearances. (That was followed by an apparently brief rapprochement.)
Mr. Catsimatidis, who considers himself a bridge between New York Democrats and President Trump, had his own meeting with the mayor at City Hall last week.
Like Mr. Catsimatidis, Joe Borelli, a Republican lobbyist and former councilman from Staten Island, harbors suspicions about collusion between Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Sliwa.
“I supported Curtis and then he scummed me over, so I wouldn’t doubt anything about him,” Mr. Borelli said, referring to what he described as Mr. Sliwa’s talk radio attacks on him in 2021. (Mr. Sliwa ran in 2021 and 2025.)
In response, Mr. Sliwa accused Mr. Borelli of being a hypocrite who texts the mayor “nonstop.”
“People occasionally value my opinion, unlike a guy that dresses like a starboard buoy,” Mr. Borelli retorted, referring to Mr. Sliwa’s signature red beret.
(“Can confirm Borelli and the mayor text here and there,” Dora Pekec, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said. She had no immediate comment on the allegation that Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Sliwa made a nonaggression pact.)
More broadly, Mr. Sliwa said that his detractors had it all wrong and were “sore losers.”
The pretaped Inner Circle skit on Saturday emerged not because of some nonexistent nonaggression pact, he said; rather, he explained, members of the mayor’s staff had seen Mr. Sliwa praise Mr. Mamdani’s cat adoption plans in a Wall Street Journal article and thought it might make for an amusing bit.
“I said ‘Absolutely,’” Mr. Sliwa said on Sunday. “I promote people adopting, or getting cats and dogs, not having them euthanized by shelters, absolutely. And so we did that skit, which is a satire and a parody. Obviously, that’s all it was.”
Mr. Sliwa and his wife, both animal welfare advocates, share a home with six geriatric cats, he said, including Ajax, who has neurological problems; Athena, whom he described as the “matriarch”; and Apollo, the “patriarch.”
In keeping with tradition at the Inner Circle, held at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Manhattan, Mr. Mamdani and his staff performed a rebuttal to the local press corps’ two-act show. The mayor, a natural performer, opened his response with a monologue poking fun at himself and the reporters who cover him, before his staff members acted out skits of their own.
Mr. Sliwa called it hypocritical for Republicans to make a fuss about his skit with the mayor, given that Mr. Catsimatidis met with Mr. Mamdani last week, and that Mr. Trump has twice met with the mayor in the Oval Office.
“Excuse me, and I can’t do satire and a parody with the mayor about something that is so important to me and my wife: rescuing and saving animals,” Mr. Sliwa said. “People need to lighten up.”
He noted that former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and John Boehner, a Republican who served as House speaker, did a video together for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2016.
Mr. Sliwa urged his critics to “regroup, move ahead and get ready for another election” in 2029.
But for now, at least, they seemed content to criticize him.
“What’s clear is that Curtis Sliwa will grab onto any vine of any organism that is living just to try to get attention,” said Mr. Paterson, who backed Mr. Cuomo in the mayor’s race. “I think he would have himself murdered just to get attention.”
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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