Three Men in a Room — wasn’t that a ’70s sitcom?
Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara riffed at comical length Friday on one of Albany’s oldest and most notorious memes: that the state is run by its governor plus the leaders of the Senate and Assembly, the “three men in a room.”
“I have a little bit of a hard time getting my head around this concept of three men in a room,” Bharara said during a capacity-crowd speech at New York Law School.
“Like why three men? Can there be a woman? Do they always have to be white? How small is the room that they can only fit three men? Is it three men in a closet?”
As the audience erupted in laughter, the prosecutor kept at it.
“Are there cigars? Can they have Cuban cigars now? After a little while, doesn’t it get a little gamey in that room?”
Rather than being fought or even questioned, the “Three Men” trope has only taken deeper root through the years, Bharara said. “It’s almost become like part of the furniture — the political furniture,” he said.
“And it’s weird to me a little bit that officials and writers joke about it good-naturedly as if they’re talking nostalgically about an old sitcom coming up after “Happy Days” — it’s “Three Men in a Room,” he said to more audience laughter.
“Or like it’s a high-jinks comic movie involving a baby with Ted Danson and Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg changing diapers. Or maybe, I don’t know, the Three Amigos.
“So three men in a room, is that really how government should be run? Is that really the way to run a state of almost 20 million people? When did 20 million New Yorkers agree to be ruled like a triumvirate in Roman times?” he asked.
“And so I ask again, what kind of a system is that?
“And I venture to guess,” he added, “that not a single person in this room or in the overflow room or anyone else save for the three disagrees with me.”