Everyone loves a New Yawk accent (we don’t care if you actually don’t like it), but beyond Fred Armisen doing riffs on them at comedy shows, it’s becoming a bit of an endangered species. It’s not totally gone though, and thank goodness for that, because it means that Thursday night you can see four native New Yorkers flex their accent muscles to see who has the best one at the NYC Accent Slam. Winner gets to be the new automated voice of the subway (not really, but that’d be great).
The festivities at the City Lore Center (56 East 1st Street) start at 7pm with a screening of If These Knishes Could Talk, a documentary about the New York accent from filmmaker (and Mets fan) Heather Quinlan, in which she talks to accent experts and everyday schmos about what the accent means. After that, the accent leaps off the screen and into your life as four competitors full of moxie tell stories and jokes and just riff, all in the service of being crowned the holder of the best New York accent. Unlike our King and Queen of Brooklyn poll, there’s nothing about it being legally binding, but still, there are worse things you can do with $15 than see a cool documentary and then listen to jokes told by native New Yorkers.