After Looking Bored at Forum, Weiner Finds Energy to Bandy With Press

He slouched back deeply into his chair, played with his pen, stole glances at his Blackberry and stared off into space.

There was no concealing it: Anthony D. Weiner was bored at an hourlong and, truth be told, fairly sedate forum for Democratic mayoral candidates in Midtown on Monday night.

But don’t tell that to Mr. Weiner.

“You looked more bored than I did,” he shot back at a reporter who asked about his demeanor. “Stop breaking my chops.”

Question and answer sessions with Mr. Weiner, a skilled and joyful jouster, are always lively affairs. But after he sat listlessly on stage, the contrast between Forum Weiner and Press Weiner was unusually stark.

A sampling of that exchange with several reporters:

Q: You did look bored.

A: Stop with that! That’s my natural face. My natural face.

Q: You seemed to know what we were saying on Twitter. Were you so bored that you checked your phone?

A: I just knew you’d be giving me a hard time about my demeanor.

Q: You really did look bored. Do you like doing these forums?

A: I did not look bored. How do you think you looked? You were really bored!

Q: Do you think you can get through dozens and dozens of these like your opponents have?

A: No.

Q: Are you going to stop going?

A: I had a ball here. Don’t you have any â€" shouldn’t you be covering the content? It really … is my posture…

Duly chastened, the assembled reporters turned to the substance of the just-ended forum.

At one point in the forum, Mr. Weiner had spoken passionately and compellingly about the city’s yawning income inequality, positing that “the average New Yorker is poor today.”

“The median income is $45,000 a year,” he said. “We dislocate our shoulders patting ourselves on the back because we’ve had job growth over the last few years.”

The city, he argued, is really just trading middle-income jobs for work that pays poverty wages. He challenged those in the room to confront the reality that a city teeming with rich people was bad for business over time.

“There are only so many oligarchs that are going to buy our apartments,” he said. “There are only so many millionaires who are going to sue each other. Sooner or later, we need middle-class people who have money in their pocket to go out and buy products.”

He concluded with an unexpected, parochial jab at a national restaurant chain: “It’s not good enough to say, I created a job at a Red Lobster. I don’t know what Red Lobster is. It’s a thing. Apparently, it’s like Lundy’s for people in Manhattan.”

This joke, about a famed seafood restaurant in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, was apparently lost on much of the young audience.

A reporter from The New York Post wondered if Mr. Weiner was “satisfied with your opponents’ answers to these questions?”

Mr. Weiner smiled mischievously. “I will read about it tomorrow in the in-depth New York Post coverage of this debate.”

He predicted the headline: “Anthony Weiner Slouched.”

He was wrong.

“Weiner Claws Red Lobster,” read the Post headline.