Celebrating the arrival of the Carnival Season, the costumed and masked krewe of the Phunny Phorty Phellows will assembled on Twelfth Night, January 6, 2023 (Friday) in the Willow Street Car Barn.

At 7pm sharp, the Phunny Phorty Phellowswill board the streetcar and begin their traditional ride to "Herarld the Arrival of Carnival" down the St. Charles Ave. Streetcar Line. Of course Storyville Stompers will be there with us.

The Phellows are an historic Mardi Gras organization that first took to the streets 1878 through 1898. They were known for their satirical parades and today¹s krewe members’ costumes often reflect topical themes. The group was revived in 1981.

One Carnival historian has referred to the organization as the “Dessert of Carnival.”

The Phunny Phorty Phellows first appeared on Fat Tuesday, 1878, when they began the tradition of following the Rex parade. Since that time, the Phunny Phorty Phellows have made distinguished themselves as one of the liveliest additions to Mardi Gras with their hijinks and well-meaning mockery of the day’s events (one 1881 float depicted Rex’s traditional symbol, the Boeuf Gras, as a heifer). The original Phunny Phorty ceased parading and ultimately disbanded in 1885.

In 1981, 83 years after their predecessors’ last parade, a new group of Phellows emerged to revive the irreverent tradition as members of the Krewe of Clones (the impetus of today’s wildly ribald Krewe du Vieux).

In 1982 the Phunny Phorty Phellows became the official heralds of Mardi Gras with their Twelfth Night ride in a traditional New Orleans streetcar announcing that, at last, the pre-Lenten season of “phun and phrivolity” had arrived.

Humor and whimsy are still very much a part of the Phunny Phorty tradition with some members favoring costumes inspired by current events and the peculiarities of local culture. Masked revelers gather at the streetcar barn in Uptown New Orleans for the Twelfth Night ride and get into the spirit of the event by carrying signs and banners with humorous slogans and messages. There are champagne toasts and second line dancing as the sounds of the famous Storyville Stompers New Orleans Brass Band fill the air; the Phellows, after cutting a ribbon and announcing, “It’s Carnival Time!” then board a decked-out party streetcar.

While on their merry way, the Phellows and other revelers sip champagne, eat King Cake, dance and let fly with the very first beads of the Mardi Gras season. There are two King Cakes used for this phirst night phrolic, one for the female members and one for the gents. Custom dictates that whoever takes the slices containing the plastic Carnival babies are declared Queen and Boss Phellow for the year.

Mardi Gras 2020 will mark the 39th ride that the Phellows have kept up this Mardi Gras tradition. Phellows and revelers traditionally board at the RTA streetcar barn, located on Willow street near S. Carrollton, at 6:30 p.m. on Twelfth Night, Friday, January 6th, 2023(ROUTE). The Phunny ride will begin at 7:00 p.m. sharp. The streetcar, which, traditionally, is still bedecked in it’s yuletide dressings, will leave the station for a route that will take the partying Phellows uptown to Canal Street turnaround and then back to the barn. You can’t miss the streetcar, it’s the one with the really noisy party inside and a big sign hanging from it reading: “It’s Carnival Time!”

All this revelry is in keeping with the motto printed on a Phunny Phorty Phellows 1896 bulletin:

“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the best of men!”