Meeting Cheeseball Man: New York’s Unique Experiences

By Rory Grant

If you live or commute anywhere around the East Village, you are bound to see lampposts covered with an older white man saying “Looking for love” or “Starting my gangsta rap career”. Although ironic and occasionally funny, these repetitive and unoriginal posters become annoying to look at. Luckily for us Lower East Siders, somebody else has taken the call and reinvigorated New York’s poster game with a new sense of fun and excitement.

“Watch me eat this entire jar of cheeseballs.” It’s such a simple but captivating headline. You might assume it was a joke, but no, he was dead serious. Cheeseball Man hung up over 400 of these posters all over New York, and on April 27th, at 3 pm on the dot, Cheeseball Man arrived in Union Square to a crowd of over 1,500. As the extravaganza continued, the circle around Cheeseball Man continued to grow bigger and bigger. Ball after ball continued down his gullet until, eventually, he had eaten the entire jar of cheeseballs. With an incredible performance, one that would garner national attention on shows like Good Morning America, everybody wanted to know, who was Cheeseball Man?

On August 1st, the world would finally know. A YouTuber by the name of Anthpo (short for Anthony Po) would release a video titled I Was New York’s Cheeseball Man, documenting the entire experience and the months of celebrity status Cheeseball Man would attain. Anthpo was by no means a megastar on the platform, but with nearly 2,000,000 subscribers he had amassed a very serious following. 

As a longtime fan of his channel, I thought what he had done was awesome, and expected it to be an amazing one and done idea just like almost all of his other big videos, and was surprised when just a few days later he uploaded footage of another event he had done over the summer, I Went Undercover And Started A Superhero Squad, where Cheeseball Man and Banana Boy(later revealed to be Anthony’s friend Hanbon) showed up at Bryant Park and got hundreds of people to eat bananas, even interrupting a nearby wedding.

I knew I had to check one of these events out for myself, and as I returned to the city for the school year, it wasn’t long before I came upon one of these posters.

I unfortunately arrived about 10 minutes late, and by the time I got there, the crowd was a circle of hundreds of people. By the end, I would estimate nearly a thousand people had ended up coming to watch. There certainly was no set up from what I could tell, they brought nothing but themselves and their camera equipment. 

With a pickle juice baptism, homemade diss tracks, and chant after chant, they managed to keep the energy going the entire time. The crowd was completely invested. While it was only a 40 minute performance, it finished with a bang. 

This next event wouldn’t be hidden behind posters on the street, they announced it loud and proud: Cheeseball Man would be having a boxing event, against his “mortal enemy”, The Cornhead Killer. Known for his evil pranks all over NYC, Cornhead Killer has been inconveniencing the masses for the past few months, filming it for his 285,000 followers. Throughout the entire show, everyone worked hard to seriously prioritize fan engagement, and stayed for nearly an hour after the show signing autographs and taking photos, even requesting boxing advice from fans who fought amateurly. 

This was one of the most fun experiences I had in 2024, and I can’t wait to cheer on Cheeseball Man at his next event.