Comedian Bill Maher will be awarded Mark Twain humor prize despite earlier White House denials
He's a frequent critic of the president. 3/25/26
The White House pushed back hard after The Atlantic last week reported comedian Bill Maher would receive the Kennedy Center’s prestigious Mark Twain humor prize.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award” while communications director Steven Cheung posted on X that the Atlantic story was “literally FAKE NEWS.”
Turns out there was a punchline just waiting to be delivered.
Maher, a frequent Trump critic but also known as a heterodox comedian, will receive the prize in June in a show broadcast by Netflix in one of the Kennedy Center’s last public events before it shuts down for a two-year renovation.
The Kennedy Center is expected to announce that Maher is getting the award later Thursday morning, said a person with knowledge of the award discussions who was granted anonymity to speak about the private process that led to the selection.
“Anonymous sources with half-baked information leaked to The Atlantic before conversations were finalized,” the person said. “There was nothing to confirm at the time and it is not appropriate to get ahead of any settled agreement between multiple parties involved.”
Maher, in an embargoed statement in the forthcoming Kennedy Center announcement, said: “Thank you to the Mark Twain people: I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it’s like an Emmy, except I “I’d just like to say that it is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain,” he joked.
A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center declined to comment and a White House spokesperson referred a request for comment to the Kennedy Center. A spokesperson for Netflix didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Previous recipients of the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which started in 1998, include David Letterman, Adam Sandler and Conan O’Brien.
Trump and Maher have a complicated relationship. Trump invited Maher to dinner at the White House in 2025, and the comedian said on his show after the gathering that Trump was “gracious and measured” and a much different person than how he appears on television.
But last month, Trump said Maher was a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” and “it was a total waste of time for me to have this jerk at the White House.”Maher responded by saying that Trump “suffers from Bill Maher derangement syndrome.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/26/bill-maher-kennedy-center-mark-twain-humor-prize-00845852