In a turn of events that lands somewhere between comic opera and a master class in administrative whiplash, the Kennedy Center has confirmed that New Jersey native Bill Maher will receive the 27th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
This comes precisely one week after the White House assured the public, with the kind of definitive language usually reserved for matters of state, that such a thing would never happen.
“This is fake news,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt flatly stated last Friday, following reports that Maher was the pick. “Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award.”
She was, it turned out, simply lying, a frequent condition of conversations that involve the Trump administration, which is known to reverse itself with the same casual efficiency one might apply to changing a dinner reservation.
The ceremony is scheduled for June 28. It will be held in the very same building whose board was recently overhauled by President Donald Trump, a fact that adds a certain piquant flavor to the proceedings.
The award, after all, is named for a man born Samuel Clemens—a writer who spent his later years declaring himself a socialist, who wrote that “the human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner,” and who reserved his most caustic ink for the millionaire class of the first Gilded Age.
“What is the chief end of man?” Twain once asked. “To get rich. In what way? Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.”
He put it even more plainly elsewhere: “I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.” It is perhaps no accident that his work now finds itself ejected from school libraries with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for contraband.
Maher, for his part, responded to the news with a brief observation that he had just had the nature of the prize explained to him and was given to understand it was something like an Emmy, only with the added benefit of winning.
Maher, who was raised in River Vale, New Jersey, and graduated from Pascack Hills High School in Montvale in 1974, noted it was humbling to receive anything named for a man who has been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.
It is a line that lands with the particular resonance of a man who has himself spent decades being told, by one faction or another, that he ought to be shown the door.
The path to this moment was not, to put it mildly, a straight line.
Outgoing Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell was reportedly in favor of bestowing the honor upon Fox News host Greg Gutfeld.
Gutfeld has repeatedly sparked outrage by making inappropriate comparisons involving slavery and the Holocaust, including suggesting that enslaved people benefited from developing skills and that conservatives should claim the word “Nazi” as a term of pride.
That particular ambition foundered upon the rocks, as bizarre ambitions sometimes do, and the selection settled upon Maher, a moderate Democrat who has lampooned Trump and sometimes credited his accomplishments.
So now Maher—the man who was once sued for offering $5 million to charity if Donald could prove his mother hadn’t had sex with an orangutan—will be celebrated under the roof of an institution Trump controls.
The case, like so many things associated with Trump, went nowhere.
It is a scenario that would likely strike the old humorist from Missouri—the same one who wrote, “I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle”—as entirely, exquisitely fitting.
Maher’s relationship with the president has been a long and winding road, occasionally intersecting with the kind of litigation one does not typically associate with comedy.
There was the lawsuit, there were the periodic salvos on social media, there was the recent White House dinner which the president later characterized, in a lengthy Trump online reflection, as a waste of time. It is the kind of relationship that produces comedic material.
The Mark Twain Prize has, since its inception in 1998, sought to honor those who have left a lasting imprint on American society through the peculiar alchemy of humor.
Twain himself made plain where he stood on the great fortunes accumulating around him: “I am an anti-imperialist,” he wrote. “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” And of the men who commanded those fortunes he said, “I have no use for a man who can’t enjoy a joke at his own expense; and I have still less use for a man who makes a fortune by methods that would disgrace a burglar.”
The list of recipients includes the sharp-edged satirists, the beloved entertainers, and, in recent years, a few names that suggested the definition was being stretched to accommodate a broader kind of popularity.
The selection of Maher, a man who has spent decades on television delivering monologues designed to irritate the self-important on both sides of the aisle, suggests a return to a more pointed tradition.
One of the prize’s co-creators noted that Maher certainly deserves the honor, being one of America’s great satirists in the same spirit as the man whose name is on the prize.
He added that as a satirist, Maher will make fun of anyone in power and not in power. This is offered as a simple statement of fact, not a warning.
The ceremony itself promises to be an event of some interest.
Last year’s gathering, held after the board shakeup, featured a parade of comedians who used the stage to express their feelings about the new management with a level of clarity not typically found in official correspondence.
Sarah Silverman observed during the presentation: “I really miss the days when you were America’s only orange asshole.”
That honoree, Conan O’Brien, largely confined his remarks to thanking the Kennedy Center leadership who had been shown the door.
This year, with Maher at the podium and the full weight of the situation resting on the evening, the proceedings may take on the character of a surrender, a celebration, or a particularly well-lit argument. Perhaps, in the spirit of the prize’s namesake, all three.
The award will be recorded for broadcast on Netflix, a detail which ensures that whatever transpires will be preserved for the permanent record, to be studied by future generations attempting to understand how a nation could take itself so seriously while laughing at itself so uneasily.
In the end, the administration’s journey from flat denial to confirmed selection serves as a tidy encapsulation of the broader state of affairs. It is not quite a comedy, not quite a crisis, but something in between.
Maher certainly exhibited prescience by predicting that Trump would resist leaving power long before the failed January 6th coup d’état and the current conversation about an unconstitutional third term.
Mark Twain—who knew something about the space between things, who called himself “the only man in America who is not trying to get rich,” who wrote in his notebook that “the rich are always making it harder for the poor to get along,” and who summed up his position with the line, “I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position”—would likely recognize the territory.
He might even have a line for it. Something about history not repeating, but rhyming. Something about the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. Something about the trouble with denial being that it has a poor track record against the truth, especially when the truth keeps changing.
Unfortunately, there is nothing funny about what is happening in the United States or the world, as a buffoon holds power over the most powerful government on the planet amid so many things that can kill us all that the Doomsday Clock is set at 85 seconds to midnight.