Bill Maher accepted the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Sunday night with a message for anyone hoping to stay out of his monologues: Try being less ridiculous.
“You want to not get mocked? Stop being funny,” Maher said from the stage at the Kennedy Center. “Then the jokes won’t work. When they are ridiculous, they do work, and when people laugh, you’re caught.”
He added: “Laughter is involuntary. It’s people’s inescapable truth detector, whether they want to believe it or not.”
That was the animating argument of a ceremony that honored Maher as one of comedy’s most persistent equal-opportunity offenders—and one that, inevitably, unfolded with Donald Trump hovering over the room despite not being there.
The ceremony, held Sunday night in Washington, D.C., was filmed for Netflix, where Bill Maher: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor will premiere July 21.
Maher’s road to the Mark Twain Prize had already included a White House denial, a Kennedy Center reversal, a court order removing Trump’s name from the building, and Trump’s own declaration that he wanted to hand the “failing Institution” back to Congress.
By Sunday night, the building was technically back to being the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But the Trump era was still visible, as tarps remained outside, covering the area where Trump’s name had been removed from the marble facade.
Inside, the jokes followed.
Woody Harrelson congratulated Maher on receiving the award “ironically at the Trump Kennedy Center,” then corrected himself: “Oh right, we fixed that.”
Whitney Cummings joked that, with Trump’s influence as chairman of the Kennedy Center, the fall program might include a “three-month run of white Hamilton.” She also offered one of the night’s sharper Trump jokes, saying she had heard the president might attend but “got caught in sex traffic.”
Matt Friend, appearing as Trump, made the subtext even more explicit, eventually demanding the Mark Twain Prize for himself. “I get so many more laughs than this guy,” Friend said in character.
Maher, who has famously never won an Emmy for his shows, responded: “Just take it. I am used to losing awards.”
Maher addressed Trump directly in his own remarks, noting that the president routinely calls him part of the “lunatic left.”
“Okay, he’s not wrong that there is one,” Maher said. “I’m just not part of it.”
Maher went on to invoke recent efforts to censor Adventures of Huckleberry Finn over its racist language, even though, as he put it, the language is in “the service of mocking racism.”
“The silly purists on the left want to ban it now, which just shows that if you hang around long enough and create something important enough, everyone hates you at some point, and that is when you know you are doing it right,” Maher said.
Maher added that he was “sure there is a lunatic right,” too, and said both sides tend to object when they become the punchline.
The ceremony traced Maher’s career from Politically Incorrect through Real Time, his stand-up specials, and his podcast, presenting him as a comedian who has made a career of refusing to stay in one ideological lane.
Others on hand to honor (and roast) Maher included Jay Leno, Arianna Huffington, Louis C.K., Stephen A. Smith, a performance by John Mellencamp, and an unannounced video appearance by Jerry Seinfeld.
Louis C.K., whose appearance underscored the night’s very Maher-esque tolerance for discomfort, credited Maher with standing by him after the sexual misconduct scandal that derailed his mainstream career. Maher, C.K. said, “offered to help me when no one else would.”
On the red carpet before the show, Maher seemed perfectly comfortable with the night’s strange political weather.
Asked by CNN whether he was surprised to be receiving the prize after the White House had initially called reports of his selection fake news, Maher said no.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens again before the show starts,” he said. “Anything could happen. President Trump has an exciting presidency.”
Maher also said his feud with Trump had returned to familiar form, with the president once again insulting him publicly. That, he suggested, was preferable to being ignored.
“I’d rather be fighting and yelling,” Maher told CNN. “I’d rather the channels be open.”
For Maher, that was more or less the theme of the night. He praised his own audience as people who do not demand to be pandered to, and said it had been “the honor of a lifetime” to push back against groupthink.
“People say they want honesty, they don’t,” Maher said. “They want to live in a bubble. They say they want to be challenged. They don’t, except for my audience. They love it, and I love them for it.”
It was a fittingly complicated night for a fittingly complicated honoree: a Trump critic receiving one of comedy’s highest honors at a Kennedy Center where Trump’s name may have come down, but his presence still loomed over the room.
The full ceremony streams July 21 on Netflix.
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