Bill Maher’s Mark Twain Prize ceremony was always going to be strange.
It was set to be the first Mark Twain Prize awarded by a Kennedy Center remade in the image of Donald Trump—a president not exactly known for his warm feelings toward late-night comedy. Trump had taken control of the institution, installed loyalists, lent his name to it, and turned what had long been one of comedy’s most prestigious institutional honors into something much more politically charged.
Then things got stranger.
When word first surfaced that the veteran comic and host of HBO’s long-running Real Time would receive the prize, the White House knocked the reports down hard.
Then, days later, the Kennedy Center made it official: Maher would receive the prize at a June 28 gala in Washington, D.C., with the ceremony—per a pre-existing multi-year deal—streaming later on Netflix.
The White House explanation was that the earlier reports had been false “at the time,” but that the situation had changed after further conversations between the Kennedy Center and event organizers. Maher, naturally, turned the whiplash into a punchline.
“Thank you to the Mark Twain people: I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it’s like an Emmy, except I win,” he said. “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.”
For all the awkwardness around the rollout, Maher’s selection made a certain Trump-era sense.
Trump and Maher have had their ups and downs, which is putting it mildly. Maher has spent years mocking Trump, and Trump has returned fire with insults—and lawsuits—of his own. But they also shared a meal at the White House just last year, and Maher has said they texted one another for a time until Trump took issue with one of Maher’s comments on his show months later.
All of which is to say that in Trump’s personal ranking of late-night enemies, Maher has never seemed to occupy quite the same place as Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, or even Jimmy Fallon. He is an irritant, but not always the worst kind of irritant. He attacks Trump, but he also attacks liberal pieties, campus politics, “woke” culture, and the same Hollywood establishment Trump loves to portray as smug and corrupt.
For Trump’s Kennedy Center, Maher probably looked like a lesser of most evils: a legitimate comedy figure, a longtime late-night host, a political provocateur, and someone difficult to dismiss as just another liberal entertainer collecting a liberal entertainment prize.
For Maher, the calculation was just as clear. He’s never been shy about wanting more recognition from the industry. He has complained for years about never winning an Emmy, and about the price he believes he’s paid in liberal Hollywood for refusing to stay inside its preferred political lines. The Mark Twain Prize offered him the establishment validation he’s so often suggested he deserves—under circumstances messy enough to make accepting it feel like part of his brand rather than a betrayal of it.
That was the first version of the story: Bill Maher, proudly unwelcome everywhere, accepting comedy’s most prestigious institutional honor from Trump’s Kennedy Center.
Then Trump said he was out.
After a federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center last Friday and temporarily blocked the planned two-year closure that was supposed to begin shortly after Maher’s gala, Trump responded by saying he planned to transfer the “failing Institution” back to lawmakers. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing,” Trump wrote, calling the effort a “hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND.’”
That gives Maher’s ceremony one more turn. It is no longer simply the spectacle of Maher receiving the Mark Twain Prize from Trump’s Kennedy Center. It is Maher receiving the prize after Trump’s Kennedy Center project has been checked by a court, stripped of its (new) nameplate, and disowned by Trump himself.
That may change the guest list. Performers who might have avoided a Trump-branded gala may now have an easier time showing up. Anyone hoping to use the event as a statement about Trump’s takeover, for or against, will have less to work with. In short, the room Maher walks into on June 28 promises to be different from the one everyone thought he’d agreed to enter.
But the joke, if there is one, is that all of this still somehow works for him.
Maher has spent years arguing that he is too liberal for the right, too anti-woke for the left, too prickly for Hollywood, and too successful to be ignored. Now he gets to accept the biggest comedy honor in the country at a ceremony that has annoyed almost everyone before it has even happened.
For Bill Maher, that’s less a complication than the point.
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