“Man waits not for time or tide,” Mark Twain once observed. Men and women do, however, sometimes wait for press credentials, and Sunday night’s ceremony awarding the 27th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher at the once-and-future Kennedy Center was one of those times.
We’d all received an email warning that we would not be admitted if we arrived later than 5 p.m. We had plenty of time to stand around grousing about it in the Hall of Nations before we were all ordered back outside so media check-in could begin at 5:43 on the dot. Though announced performers Woody Harrelson, John Mellencamp, and Louis C.K. skipped the red carpet, Matt Friend, Arianna Huffington, Senator John Fetterman (D?-Pa.), Jay Leno, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick all gave face-time to reporters. Maher did, too, though he was whisked away after speaking to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Edwards, whose red carpet position was a few plots to the north of that of DC Theater Arts. The last man standing on the red carpet as ushers warned ticket-holders to take their seats in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall was Mehmet Oz, who joined the Trump Administration after losing the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race to Fetterman, then the state’s lieutenant governor.
I asked Leno about his comments in the wake of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s cancellation announcement last summer that comedians should be wary of “cozying too much to one side or the other,” as he seemed to imply Colbert had done with his sharp criticism of the Trump Administration. On the carpet, Leno seemed to distance himself from his summer 2025 remarks, saying, “I don’t give advice to other comedians like that. It’s not my job. Bill is a patriotic guy who believes in the Constitution, and he feels the need to defend it every chance he can. I’m quite proud of him for that.” The night’s honoree, Maher, has found himself in hot water with the right and left alike at various points during his 33-year career as a basic-cable, then network, then premium-cable talk show host, a fact he would embrace as a badge of honor while accepting the Twain prize from Leno a couple of hours later.
As the first Twain Prize recipient since Trump installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center and replaced its board with cronies — last year’s winner, Conan O’Brien, was chosen by the Kennedy Center leadership Trump fired — Maher and his supporters seemed eager to refute the suggestion that there was anything transactional about the award. The administration even refuted the announcement that Maher would receive the prize last March as “fake news,” though like so much of what Trump has tried to spin that way, it proved to be fake fake news, a.k.a. the truth.
Maher has most recently been more despised by the left than by the right, especially after dining at the White House last year and praising Trump as “gracious and measured.” Last week, Maher hosted Vice President J.D. Vance on his long-running HBO talk show Real Time, just a day after Vance had remarked — shamefully but probably correctly — that the Watergate scandal that eventually prompted President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in 1974 would be nothing more than “a 12-hour news story” if it happened now. Maher pushed back on Vance about the administration’s Iran war, election denialism, and ICE cruelty. But Maher’s comment that his 2028 vote could be “in play” if Vance would pledge not to claim that any Democratic victory meant the election was tainted echoed louder than anything else. In any case, Vance offered no assurances that the GOP’s Trump-driven election denialism would be retired post-Trump.
So that was the charged environment in which Kennedy Center trustee Pamela Rolland DeVos introduced Maher to start the show. Maher simply waved and took his seat at the stage-right box, leaving the talking to the first of the evening’s performers, DC native and 2 Broke Girls co-creator Whitney Cummings. As if to prove that the night would not suffer from an excess of presidential fealty, she started with a joke she said she’d been warned not to use — that Trump wasn’t there because he got “stuck in sex traffic.”
Cummings then launched into the first of the evening’s lightly barbed tributes to Maher, calling him “a warrior for free speech. He believes you should be able to say anything at any time — especially when someone else is mid-sentence.” Her best joke was about that Kid Rock-brokered White House dinner, which she characterized as in keeping with Maher’s loud-and-proud atheism. “Seeing Donald Trump, Dana White, and Kid Rock together in the White House once and for all proves there really is no God,” she quipped.
Cummings’ encomium gave way to a Maher clip reel, this one drawn from his 13 stand-up specials. In the first, Maher explained why he’s not a Republican and never has been. The reel ended with a bit seemingly about celebrity wardrobe, with Maher adopting the persona of a sex worker: “I’m not on my way to an awards show. I’m a whore. A real whore!”
The awards show continued with the introduction of its most-scandalized performer, Louis C.K. Largely abstaining from jokes, C.K. called Maher’s demeanor “a rare thing for comedians. He doesn’t need you to think he’s a good guy, but he is.” C.K., a once-celebrated comedian and filmmaker whose career took a dive after he admitted in 2017 that allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against him by five women were true, cited the fact that Maher had reached out to invite him on Real Time in the wake of this crisis as evidence of Maher’s decency. C.K. did not remind the audience of the circumstances of his cancellation, which in any case has proved temporary: His new special, Ridiculous, hit Netflix just two days after the Mark Twain Prize ceremony, three weeks before the streaming service will air the tribute to Maher.
After another clip reel, Woody Harrelson took the stage. “I’ve known Bill a long time,” the actor reminisced. “Since back when he was funny.” Harrelson’s jokes got a shaky reception in the room, prompting him twice to quip, “That joke’s not for everyone,” but I appreciated his bit — whoever wrote it — challenging the crowd to identify which among several quotations he read came from the pen of Mark Twain, and which ones belonged to the man of the hour, Bill Maher.
There came another sincere, joke-free encomium from sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, who declared that Maher is “no mainstream, he’s upstream” before going on to quote an entire verse of “My Way,” the Paul Anka song that Frank Sinatra turned into a mission statement. Recited like the Pledge of Allegiance, it just sounded weird.
HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington was up next. Recalling her first appearance on Maher’s roundtable chat show Politically Incorrect in 1993, she said she felt self-conscious about her Greek accent, and expressed gratitude for the host’s words of consolation: “In American public life, you cannot underestimate the value of complete and total incomprehensibility.”
Huffington went on to point out that she was a guest on the September 2001 episode of Politically Incorrect — which by then had leapt from Comedy Central to ABC — wherein Maher opined that whatever else the 9/11 hijackers were, they were not cowards. The blowback was swift and, despite Maher’s attempts at damage control, sustained, leading the network to cancel Politically Incorrect the following June. Huffington cited that evening as emblematic of Maher’s career: “A standing ovation in the room. Panic in the control room.” Though she lamented her friend’s godlessness and preference for dating much younger women over settling down, she reiterated her love.
After Huffington, Leno — who received the Twain Prize in 2014 — reported for the task of actually presenting the little bust-of-Twain trophy to Maher. The Kennedy Center was not Maher’s first-choice venue in which to be honored, Leno quipped, “but the Playboy Mansion was not available.” Zing.
The 76-year-old Leno, who continues to tour his standup act, was by far the most seasoned joke-teller on the bill, but he seemed to rush through his set, stepping on his own scattered laughs. “Do you know who Bill Maher’s first guest on Politically Incorrect was?” Leno asked us. “Mark Twain!” That’s one septuagenarian teasing another about his age.
Maher finally took the stage, only to have impressionist Matt Friend “interrupt” him with a riff on Kanye’s crashing of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, an already much-lampooned teapot-tempest that happened when Friend was 11 years old.
“I’ma let you finish,” Friend interjected, quoting MAGA’s favorite rapper, but he did so in the vocal guise of the president who’d been ever-present in absentia. Building on a joke that Maher had told the press earlier — that he would accept the Twain prize and promptly hand it over to the leader whose name had earlier that year been applied to and then removed from the edifice of the building — Friend’s Trump insisted that he was a more deserving recipient than Maher. Maher’s protest earned him a “Quiet, piggy!” before Friend-Trump went on to claim, with typical Trump absurdity, that he knew Mark Twain. “He was part of my first cabinet, but I fired him like a dog!” The screen cut to a photo of walrus-’stached former U.N. ambassador and National Security Adviser John Bolton standing behind Trump in the Oval Office. Reader, I laughed.
Maher cited his Emmy Award record — 41 nominations, zero wins — musing that he should’ve won by clerical error by this point.
Noting his admiration for prior Twain prize winners Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Robert Klein, Johnny Carson, and Leno, Maher declared that his true comedic hero is Toto, Dorothy’s dog from The Wizard of Oz, because the pup “pulls back the curtain and shows you who’s a phony.” Maher went on to opine that the first year of Real Time, the long-running HBO show that premiered in early 2003, wasn’t particularly good, and expressed gratitude to the premium cable network for giving the program time to find its feet. He even thanked internet punching bag David Zaslav by name, along with Netflix chief Ted Sarandos. (The notion of Sarandos and other executive thank-yous becoming a contractual requirement was a plot point in Seth Rogen’s very funny HBO series The Studio.) Finally, Maher thanked “the haters,” telling this big-tent coalition, “You have helped me more than you know.”
There followed one of the evening’s few reminders that this was in fact a live taping of a Netflix special, as the director’s voice over the P.A. asked the crowd to cheer for cranky heartland troubadour John Mellencamp for a second time, after the musician’s equipment was set up on stage. Mellencamp, who has never made a secret of his lefty politics, performed an acoustic version of his 1983 hit “Pink Houses,” appending a couple of the song’s lyrics: “Go to work in some high rise / and vacation down in the Gulf of Mexico… or whatever they call it now.” A moment later, he appended the line “A simple man, baby, pays the thrills, the bills, the pills that kill” with a shot at big pharma.
After the song, the 74-year-old told the crowd that his entire family watches Real Time on Friday nights the way his household sat down for The Ed Sullivan Show when he was a kid. His concluding number, he said, was a personal request from Maher. The house band then joined him in the barn-burner “Authority Song,” a Reagan-era update of “I Fought the Law” with thundering drums and a chorus that goes, “When I fight authority, authority always wins.”
It’s a great song. There was something self-conscious and self-congratulatory about its iconoclasm, even when the song was brand-new and Maher was a 27-year-old working comic making regular Late Night and The Tonight Show appearances and popping up in the best film ever made about DC cabs, D.C. Cab. That made it, like so very little of what had come before, a perfect choice.
The 27th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor honoring Bill Maher took place on Sunday, June 28, 2026, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The ceremony will stream exclusively on Netflix beginning July 21, 2026.
