It looks like talk show host and comedian Bill Maher will be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, despite a strong initial denial from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award,” Leavitt told The Washington Post on March 20 in response to a report by The Atlantic.
The onetime host of “Politically Incorrect” who now helms the HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher” will be getting the recognition he has craved for years.
“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,” Maher said in a statement. “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.”
It’s unclear why the White House initially denied that Maher was being honored. But officials have just decided to declare that everyone else was lying.
“This was false reporting at the time of the Atlantic’s reporting, but the situation changed after further conversations took place between the Trump Kennedy Center and event organizers over the past week,” a White House administration official told The Washington Post.
Regardless, it’s great news for Maher, who has seemingly been vying for the honor for quite some time.
“Larry King, every time I was on, he would say, ‘You are more like Mark Twain than anybody that we’ve had in a long time,’” Maher claimed in a 2024 podcast.
It sure is weird that he’s now claiming he needed the award “explained” to him.
In a press release obtained by CNN, Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, acknowledged Maher’s long comedic history of unabashedly, and without filter, mocking both the left and the right.
“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” said Daravi. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse – one politically incorrect joke at a time.”
Maher will be the 27th recipient of the award, and the first pick since President Donald Trump took control of the Kennedy Center board and slapped his own name on the storied facility. Past recipients have included Conan O’Brien, David Letterman, Carol Burnett, and Tina Fey.
Normally, the award is given out in the spring. But Maher is set to receive the honor on June 28, just days before the July 4 closure for reconstruction that will take close to two years.
Related| Close the Kennedy Center? Trump’s plan may be illegal.
Maher has been a longtime critic of Trump, to the point where the president has publicly called the comic a “jerk” and filed a lawsuit against him after Maher promised to make a $5 million charitable donation if Trump could prove he was not the son of an orangutan.
Unsurprisingly, Maher’s decision to rub shoulders with Trump last year raised plenty of eyebrows. Following an invitation to have dinner at the White House, the comedian took to his TV show to sing the president’s praises.
His about-face sparked backlash. Comedian Larry David used an op-ed to paint a larger narrative on the situation in a wildly popular piece titled “My Dinner with Adolf.”
While David never spoke of Maher or Trump by name, he sent a message that was loud and clear to his comedic colleague.
“‘I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other,’” David wrote. “And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”
