Since 1998, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has annually given one person the Mark Twain Prize, named for that giant of American comedy. This year’s choice of Bill Maher has left many people asking, “Really?”
Given last year’s drama surrounding the Kennedy Center — including President Donald Trump firing its board and top staff, replacing them with his cronies, adding his own name to its name, announcing that it will shut down for two years and, just Thursday, beginning layoffs of its staff — there was no question that its eventual selection of a Mark Twain Prize recipient would not be universally praised. But Maher is a particularly odd choice, one that says something about conservatives, Trump and their relationship to comedy.
Maher is a particularly odd choice.
We don’t know if Trump personally approved the selection because the process is opaque; the Mark Twain Prize winner is chosen by the Kennedy Center’s board and staff, but how they go about it is unclear. As one board member said in 2013, “We try to choose people who’ve had a full lifetime of making us laugh and who’ve had a great influence on the people who’ve followed them.” Since this is the Trump administration, Maher’s selection was delivered with a combination of incompetence and rage. The Atlantic reported a week before that Maher would receive prize, prompting White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to tell reporters, “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award.” Until it was true news.
Maher’s selection is also unusual because of his complex relationship with the president. Last April, he had a friendly visit in the Oval Office (prompting Larry David to write a parody op-ed for The New York Times titled “My Dinner With Adolf”), but he also has made plenty of jokes at Trump’s expense. Maher’s own views on politics are a mishmash of liberal and conservative ideas, but it’s hard not to believe that whatever admiration Trump has for him comes mostly because of Maher’s contempt for “wokeness” and his desire to be seen as a brave thinker who says what others are too afraid to say. Which is how Trump thinks of himself.
Yet given the current status of the Kennedy Center, one would think it would have found a genuinely right-wing comedian to award. The problem is almost no one deserves it.
That’s not to say every Kennedy Center choice has been a home run, but many of the honorees have been true comedy legends, including Richard Pryor, Carl Reiner, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett and Eddie Murphy. Had the center just wanted an older Republican entertainer, it could have gone with Trump fan Tim Allen: successful standup career, hit TV show, lead roles in one huge franchise (Toy Story) and one truly great movie (Galaxy Quest).
But according to The Washington Post, Trump loyalist Richard Grenell, whom he appointed to head the Kennedy Center, had a different choice in mind to stand alongside the likes of Neil Simon, George Carlin and Steve Martin: Greg Gutfeld. If, like most Americans, you aren’t familiar with Gutfeld, he hosts a late night “comedy” show on Fox News called Gutfeld!, which is so painfully unfunny it could be mistaken for a parody of lame conservative comedy produced by liberals to mock right-wing media.
It’s not that conservatives can’t be funny; they certainly have produced a growing number of successful comedians in the last few years. But because that’s a relatively recent development, those comedians are mostly younger, not the type to win a lifetime achievement award.
But they’re still a minority within the comedy world, and likely always will be. It’s part of a broader phenomenon across all art forms: Art is built on exploration and ambiguity, and liberals are more comfortable than conservatives in that psychological space. In addition, liberal and conservative comedy tend to be different: Liberals are drawn to irony and satire, while conservatives favor trolling, i.e. punching down and giving offense.
It’s no accident that in the Trump era, the number of conservative comedians has risen precipitously, as they saw a market opportunity for humor of the kind Trump fans like. There is now a whole spate of conservative stand-ups and comedy podcasts, and Republicans have integrated them into the party’s political message machine. We saw that vividly near the end of the 2024 campaign, when right-wing roast comedian Tony Hinchcliffe performed a cringeworthy routine at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden. Along with a series of uncreative jokes built on racial and ethnic stereotypes (Black people eat watermelon, Jews love money), he drew groans from the crowd when he said, “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Rather than distance himself from the joke, Trump embraced it, riding around in a garbage truck and wearing a safety orange vest at rallies, to prolong the controversy.
That’s a key part of conservative humor as it exists today: Make an offensive joke, then when people take offense, double down to show how little you care about anyone’s feelings (setting aside the fact that nobody whines and complains as much as conservatives, especially Trump himself). That’s Maher’s stock-in-trade too, which may help explain why, in this Trump era, he’s a Mark Twain Prize honoree.
Perhaps by the time the celebration takes place in June, it will have been renamed the Donald Trump Mark Twain Prize, which would be appropriate for the moment — but not all that funny.
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