Bill Maher has officially been named the 2026 recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
The honor will be presented during a ceremony at the Kennedy Center on June 28th, shortly before the venue closes for two years of renovations.
It was previously reported that Donald Trump initially approved the decision to name Maher the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize, only to reverse course after the news leaked last week. He has now apparently changed his mind again.
Though Maher has long been a critic of Trump and was once sued by the then-future president over a joke he made about his father, the two have developed a more cordial relationship during Trump’s second term. Maher even dined at Mar-a-Lago last year.
“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” said Roma Daravi, VP of the Kennedy Center. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse – one politically incorrect joke at a time.”
“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 his own 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.”
Past recipients of the Mark Twin Prize include David Letterman (2017), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (2018), Dave Chappelle (2019), Jon Stewart (2022), Adam Sandler (2023), Kevin Hart (2024), and Conan O’Brien (2025).
