Bill Maher receiving Kennedy Center honor despite | TV Shows

The White House was firm with denials that comic Bill Maher could be receiving a Kennedy Center honor, but the 70-year-old seems to be getting the last snort, as he’s set to obtain the Mark Twain humor prize.

Maher, the host of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO Max, was reported to be set to obtain the prize in a March 20 Atlantic story, a declare the White House strongly denied after the fact.

According to Politico, Maher can be given the honor in a show that will air on Netflix for one of the last public occasions at the Kennedy Center before it shuts down for a two-year renovation.

Speaking to the location, a source with data of the award discussions shared particulars of the non-public course of that led to Maher’s choice.

“Anonymous sources with half-baked information leaked to The Atlantic before conversations were finalized,” they said. “There was nothing to confirm at the time and it is not appropriate to get ahead of any settled agreement between multiple parties involved.”

Maher, in an embargoed assertion in the anticipated affirmation from the Kennedy Center, said, “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.”

“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.”

The affirmation comes after the White House pushed back against reviews that he was receiving the award last week.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting the award,” and communications director Steven Cheung shared on X (previously Twitter), that the story in the Atlantic was “literally FAKE NEWS.”

Their pushback comes amid a sophisticated relationship between Trump and Maher, following a 2025 White House dinner between the 2, which Maher later called “gracious and measured” and said the president was a very different individual than how he appeared on tv.

However, in the months since, issues have taken a flip, with Trump posting rants on social media in February, claiming the comic was “scared” and a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” and that it was a “total waste of time for me to have this jerk at the White House.”

Maher later responded by saying Trump “suffers from Bill Maher derangement syndrome.”