Opinion: Comedy’s Biggest Prize Has Shrinking Ambitions

The Kennedy Center Honors, with the sitting president of the United States in attendance, ends each year by celebrating lifetime achievements of our nation’s greatest performing artists. Since 1998, the center has also hosted a step-sibling event in the spring specifically for comedians: the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Citing Twain for “his uncompromising perspective on social injustice and personal folly,” a select committee has bestowed this award in his name to now-late greats including Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters, as well as to still-living legends such as Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett.

This year, Kevin Hart has been named as the 25th recipient of the Mark Twain Prize (the Kennedy Center skipped 2020-21 due to the pandemic). And with absolutely no offense directed to Hart specifically, his selection begs the question: Why now? What has the 44-year-old stand-up comedian, movie star, and omnipresent TV commercial pitchman done to deserve singling out in 2024?

There’s a time and a place to celebrate Hart for all of his accomplishments as a stand-up selling out a football stadium or as a businessman putting his HartBeat Productions all over the streaming map. But this isn’t that time. As comedians love to heckle one another: “Too soon!”

Sure, Hart thrived last Sunday while presiding over a raucous three-hour roast of NFL great Tom Brady, and he’ll bookend the week for Netflix by getting ribbed and praised by his peers during the Mark Twain Prize ceremony that was taped in March. But the Brady roast had a timely weightiness to it, occurring in the wake of the quarterback’s second (and final?) retirement as well as the end of his former longtime coach Bill Belichick’s reign with the New England Patriots. While there’s plenty for comedians to pick on Hart about—as Nikki Glaser zinged him on Sunday, “I don’t mean to belittle you, but you be little, man”—there’s no particular rationale for why the Kennedy Center would single out Hart this year.

To wit, comedy’s grandest prize seemingly has shrinking ambitions. What once was a lifetime achievement award has gone mid, as in suffering through its midlife crisis phase, at only 25.

The first decade of Twain Prize recipients reads like a Hall of Fame: Pryor, Winters, Carl Reiner, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Newhart, Tomlin, Lorne Michaels, Steve Martin, Neil Simon, Billy Crystal. George Carlin became the first posthumous honoree when he died in 2008 before he could pick up his prize in person. Then the committee picked Bill Cosby in 2009 (and rescinded it in 2018), and after that, suddenly pivoted to comedians a full generation younger and still in their prime. Tina Fey was only 40 when she won in 2010, followed the next year by then-44-year-old Will Ferrell. Ellen DeGeneres was still dominating daytime TV at 54 when she won in 2012.

Burnett’s win came in 2013, followed by a shift to reward Boomers such as Jay Leno, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, David Letterman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Jon Stewart. But most Gen X comedians have held the spot most recently, from Dave Chappelle to Adam Sandler, and now Hart.

If the Kennedy Center Honors compares itself to British knighthoods, then does the Mark Twain Prize call out the court jesters? What does the prize mean? Who is it even for now?

Back in 2013, prize co-creator Cappy McGarr explained the selection process this way to The Washington Post: “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. I don’t think being famous has anything to do with it. I’m not sure how many people know who Neil Simon is. But they know The Odd Couple. They don’t know Lorne Michaels [the 2004 winner]. But comics do.”

And yet, since 2010, the Twain Prize committee has decided more often than not to opt for names that appeal to a younger demographic when it had ample opportunities to remind America about the funny people who have influenced generations—and to do so while those show-business trailblazers were alive to appreciate their tributes.

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Martin, Tomlin, Letterman, and Michaels have both awards—the Twain Prize and a Kennedy Center Honor—to their name. But Mel Brooks, a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2009, reportedly declined the chance for a separate feting from the Twain Prize folks. (Brooks will, however, accept the career achievement award from the Peabody Awards this year.) Mike Nichols and Norman Lear received Kennedy Center Honors but died without ever receiving a Twain Prize. Dick Van Dyke received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2020 and a CBS showcase spectacular last year for his 98th birthday, but still no Twain Prize.

Here’s just a shortlist of some other all-time comedy greats we could have honored with the Mark Twain Prize, but who have sadly left us: Phyllis Diller, Robin Williams, Joan Rivers, Sid Caesar, Tommy Smothers. Don Rickles lived to 90; Betty White to 99! None of them lived to win the prize. Richard Lewis died in February at 76, after announcing his retirement a year earlier, and still, no recognition from the Kennedy Center. They committee has also botched chances to toast some of the industry’s larger-than-life comedy club owners who fueled the comedy boom of the 1970s, such as Budd Friedman of the Improv and Mitzi Shore of The Comedy Store.

Perhaps the platform makes all of the difference, too, in influencing the selection process. This is the first in a new multiyear partnership to stream the Mark Twain Prize ceremony on Netflix. After broadcasting the first two years on Comedy Central in 1998-99, the ceremony moved to the more staid, albeit more publicly available, PBS from 2000 through 2022, before jumping last year to CNN. What appealed to the audience tuning into PBS might not cut it on CNN, and certainly won’t reach the masses programmed into Netflix’s algorithms.

For his part, Hart made a point multiple times during Sunday’s live roast on Netflix to “give flowers” to some of the younger comedians, like Glaser, Sam Jay, Andrew Schulz, and Tony Hinchcliffe, for their performances that night.

Wouldn’t it be something if the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize gave flowers to seventysomethings such as Danny DeVito or Christopher Guest? Elaine May is still with us at 92. Innovative talk show host Dick Cavett is 87. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are getting the biopic treatment to go along with a new documentary to cement their legacies, but still no Twain Prize for them.

If not now, then when?!

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