Whitney Cummings performed a comedy set at Bill Maher’s Mark Twain Prize ceremony, which took place on June 28 at the Kennedy Center. But according to the comic, her closing joke won’t be seen in the Netflix broadcast of the event, which streams on July 21.
Cummings said earlier in July that one of her jokes about Donald Trump was cut after she performed it in rehearsal. But on a July 18 episode of her “Good for You” podcast, she revealed that another joke targeting the president, which did make it into her set, will be edited out of the Netflix broadcast. (“Donald Trump couldn’t make it tonight. He got caught in sex traffic,” goes the joke, which nods to the president’s former association with Jeffrey Epstein.)
“It stayed in, and then they said we would like to cut it out,” Cummings said, without clarifying who “they” are. A Netflix spokesperson tells Variety, “While it’s our preference not to cut jokes from anyone’s set, The Kennedy Center has the contractual right to do so.” (Cummings also posted on X, “I was super clear that Netflix did not cut anything from my Mark Twain prize set. Netflix always supports comedy and comics. Quit spreading rumors ya weirdos.”)
Cummings added on her podcast that the venue staffers are “amazing” and “don’t want to silence anyone.” “It is true that their boss is Donald Trump, so they did their job,” she said.
Since she had performed the “sex traffic” joke on stage, it had already leaked online after the ceremony. Her reaction to being asked to remove it from the telecast was: “It’s already out there. Who cares?”
“They’re like, ‘He will sue you,'” Cummings said, referring to Trump. At first, she didn’t buy it, but then she remembered Trump filed a lawsuit against Maher in 2013 after Maher joked that Trump was the “spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.”
Cummings thought it was ironic that she was being censored at the ceremony for the Mark Twain Prize, which is “about comedians using humor to criticize our elected officials.” According to the Kennedy Center website, the prize (which has previously been awarded to George Carlin, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Jon Stewart and others) recognizes people who share “fearless” observations and an “uncompromising” perspective on society.
“I am so clear now that when somebody gets offended by something, they are guilty of the thing,” Cummings said of Trump. “I just think it’s a little weird that we can’t joke about it.”
Cummings did perform another joke about Trump that made it into the broadcast, about how the president has sway over the programming of the Kennedy Center. “Enjoy this fall’s three-month run of white ‘Hamilton,'” she quipped.
“The joke implying he’s racist — no problems,” Cummings said on her podcast.
“Bill Maher: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor” is now available to stream on Netflix.