A week after the White House called the idea “fake news,” the Kennedy Center’s annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor will carry on this year after all, honoring comedian Bill Maher this summer.

“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, said Thursday in a statement. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse — one politically incorrect joke at a time.”

The announcement comes after Trump recently publicly insulted Maher and after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Washington Post that rumors of the comedian receiving the award this year were “fake news.”

The gala is scheduled for June 28, less than a week before the Fourth of July, which the Kennedy Center has said will be its final hurrah before closing for two years for renovations.

“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 a 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.”

The annual award ceremony historically has honored a comedian at the Kennedy Center for a red carpet welcome and show full of speeches from their famous colleagues. It typically takes place in mid- to late-March and is televised a few months later.

Past honorees include Conan O’Brien, Kevin Hart, Adam Sandler, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Carol Burnett and Richard Pryor.

Maher has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, who last year appointed himself head of the Kennedy Center and renamed it to include his name in addition to John F. Kennedy’s. Maher and Trump shared dinner last year at the White House, a meetup facilitated by Kid Rock, which Maher previously said was a positive experience and showed a different side of a “person who plays a crazy person on TV.”

But just last month, Maher poked fun at the president for comments he made on Truth Social criticizing Canada’s trade deal negotiations with China, in which Trump claimed that the deal would lead to China deciding to “terminate all ice hockey.”

“I can usually suss out something in this, but why would China take over, destroy hockey?” Maher said on “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Trump fired back on Truth Social, claiming that their 2025 dinner was a waste of time and that Maher was “extremely nervous” and “had ZERO confidence in himself.”