One denigrates the award, not those who have received it--though they could decline. Whoopi Goldberg, Carl Reiner, Jonathan Winters, and Richard Pryor are all excellent humorists and gifted performers. So, too, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, George Carlin, and others. Twain was a good deal more, as are, for example, Keillor and Woody Allen. They perform(ed), mostly, their own work. Unfortunately, so far the winners of the Mark Twain Prize are only representative of a little bit of Twain. The Kennedy Center has had four chances to improve, and instead has gone farther away from Twain at each opportunity. The Prize is not about writing, else Charles Portis would have won it already. It appears to be about comedic performance, principally of the stand-up variety. That was the least part of Mark Twain--though I'll admit that if you asked him how he made his living he'd have said it was the most part. I just doubt that's the way he'd want to be memorialized in a prize from a prestigious institution. MacN