Emmy-Winning Comedian Alex Edelman Says Loss Of Kennedy Center Is No Joke

Alex Edelman, the comedian and actor who won an Emmy for his 2024 HBO/Max special Just For Us and a special Tony for the original Broadway staging, laments what is effectively the loss to comics of a newly politicized Kennedy Center.

“For me and the performers I know, it doesn’t make sense to play the venue now unless you’re avowedly and solidly Trump-supporting,” Edelman, who currently writes and stars in Peacock’s The Paper, says in a guest column for The New York Times. “By my count, only three headlining comedians performed at the Kennedy Center this year, all vocal Trump supporters at some point.”

Fondly recalling his 2024 performance of his one-man show Just Like Us at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater – “My parents came down from Boston for it” – Edelman writes, “That might have been my last time performing there.”

As Deadline’s Ted Johnson noted earlier this month, the fall-out from President Donald Trump’s takeover of the arts institution in 2025 is ongoing. One of the latest developments was the news this month that The Kennedy Center Honors will move to a new location for the first time in its history: On December 7, the ceremony will be held at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C.

Deadline wrote, “Since Trump took over the center and ousted board members appointed by his predecessors, the center has seen a drop in ticket sales, while artists have canceled performances. The Washington Post and CNN have recently done deep dives on the dire state of Kennedy Center finances. Major shows ended in July, which had been the original time frame for when Trump and the center planned for the long-term closure for renovations.”

In Edelman’s guest essay, headlined “I Loved Performing at the Kennedy Center. I May Never Do It Again,” the Paper actor and stand-up comic writes about the impact of Trump’s takeover on performers who once treasured booking gigs at the D.C. institution.

“In the latest round of President Trump’s imposition of personal politics and self-promotion, he’s closed a huge chunk of the main building, saying it needs a costly renovation — which he will authorize only if the building bears his name,” Edelman writes. “Given that the Kennedy Center is a national memorial and not a hotel or a steak-by-mail company, legal challenges to a renaming are unlikely to be over soon.”

Legal challenges notwithstanding, Edelman writes, “Theatergoers are already losing. In 2025, the vision Mr. Trump laid out to the board — newly stocked with political allies, loyalists and, worst of all, Lee Greenwood — was depressingly free of thought about curation. It was all about putting on shows that make money — even though the center’s programming was $40 million in the black during the last year of the Biden administration.”

Edelman puts the center’s turmoil in personal terms from his perspective as both a performer and an audience member. “In recent years,” he writes, “when I would check the calendar or see shows there, I was struck by how diverse the programming was — but diverse in the underused, literal sense. Ballet. Comedy. Country. Opera. Hip-hop. Theater — from Guys and Dolls to the avant-garde. And honestly, in its diversity, I often found offerings that weren’t for me. Dull re-heatings of old plays, pedestrian touring stops for milquetoast musicals and Thai contemporary dance. Oof. But the not-for-me productions were part of the Kennedy Center’s appeal. The remit seemed to be not far-off from the Smithsonian’s down the street: art that was in the public interest and art that should be.”

As a performer, “If you played the Kennedy Center, you’d meet the sweet weirdos who are like the sweet weirdos who program and promote theaters all around the country. Culture nerds and eggheads and snobs who care about bringing in the big headliners and also root around in the bargain bins at music festivals for up-and-comers an audience might like.”

Now, he says, “The comedians and actors I know no longer talk about it like a venue you want to visit. The Kennedy Center Honors and the Mark Twain Prize — which Steve Martin, an honoree, once referred to as the only significant American award for comedy ‘apart from money’ — have been so thoroughly politicized as to be nearly worthless. I honestly feel bad for the talented people still performing there and the surely handcuffed staff doing their best to keep it all going.”

The Just For Us performer hasn’t entirely given up hope for the Kennedy Center entirely.

“I have also noticed that there’s an election coming up,” he concludes. “And administrations don’t last forever. So maybe I’ll get to come back and perform next to the Potomac — for people who find me funny and for people who decide I’m not for them. Strangers, folks I know from high school, college students, locals, tourists. Sitting in the dark with groceries and their friends and other Americans; laughing, laughing, laughing.”