Comedian Whitney Cummings says Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center goons cut a brutal joke she made about the president before footage of it hits Netflix.
Cummings, 43, made the joke about Trump, 80, at the Kennedy Center on June 28, when comedian and TV host Bill Maher, 70, was being honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
As the Daily Beast reported, at the end of her appearance, Cummings made a reference to Trump’s connections to late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I actually heard Trump may come tonight but he couldn’t make it,” Cummings said, adding, “He got caught in sex traffic.”
Speaking on her Good For You podcast, Cummings admitted the joke has now been removed from the 27th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which starts streaming on Netflix from Tuesday.
The ceremony was the first event held at the Kennedy Center since a federal judge ruled that Trump’s attempt to change the D.C. arts venue to include his own was unlawful.
Cummings said on Good For You that while the joke initially “stayed in,” she was eventually told it was getting the chop.
“They said, ‘We would like to cut it out,’” Cummings said, without pointing fingers.
Cummings, however, credited the staff at the Kennedy Center, saying that “they don’t want to silence anyone. It is true that their boss is Donald Trump, so they did their job.”
“I was presented with a tricky conundrum; I just don’t know if I did the right thing or not,” Cummings added.
“They said, it was very clear to me, that they would lose their jobs.”
Cummings said the joke had already been “leaked” by someone in the audience, and noted, “It was already in People magazine and Daily Beast... it was already out, it’s already out there."
“But then they said, ‘We need to cut it from the broadcast.’”
When she repeated the joke was already public, Cummings says she was also warned that President Trump “will sue you.”
She said, “I don’t buy it, number one. Number two, he might.”
Explaining her dilemma, Cummings said the Mark Twain Prize was “the only time you shouldn’t get censored, because it is about comedians using humor to criticize our elected officials.”
A statement from Netflix provided to Puck said it wasn’t its call to cut the joke from airing on its platform.
“While it’s our preference not to cut jokes from anyone’s set, The Kennedy Center has the contractual right to do so,” the statement said.
The comedian said she wanted to “fight” to keep the joke in, but added, “Also, I don’t want anyone losing their jobs. But if it’s just about him suing me, I was like... I felt very strongly I would win.”
Cummings then joked about her suing Trump for “emotional distress” over how much she had to restrain herself at the Mark Twain Prize.
She said, “I had to write a set, and do it in the Kennedy Center, where Trump is the boss, and not make fun of [him]. You know how hard that is for a comedian?”
Cummings said the Kennedy Center staff “did their jobs well and protected their boss from the wrath of a comedian mom... from me destroying his reputation.”
She added, “I can’t believe I had the audacity to ruin his pristine name.”
Cummings also said she was warned Trump could sue her at some point in the future if he’s “bored out of his mind,” and decided to watch the Mark Twain Prize because “the new gold toilet just chipped and he’s in a bad mood.”
“They were like, ‘You’ll always have this hanging over your head and you never know when he’ll just get bored and strike out of left field’.”
The comedian added, “The people that work there on staff told me not to say it. The people that were hourly and daily hires laughed hysterically... the people that get health insurance from the Kennedy Center did their jobs well.”
Trump has denied knowing anything about the late sex offender’s crimes and maintains he was never involved in any wrongdoing, but many have expressed concern about his friendship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he was friends for nearly two decades until the pair fell out in the mid-2000s.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, Netflix, and the Kennedy Center for comment.
