And of course, when I say "Set the TiVo!" here, I'm referring to any recording device, be it D.V.R. or V.C.R., you use to capture a program off television to view at a time convenient to you. In any case, you might want to set whatever you use to record Jon Stewart: The Mark Twain Prize, which debuts on PBS next Tuesday.
Previous recipients of this honor include Richard Pryor (1998), Jonathan Winters (1999), Carl Reiner (2000), Whoopi Goldberg (2001), Bob Newhart (2002), Lily Tomlin (2003), Lorne Michaels (2004), Steve Martin (2005), Neil Simon (2006), Billy Crystal (2007), George Carlin (2008), Bill Cosby (2009, rescinded in 2018) Tina Fey (2010), Will Ferrell (2011), Ellen DeGeneres (2012), Carol Burnett (2013), Jay Leno (2014), Eddie Murphy (2015), Bill Murray (2016), David Letterman (2017), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (2018), and Dave Chappelle (2019). For reasons you can probably guess, there were no awards in 2020 or 2021.
This is not a bad list but when I see it, I always think that Mark Twain was known for two things: Writing and contemporary social commentary through humor. Very few of these recipients could be said to have done both, though Jon Stewart comes closer than most.