“ ‘When Mark Twain first e-mailed me about the prize, I totally misunderstood: I assumed that I was being asked to honor somebody else, and I thought, Oh, my God, what a hassle. “O.K., should we hear this thing and see how bad it is?” she asked, and began to read. Asked how it was, she replied, “Punitive.”) She leafed through a printout of the speech. (Mountains of dumplings from Din Tai Fung for the writers, and a spinach salad for Louis-Dreyfus, which her assistant handed her in a Tupperware. Later that day, she sat with the showrunner of “Veep,” David Mandel, in a small conference room in the Hilton, surrounded by a dozen writers and assistants, who were helping Louis-Dreyfus fine-tune her speech over lunch. She’d decided to address her illness and recovery at the Twain prize, but, as she put it, “I don’t want it to be ‘The Cancer Show at the Kennedy Center.’ ” These days, it is also “blasted by chemotherapy and still growing out,” after six rounds of treatment that Louis-Dreyfus underwent last year for breast cancer. Her real hair is explosively curly, when it hasn’t been coaxed into sleekness for an event. When the makeup was finished, a stylist ran a curling iron through Louis-Dreyfus’s shiny brown bob, one of several wigs she’s worn while making “Veep,” in order to minimize her preparation time. She was sitting in a white bathrobe, having her makeup done, in a room at the Glendale Hilton, where she was shooting an episode of her HBO series, “ Veep.” Louis-Dreyfus has nine Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe, and she shares with Cloris Leachman the record for the most Emmys accumulated by an actor: one for playing Elaine Benes, on “Seinfeld,” the role that made her a star one for her performance in “ The New Adventures of Old Christine” and six for playing Selina Meyer, on “Veep.” But the Twain prize felt different. “It’s, like, ‘If you’re so fucking funny, get up onstage and prove it!’ ” she said one morning in Los Angeles. In a few weeks, she would be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in a televised ceremony at the Kennedy Center, and she was anxious about her speech. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was not feeling relaxed.
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