A joke about President Trump and sex trafficking that the comedian Whitney Cummings made at the Mark Twain Prize ceremony was among those left out of the special released on Netflix on Tuesday.
The ceremony honoring the late-night host Bill Maher was held at the Kennedy Center, where Mr. Trump is chairman. He did not attend the June 28 event, which took place the same month his name was removed from the building’s facade following a judge’s order.
“I actually heard Trump may have even wanted to come tonight, but he couldn’t make it — he got caught in sex traffic,” Ms. Cummings said from the stage.
The joke received modest laughter before Ms. Cummings added, “They did tell me not to say that.”
Mr. Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse but has not been accused of sex trafficking. The joke seems to nod to his previous association with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was charged with sex trafficking in 2019 before killing himself in jail. Mr. Trump has denied any involvement in or knowledge of a sex-trafficking operation.
The special did include a joke Ms. Cummings made about Mr. Trump’s influence on Kennedy Center programming, telling the crowd to “enjoy this fall’s three-month run of ‘White Hamilton.’”
It was not entirely clear why the sex-trafficking joke was not included, or who made the decision.
“While it’s our preference not to cut jokes from anyone’s set, the Kennedy Center has the contractual right to do so,” Netflix said in a statement on Tuesday.
In a statement, the Kennedy Center said that “edits to a show are always made in a collaborative way to produce the best product for broadcast.”
Representatives for Ms. Cummings did not respond to requests for comment, although she said on social media: “I was super clear that Netflix did not cut anything from my Mark Twain prize set. Netflix always supports comedy and comics. Quit spreading rumors ya weirdos.”
Other jokes the comedian made onstage at the Kennedy Center were not included in the Netflix special, such as a riff on Mr. Maher as a “stern stepdad who cares maybe a little too much because he wants to prove that he won’t abandon us like our forefathers did.”
Ms. Cummings discussed her experience at the Mark Twain Prize ceremony on a recent episode of her podcast, “Good for You.”
“This is the only time that you shouldn’t get censored,” she said, “because it is about comedians using humor to criticize our elected officials.”
She also spoke about the sex-trafficking joke without providing specifics: “They said, ‘We would like to cut it out.’”
“The people at the venue have been amazing,” she added. “They don’t want to silence anyone. It is true that their boss is Donald Trump, so they did their job.”
On the podcast, Ms. Cummings said she was dubious about the possibility of litigation until she remembered that Mr. Trump once sued Mr. Maher for $5 million after the comedian joked that the president had been fathered by an orangutan.
Ms. Cummings explained in a different podcast episode that she had dropped another Trump joke she delivered in rehearsal after she was told, “We’ll get fired if you say that.”
In addition to Ms. Cummings’s “sex traffic” joke, the Netflix special also excluded her follow-up statement about her task as a comedian.
“The thing about comedy is that we aren’t scared,” she said at the ceremony. “We try not to be scared of the people that bully.”
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