“I can’t believe I’m getting a humor prize from the Kennedy Center,” Burnett said in a press release. “It’s almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington.”

Shortly after the Civil War, Washington became a place where artistic and literary spirits assembled, including scribes George Alfred Townsend and Mark Twain.

MONDAY It’s anybody’s guess as to whether Mark Twain would have approved of Jon Clinch’s Finn, the dark, call-it-a-prequel, story of Huck Finn’s father, depicted herein as a degenerate bigot. But you know what? Suck it, Twain: you’re dead! At Olsson’s in Crystal City, 2200 Crystal Drive, 7 p.m. TUESDAY If your two favoritest things in the whole wide world are crayons and burlesque shows, then DCist is finally ready to offer an event that…

In May, the D.C. theater community has devils, Dorian and the deformed — and in Round House Bethesda’s case, an affection for alliteration that we apparently share. We love the work that Actors Theatre of Washington does, and their latest effort is “Mondays In May”, where for three days this month, they showcase new talent. We Wildephiles are particularly interested in what they’re going to do with The Picture Of Dorian Gray on May 8….

FRIDAY: >> Kaiser Chiefs, a Leeds, England five-piece, hits the stage at the 9:30 Club tonight. Their music is infectious (you know, in a good way), confident, and sure to get you dancing. And they’re cute, in a quintessentially British sort of way. $15. Doors open at 9, openers The Cribs go on at 10:15, and the Kaiser Chiefs will be on stage at 11:30. At which point we’ll be asleep. Because we are old….

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them,” Mark Twain’s saying goes. And according to a study put out by the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, D.C.’s got plenty of people who read the good books, despite the fact that 37 percent of D.C. adults read at or below a third grade level. The study, which examines how residents of the United States’ largest 79…

Welcome to DCist, the newest metro blog from Gothamist.com. For the next week, DCist will be in a public beta testing period. So please mind the dust as we tie up all the loose ends. On top of our local readers, we welcome visitors from Gothamist and our sibling sites in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. You all know D.C. as a stuffy, formal, capital city on the banks of the mosquito-infested Potomac River….