The first time Micheal Keaton was tapped as Hasty Pudding’s Man of the Year, he couldn’t accept because he was off filming a movie. It took 35 years for the Harvard theater troupe to invite him back, he said.
“Not too hasty,” the actor cracked in Harvard’s Farkas Hall, where he finally picked up the honor for 2026 on February 6. Given annually since 1967, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals Man and Woman of the Year Awards honor performers “who have made lasting and impressive contributions to the world of entertainment,” according to the organization. On the men’s side, past awardees have included Robert DeNiro, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, and Jon Hamm.
Keaton, a movie star best known for his performances in Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s Batman films, Spotlight, and an Oscar-nominated turn in Birdman (2014), was the organization’s 59th Man of the Year Winner. In celebration, he participated in a roast and news conference before the opening performance of Salooney Tunes, an original Hasty Pudding show that will run until March 8. The troupe’s 2026 Woman of the Year, Rose Byrne, will be honored with a parade and roast on February 13.
“He was Batman, then Birdman, and now, most importantly, he’s a Pudding man!” said Hasty Pudding producer Eloise Tunnell ’27, announcing Keaton’s selection. “Keaton is no stranger to being a superhero, but let’s see if that training earns him a Pudding Pot…until then, don’t say his name three times!”
During the roast led by Tunnell and fellow producer Cate Schwarz ’27, Keaton took jabs for spending his early years as a stand-up comedian, being less famous than actor Jeff Goldblum, and disappearing from movie screens between his heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s and his career resurgence in the 2010s. He donned a Batman costume, dueled someone dressed as a gold Oscar statuette (to represent the one he failed to win for Birdman), and was coerced into reading from a handwritten journal of jokes disparaging Harvard and the city of Boston.
“I was born in Pittsburgh, right? And, yeah, I guess that’s not the nicest city but at least it’s not Boston. Am I right?” he read with growing mock alarm.
Later, he put on a McDonald’s fry cook uniform to serve burgers (a nod to his role in The Founder, a biopic about Ray Kroc) and went fishing in the orchestra pit, eventually reeling in his Pudding Pot trophy.
At a press conference following the roast, Keaton fielded questions about flexing his comedy muscles onstage and his relationship with Beetlejuice costar Catherine O’Hara, who died on January 30.
“I was always a giant fan, like everyone else, at first,” said Keaton, who knew her initially from the Canadian sketch show SCTV. “She was already kind of a goddess, you know, and everybody who was in that world, we all knew how brilliant she was.”
Before peeling off to catch the night’s Salooney Tunes performance, Keaton wrapped up the conference with praise for the students he’d spent the day with at Harvard.
“If I was concerned about our future…[with] these next generations I’m encouraged as hell about this country, if these people I hung out with are any indication,” he said. “These women and men have just been great.”
