Ricky Gervais has been nominated for his first Grammy award – for a show that was roundly hated by critics.
The audio version of his Armageddon stand-up special has been shortlisted for best comedy album in the 2025 awards.
Also in the running is Dave Chappelle’s equally controversial The Dreamer, alongside Jim Gaffigan’s The Prisoner, Nikki Glaser’s Someday You’ll Die and Trevor Noah’s Where Was I?
When Variety reviewed Armageddon it referred to Gervais’s ‘repetitive culture war grievances’ and material that is ‘beyond hacky’, adding that his ‘delivery is as dull as his staging and all-black getup’.
The Independent said: ‘Armageddon is just another piece of lazy comedy that plays on the majority’s fear of minority voices’ while the New York Times called it ‘a dutifully predictable collection of jokes about supposedly taboo subjects’
Meanwhile, in a two-star review of the live show, the Telegraph said: ‘ Gervais’s imagination circles around a very small pool of tropes’, while the Guardian complained of his ‘battery of crude gags about immigrants, homelessness and, ho hum, Chinese people eating dogs.’
Gervais’s nomination comes as his new tour – Mortality – gets under way, with more critical opprobrium, and more commercial success, ahead of its release on Netflix.
Chappelle has won the comedy Grammy five times, from 1998 to 2000, 2023 and 2024.
The 2025 Grammy winners will be announced on Sunday, February 2.
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