That 'cancellation' is really starting to bite...

Dave Chappelle has won his sixth Grammy award, after taking the 2025 accolade for his latest stand-up album, The Dreamer.

Voters on the  National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences again ignored the controversy over the comic’s transgender jokes to award him the accolade for the third year running.

In the audio version of his Netflix special he claimed ‘I ain’t doing trans jokes no more’, and said: ‘I ain’t saying shit about them. Maybe three or four times tonight, but that’s it.’

That included suggesting that if he was ever convicted of a crime he’d identify as female so he’d be sent to a women’s jail, where he could bully fellow inmates, saying things like: ‘ I’m a girl, just like you, bitch. Come here and suck this girl dick I got. Don’t make me explain myself. I’m a girl.’

He made a couple more other ‘identifies as…’ jokes; and joked he’d written a sad play about a ‘black transgender woman whose pronoun is ’n***a’ who ‘dies of loneliness because white liberals don’t know how to speak to her’.

Ricky Gervais had also been nominated for the Grammy for his special Armageddon – which had also been widely rapped by critics, including the New York Times which called it a ‘dutifully predictable collection of jokes about supposedly taboo subjects’.

 Also losing out to Chappelle were Jim Gaffigan for The Prisoner, Nikki Glaser for Someday You'll Die and Trevor Noah – who hosts the ceremony – for Where Was I.

Chappelle was not at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles to accept the Grammy.

Published: 3 Feb 2025