Dave Chappelle claims Grammys ‘snubbed’ him over trans jokes – the show won a Grammy

Dave Chappelle is angry that he didn’t win a Grammy for a comedy special that featured “jokes” about trans people. But he seems to have missed the fact that it did.

The stand-up comic, who has half-a-dozen Grammys to go with five Emmys, complained that he was “snubbed” by both award bodies when it came to 2021’s The Closer.

During the premiere of the documentary, Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life, at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival on Friday (8 August), the comedian claimed he had been blackballed because of his remarks about transgender people.

“I’ve gone on to get snubbed by the Grammys and the Emmys because someone thought it was a good idea to tell trans jokes,” he said.

Despite his claims, the comedy special, in which he tells a number of jokes about gay and trans people, while calling himself a member of “team TERF”, won a Grammy in 2023.

In fact, since 2022, Chappelle has won three Grammys for best comedy album, including for The Dreamer, in which he sarcastically claimed to be writing a play about a “Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n***a”.

He has also spoken about an incident during the Netflix Is A Joke comedy festival in 2022, when he was “charged and tackled” to the floor, claiming the assailant was a “trans man“.

And he had often moaned about “cancel culture” despite continually partnering with Netflix and performing sold-out shows.

In 2022, while performing at Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan, Chappelle called a group of protestors outside the venue “transgender lunatics” who were trying to “cancel” him.

His “jokes” about the trans community have often been criticised. In January, comedian Michelle Buteau condemned his comedy sets, saying: “We can tell jokes and stories and not disparage a whole community. We can make it funny, we just have to work at it.

“So, if you ever run into Dave Chappelle, can you let him know that s**t. I don’t think he knows that s**t.”