Dave Chappelle has taken residence the Grammy for finest comedy album, marking his fifth win within the class.

The comic received for his album “Dave Chappelle: What’s in a Identify?” linked to the 2022 launch of his Netflix particular of the identical title. This yr, he was topped the victor over opponents Wanda Sykes, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock and Trevor Noah, who served as host on the 66th annual Grammy Awards.

Chappelle’s victory is rooted in controversy, after all, because the surprise-released particular consisted of a speech given at a naming ceremony at his alma mater, Washington D.C.’s Duke Ellington Faculty of the Arts. On the time, the varsity deliberate a ceremony linked to its resolution to rename its theater after him, which elicited a powerful backlash resulting from his feedback in regards to the transgender group in his 2021 standup particular “The Nearer.”

Throughout that ceremony, Chappelle introduced that he didn’t need to have the theater renamed in his honor as a result of controversy. “What’s in a Identify?” captured the speech the place he addressed the problems surrounding the incident at giant, and mentioned a previous Q&A with college students on the faculty that received heated.

“All the children had been screaming and yelling. I keep in mind, I stated to the children, I’m going, ‘Effectively, okay, effectively what do you guys assume I did incorrect?’ And a line shaped. These children stated every little thing about gender, and this and that and the opposite, however they didn’t say something about artwork,” Chappelle stated. “And that is my largest gripe with this complete controversy with ‘The Nearer’: That you just can’t report on an artist’s work and take away inventive nuance from his phrases. It could be like if you happen to had been studying a newspaper they usually say, ‘Man Shot within the Face by a Six-Foot Rabbit Anticipated to Survive,’ you’d be like, ‘Oh my god,’ they usually by no means inform you it’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon.”

In the long run, Chappelle claimed that the Q&A affected him personally and that the scholars had been overly essential of his “freedom of inventive expression.” “Once I heard these speaking factors popping out of those kids’s faces, that actually, sincerely, damage me. As a result of I do know these children didn’t give you these phrases. I’ve heard these phrases earlier than. The extra you say I can’t say one thing, the extra pressing it’s for me to say it,” Chappelle stated. “And it has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has every little thing to do with my proper, my freedom, of inventive expression. That’s helpful to me. That isn’t severed from me. It’s price defending for me, and it’s price defending for everybody else who endeavors in our noble, noble professions.”