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Dave Chappelle Thanks His Mom as He’s Awarded Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

The standup superstar said being able to do his sometimes-controversial comedy was “the best part of the First Amendment.”

Stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle thanked his mom for suffering through his raunchy acts during his early career when he accepted the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor award at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in New York on Sunday. He was joined on stage by Sarah Silverman, Morgan Freeman, Lorne Michaels, Bradley Cooper, Aziz Ansari, Jon Stewart, and Saturday Night Live cast members Kenan Thompson, Michael Che, and Colin Jost, who paid tribute to his success. “You deserve it,” Silverman said as she congratulated him. “It’s the right thing. It’s actually perfect that you’re getting the Mark Twain Prize because you both love using the n-word in your masterpieces.” Chappelle left his popular Comedy Central show in midseason in the early 2000s over a conflict of conscience about the show and his audience’s reaction to some of the material. He won fans in his first episode, in which he played a Klansman named Clayton Bigsby who was blind and therefore didn’t know he was black.