Comedian and Grammy presenter Randy Rainbow has heard all the Valhalla jokes.
“Yes, I totally had a Travolta/Adel Dazeem moment,” he says in an apology tweet today.
Presenting the first-ever Grammy for video game music during the pre-show Premiere Ceremony, co-host Rainbow mangled the pronunciation of the winner Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, saying something like “Assassin’s … .Creed Valaha.”
In a tweet titled “With sincerest apologies to Assassin’s Creed VALHALLA,” Rainbow — who was nominated in the Best Comedy Album category — explains: “It was the second category of the show, I was still finding my footing and don’t know video games. And of the many phonetic spellings I had to contend with as host, that one wasn’t included so I just started speaking in tongues.”
The award was presented during the Sunday afternoon ceremony to composer Stephanie Economou for her music in Ubisoft’s video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok, a billion-dollar-plus money maker. The Grammy is just the latest plaudit for Economou, who last year won the Society of Composers & Lyricists award for emerging talent for her work on Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy.
Rainbow’s “Valaha” quickly went viral, drawing comparisons to John Travolta’s bizarre garbling of Idina Menzel’s name as “Adel Dazeem” at the 2014 Oscars ceremony.
“If it’s any consolation,” Rainbow tweets, “when my nominated category was called, “they accidentally pronounced my name ‘Dave Chappelle.’”
