Bluesky

“The royals loved the show,” said Bill Burr, a recently hired court jester to Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman (known familiarly as MBS), on his podcast Monday. “Everyone was happy.”

That’s a relief, because the last people in Saudi Arabia you want unhappy with you is the Saudi royal family. Burr had just returned from the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which claims to be the biggest in the world. It’s running from September 26 to October 5, in case you’re in the neighborhood, and boasts Louis C.K., Pete Davidson, Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, and many others, who received significant pay bumps to play birthday-party clowns to a despot.

“They’re just like us!” Burr assured his listeners. You can’t get too mad at Burr for saying that about the hereditary monarchs of the House of Saud, because that is what they paid for: a normalization of Saudi Arabia’s abysmal image worldwide—an image that is especially well-earned in the realm of human rights. The litany of abuses the Saudis have on their permanent record is staggering. Saudi courts execute journalists for tweets, and MBS, its reigning crown prince, infamously ordered the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi regime allows modern-day slavery, executions for nonviolent crimes like adultery and blasphemy, as well as noncrimes like homosexuality. One blogger, Raif Badawi, received a sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam” and founding an online site for political debate. “Beneath the progressive, glitzy image that Saudi Arabia is trying to present to the world, lie horrid stories of abuses and violations,” Amnesty International’s acting deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, Diana Semaan, has said. “The world will not be fooled by sham fanfare.”

The Saudis understand that—and the organizers of the Riyadh Comedy Festival took pains to ensure that none of the performers would allude to the daily horrors beneath the glitz. Each contract signed came with a list of prohibited topics not to mention onstage. Burr assured his listeners that the festival brass was accommodating when he pushed back on some of the restrictions. “They just negotiated it all the way down,” he said, “to like, you can talk about anything, other than a couple of things, which was basically, you know, religion, don’t make fun of the royals.”

In Saudi Arabia, there is a core partnership between the fundamentalist Wahabi sect of Sunni Islam and the royal family—an alliance that’s shared leadership between the royals and Wahabists for nearly 300 years. The basic agreement was to elevate to state law the extreme edicts of Wahabism—such as executions for witchcraft and sorcery or the requirement that women have male guardians with legal rights over their decisions. In exchange, the Saudi monarchy claims moral authority to rule.

Since 2017, MBS has distanced the government from its religious backers and called it “reform,” but that consolidation of secular power still allowed for the brutal murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. In other words, those “couple of things” Burr mentions as expendable topics in his set—religion and the royals—represent that whole “speaking truth to power” thing comedians like to do, because no one else has any power in Saudi Arabia.

Burr has ridiculed the idea of comedians “speaking truth to power” before, but he’s also made frequent use of that American pastime—as when he pilloried Joe Rogan for his MAHA-style distrust of masks and vaccines, derided America’s epidemic of billionaires, or gleefully ridiculed the insurance industry’s terrified reaction to Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of a healthcare CEO. He’s genuinely outraged that people die because of a billionaire elite class’s decisions, which is why it’s hard to watch him casually toss it away.

Comics don’t have a responsibility to speak truth to power. Rodney Dangerfield would not have been funnier talking about school shootings or 9/11—but he didn’t build a career doing that. When you do, and then go to Riyadh, the audience isn’t wrong to ask what you actually care about. How can Burr ever get mad about billionaires here after insisting that the Saudi royal family over there is “just like us”?

The list of massive, ironic self-owns these comics just racked up in Riyadh is impressive. Burr himself once went off on Beyoncé as a woman who embraces feminism yet flew to Libya to perform for its late strongman misogynist leader Moammar El-Gadhafi. Chappelle has criticized Israel on Gaza, but just took money from a country that backed a civil war in Yemen that caused the famine deaths of at least 85,000 children and killed hundreds of thousands more Yemeni civilians. In 2014, Hannibal Burress went after Bill Cosby for his criticism of young Black men, and said out loud what many knew but were afraid to say: that Cosby was a serial rapist. Journalism was limited in what it could say about Cosby, because it has rules. Law enforcement was limited in what it could do, because it has rules. Comedians don’t, and Burress’s takedown kickstarted Cosby’s ultimate downfall.

Dave Chappelle has railed against cancel culture and defended freedom of speech in the United States, because the public, and especially social media, criticized him for his views on Jews, the trans community, and homosexuals. He’s claimed it’s made his job very hard. In Saudi Arabia, whose citizens have no freedom of speech and whose government proves his point every day, he happily signed his free speech away to the regime that sends you to jail for insulting Islam. Perhaps he talked them down to the same free speech deal that Burr got. If only trans activists had known what size check to cut for Chappelle, they could have shut him up years ago and saved themselves all the picketing at Netflix.

The Riyadh Comedy Festival is only one front on Saudi Arabia’s bigger effort to whitewash its national image on the world stage. This is the real agenda behind events like the Riyadh festival—Saudi leaders using their autocratic power and enormous wealth to buy respectability in the West. They brought Formula 1 racing to Saudi and began their own world-class golf tournament. They’ve recently announced a sizable investment in movies with Universal and Columbia Pictures, clearly modeled on China’s large investment partnerships with Disney. The partnerships work two ways, however, which Disney found out when it made a movie China did not like.

Some comics found out the same thing before they got to Riyadh. Podcaster Tim Dillon accepted a reported $375,000 to appear there, which the event’s producers rescinded when he said, “They are paying me enough to look the other way.” Jim Jeffries said on Theo Von’s podcast, “One reporter was killed by the [Saudi] government—unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I’m gonna die on.” Guess what—Jeffries died there anyway, because he disappeared from the lineup advertising for even mentioning the Khashoggi killing. The point of whitewashing and soft-power spectacles like the Riyadh festival isn’t to get a couple of stand-up comics to look the other way; it’s to get the whole world to look the other way.

The Riyadh court jester parade won’t mean much to the careers of most of these comics. No one’s going to lose a Hollywood deal for movie or a show, and, with Saudi money in Hollywood, some might come home to new deals. All they lost is any credibility on lecturing anyone else on right and wrong ever again. But that’s a real loss—it’s the reason Donald Trump hates comedians so much. When they handed over their credibility to MBS, they handed it over here, too, and for free.

Ricky Gervais once told an awards show crowd, “If ISIS started a streaming service, most of you would call your agent.” Give the man credit—he was pretty much right.