Saudi Arabia’s repressive regime is nothing to laugh about
Some may ask who cares if some comic takes money from a government that kills its critics, but it’s all part of the dangerous trend of what we are willing to tolerate.
From the country that has a Top 10 list of human rights abuses comes the Riyadh Comedy Festival! Laugh along with some of America’s biggest comedians — including Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Aziz Ansari, Pete Davidson, and Kevin Hart — as they bring their good-natured ribbing to a place that arrests and (allegedly) tortures critics and (definitely) executes journalists and dissidents. Fun!
That’s a lot of text to put on a poster, so I imagine that’s just one of the reasons why the Saudi government organizers left it off. But if you can look past the faces of the comics who reportedly took anything from $375,000 to more than $1.5 million to perform at what’s been promoted as “the world’s biggest comedy festival,” the truth starts to bleed through.
Yes, Saudi Arabia is slowly becoming more open and loosening restrictions on women and young people. But just a year after women were allowed to drive, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also allowed the assassination of U.S.-based Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. So, baby steps, I guess.
In fact, Thursday, halfway through the 14-day comedy festival, was the seventh anniversary of Khashoggi walking into a Saudi consulate in Istanbul and coming out in plastic bags.
The Saudis initially called the extrajudicial killing an accident. That claim was believable only because the regime has no problem killing legally. As of Aug. 5, at least 241 people had been executed in a justice system where due process violations and abuses “make it highly unlikely that any of those executed in 2025 received a fair trial,” according to Human Rights Watch. One of those killed was Turki al-Jasser, a journalist who exposed corruption within the Saudi royal family.
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But don’t tell the performing comedians that. Apparently, you can murder whomever you want, just don’t kill joy.
“It was great to experience that part of the world and to be a part of the first comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia,” Burr said on his podcast Monday. “The royals loved the show. Everyone was happy. The people that were doing the festival were thrilled.” Well, goody.
It’s not just comedy. Saudi Arabia has been on an entertainment and sports tear the last few years — including hosting professional wrestling and high-profile boxing matches, buying up soccer teams, and merging their golf tour with the PGA.
This is all part of a rebranding effort to move the country away from “didn’t those guys do 9/11?” to “didn’t they do an awesome job hosting the 2034 FIFA World Cup?” Judging from some of the reactions to the comedy festival, it won’t be that difficult.
Here’s Burr, again.
“You think everybody’s going to be screaming ‘death to America’ and they’re going to … want to like chop my head off, right? Because this is what I’ve been fed about that part of the world. I thought this place was going to be really tense. And I’m thinking like: ‘Is that a Starbucks next to a Pizza Hut next to a Burger King next to McDonald’s …?”
Here’s a funny sounding word Burr might want to look up: jejune.
If it seems like I’m picking on the Massachusetts comedian it isn’t because of his famous 2006 Philly roast, it’s because out of the entire lineup he’s the one that most disappointed me. I know that if I want unfunny social commentary and trans bullying, I turn to Chappelle. If I want some hacky edgelord schtick, I tune in to Jimmy Carr. But Burr is one of those voices who speaks truth to power — on the right and left.
Stand-up comedy as an art form is about being funny while punching up, about saying uncomfortable things to comfortable people.
“This is an art where you call out the elephant in the room and when the elephant is saying, ‘I don’t want to be called out,’ you do it even harder,” the veteran improvisational actor Marlene Thompson told me. Instead, the comedians who performed in the Riyadh festival were contractually barred from disparaging the royal family.
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Thompson, who hails from Delco and is my friend, actually makes her living in comedy (I’m just a comedy nerd), so she takes this seriously.
“We look to comedy as a barometer for how a country is doing, how we see a culture, and all these people are taking literal blood money to perform,” she said.
That, to me, gets to the crux of it. Some may ask who cares if some comic makes bank, but it’s all part of the dangerous trend of what we are willing to tolerate. It reminds me of when Donald Trump was asked in 2017 about Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who was described by the interviewer as “a killer.”
“We got a lot of killers,” Trump responded. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
You can’t argue that isn’t true. But, once upon a time, didn’t we try to be the good guys?
Of course, we live in an imperfect world where we make compromises every day about what we can stomach. I order from Amazon, which treats its workers poorly; drink Coca-Cola, which drives a lot of plastic pollution; and use Facebook and X, which are destroying our minds.
But in his cynical answer, the president presaged this downward spiral we find ourselves in. One where there is no line we won’t cross, no outrage we won’t look the other way on. Slowly but surely, the values we are all raised on grow increasingly meaningless.
In the comedians’ case, I would like to think that the least we can do is live our values when confronted with a clear moral choice. But I’m afraid that in a world full of bad guys, it’s just take the money and run.