The Riyadh Comedy Festival

bounds of any country. It kind of depends on what you're doing and how you do it, and this is the wrong way to do it, because these are not just people. If someone had just shown up at a nightclub in Saudi Arabia to do a stand up set, I don't particularly care about that, even though there are lesma jest laws, Like I wouldn't care if someone did a stand up comedy set that couldn't make fun of the King of Thailand, right, which is a crime in Thailand.

Saudi government department. He grew up with Mohammad Ben Salmon playing League of Legends, and it's kind of like key to Ben Salmon's planned makes Saudi Arabia cool to like bring it into the global entertainment and like social network without modernizing its laws or allowing people to, you know, make fun of Mohammed Ben Salmon or his friends. For an idea of the kind of dude who hired Bill Burr and all of these other guys and paid them

so much money. There is an entire wing of the all Higher prison called the Tutu Wing, which references all Shake's nickname Tutu, where prisoners that he specifically pointed out, often people who made fun of him or made jokes that he did not appreciate, are put in tortured. This guy has an entire torture prison named after him. That is who's writing checks to fucking Pete Davidson, whose dad

died in Night eleven. Ah fuck, it's fucking shocking the fact that Pete Davidson is at this thing, and he has been He's been like questioned about it, and his answer, basically, I'll say this for Pete, was basically like, yeah, but there's a lot of money, right. And I'm separating in

my head to a degree. I think it's bad to take money from the Saudi government to do something like this that is being used to like whitewash their human rights record to make them look like a cool part of global society, even as they this week executed another journalist. I think that's bad. I think it's worse if you're someone who stood for something. This doesn't change my opinion about THEO Vaughn, who sucks and it's like, yeah, he'll

take money from Saudi Arabia. He's a huge asshole. I'm not surprised, right, And there's some other guys in this that I'm not necessarily like shocked about.

at this thing. And then the funniest possible follow up, he was removed from the festival lineup because he acknowledged that they killed a reporter and you can't even do that on your own fucking podcast or fucking theo vod's goddamn podcast. I want to play a video clip of Tim Dillon, because Tim Dillon is another guy who agreed to show up and perform at this this fucking nightmare event.

And Dylan is why we know kind of how much money is on the table at this thing, because he has said that he was paid three hundred and seventy five thousand. He was offered three hundred and seventy five thousand for one performance to be there. He said that kind of the lowest number people were being offered was about one hundred and fifty thousand, and the most like highly paid people were being offered up to one point

six million dollars. So I mean it's possible see people were geting more than that, but I'm guessing that's closer to like where the Bill Burr's than the Dave Chappelle's you are getting right like in the one point six million. So these guys were offered an insane amount of money. And Tim Dillon went on and like talked about this on a podcast, talked about like why he agreed to

do it, and defended and it's very funny. He like brought up like slavery in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia has slaves, as a way to like to segue into a defense of why it's fine for him to do this, and this is just one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

take any gig if the check's big enough. It's like, Oh, I'm all about the people, until some crazy dictator weaves a stack of cash and then it's where's my private jet?

comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia. The royals loved the show. Everybody one was happy. The people that were doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I've been talking to are saying, dude, you can feel that the audience wanted it. They wanted to see real stand up comedy. It was a mind blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences I've had. I think it's going to lead to a

lot of positive things now. He did talk a little bit about like the rules that they had to bye bye, and said that like when they were first handing around contracts, he pushed back and was like or people pushed back, or like comedians didn't, were like, you can't have all these restrictions, and that they whittled them down to just a couple of things, which Bill sums up as don't make fun of Royal's religion right now, as pointed out by the fact that Tim Dillon got canceled for talking

positively about slavery and the Kingdom, there were more restrictions than that. I do want to read from a Hollywood Reporter article talking about like Bill's response to this, because it gets even worse than what I've read already. Bill first described going to the island country of Bahrain, which is more socially liberal than Saudi Arabia, where a customs agent immediately clocked his anxiety about doing stand up in

the region and gave him grief about it. When I was landing in Bahrain, like I'm fucking nervous, right, and then the agent says, you tell jokes about the Middle East, you think you're going to come over here and get beheaded. Right After a successful show in Bahrain, Burr was at a bar where he was watching interactions among locals and decided, I'm like, they're just like us. I don't speak the language,

but I get it. When he flew to Saudi Arabia, Burr's nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the amount of local Western influence. You think everyone's going to be screaming death to America and they're going to have fucking machetes and want to 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 Pieza Hut, next to a Burger King next to McDonald's.

nightclub in Saudi Arabia. The problem is that you're performing at the behest of the Saudi government, at the behest of the regime.

up government like Kevin Hart just did. Because Kevin Hart was also a part of this show, and he posted a video on TikTok talking about how fucking awesome Saudi Royal Turkey Al Shake is and Turkey al Shak has now been sharing that video on all of his social media accounts, Like you're holding water for people for a guy he was a wing in a torture prison named after him, that crosses a line for me. You know, when we're talking about entertainment, we're talking about being ad

support all this stuff. There's compromises that everyone makes in this business. There's compromises in what company you fucking work with, right Like, if you're talking about, you know, make it a TV show for Amazon's TV division or Disney's you know fucking streaming division, right, Well, there's there's a degree of moral compromise there. And I think, depending on what you're doing and whatnot, can be justified by the fact that number one, like that's just the way television works.

There's no working with anyone completely clean in a company that has the ability to fund, you know, a production like that, but taking money directly from the hands of the guy with the torture prison, I think that crosses a line. I think that crosses the line for a free speech activist. It should across the line for Pete Davidson, who's dad died at nine.

game companies in the world. Right, they've been you know, they've been doing this sort of whole sportswashing strategy of using these things to sort of normalize, normalize the regime. And I think the actual genius of this, right was not that you can buy legitimacy with like sports and

with comedians. The genius of it was that they were able to control the backlash because they ensured the backlash to it would be done by sports journalists and entertainment journalists who don't know anything about the Saudis and thus assumed that the Saudis were attempting to whitewash their you know, horrific domestic human rights record, and they were to some extent, But even focusing on the Saudis domestic human rights record is a victory for the Saudist because it means that

nobody's talking about the stuff people were talking about last decade when they talked about the Saudis, which was things like, for example, the Sudanese child soldiers that they were deploying in their warren Yemen, and these Sudanese child soldiers were drawn from their connections bolstered by the UAE to the Sudanese Appid Support Forces, a group that is almost entirely composed of the militias who did the genocide in Darfour. So these are the ground troops that they're deploying in Yemen.

Are Assudanese child soldiers drawn from the people who did the genocide in Darfour in twenty eighteen, which was not

that long ago, like I remember twenty eighteen. So do you statistically if you're listening to the show, they carried out an airstrike on a school bus that killed twenty six children, right, no one is talking about the air strikes on funerals that they absolutely love to do, like, for example, there was a huge one in twenty sixteen where they killed one hundred and forty people in one air strike, after which the area was described by a

rescue worker as a quote lake of blood. And this has been the really successful thing about about the Saudi specifically targeting sports and specifically targeting entertainment, is that the people covering this do not know anything about Saudi Arabia, right.

And this is also partially what was going on Bill Burv, because they're just racists or their attempt could do a backlash, and they're trying to do a backlash with things like Okay, they killed a journalist, which is really bad, right, But like Jamal Kashoggi was one guy out of thousands and thousands and thousands of people that they were killing and are continuing to kill to this day in Yemen.

write this piece on sportswashing for you, literally anyone. This is what this is what makes me insane about all this coverage is that like, if you even a little bit paid attention to what they were doing in the twenty tens and what they're continuing to do now in Yemen, you know about so many even I'm not even I'm

not even talking about the starvation genocide here. There are so many things that they did, you know, And like one of the common defenses is like, oh, like you know, like we live in the US as a fucked up country, right, Like who cares about authoritarianism? Just like I don't know, it's hard to make that argument when it's about Sudanese child soldiers.