All the magic is happening at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in the Saudi capital's Boulevard City, a 220-acre retail and entertainment zone that contains a replica of Times Square and "500 electronic games for children." Since we last checked in, a couple of new names have been added to the festival lineup; the Whose Line Is It Anyway?–obsessed 11-year-old in me was distressed to see the addition of Wayne Brady.
But how are the comedians who have already performed enjoying the experience? Judging by the images of Kevin Hart shared on the festival's official social media accounts, he's having a great time:
Meanwhile, Dave Chappelle, who is tired of cancel culture, is relishing the expressive freedom that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has afforded him. "It’s easier to talk here than it is in America," Chappelle reportedly told a crowd of 6,000 people.
Last week, comedian Atsuko Okatsuka said she rejected an offer to perform at the festival, straightforwardly observing that "the money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process." She also shared a screenshot from her offer, which set restrictions on comedians' material: no making fun of any aspect of Saudi Arabia, or any religion.
Screenshot via Threads
Bill Burr, whose whole shtick is that he stands athwart the reactionary turn of his aging and crankish peers, still performed at the festival, which gives you a sense of where the bar is, morally, for standup comedians. He's also offered the most thorough account of what the festival was like. After his visit to the kingdom, he raved on his podcast about what a good time he'd had.
My whole fuckin' idea of Saudi Arabia is what I've seen on the news. I literally think I'm gonna fuckin' land and everyone's gonna be screaming "Death to America," and they're gonna have fuckin' machetes and want to chop my head off, right? Because this is what I've been fed about that part of the world, right?
[...]
And we're driving around and then I'm just going like—I thought this place was going to be really tense. And I'm thinking like, "Is that a Starbucks, next to a Peet's Coffee, next to a Burger King, next to a McDonald's, next to a Pizza Hut, next to a Dunkin' Donuts, next to a Krispy Kreme, next to a Cheesecake Factory, next to a KFC, next to a Chili's? They got a fuckin' Chili's over here? Then we go into the mall, because I want to get my kids something. There was a Timberland store. I could have bought Timberlands like I was in Brooklyn, New York.
What penetrating insight into a distant culture. Without Bill Burr, how could I have possibly gathered that Gulf petrostates are really into Western junk food and malls?
Burr, like Chappelle, praised the festival for freedom of expression. "When they first went to set [the festival] up over there, the rules on what they had about what you could say and what you couldn't say in Saudi Arabia, the people running the festivals were being like, 'All right, well that's game, set, and match. If this is like all you can talk about and you want some good comedians, this isn't going to work.' And then to their credit, they said. 'All right, what do we got to do?' And they just negotiated it all the way down to like you can talk about anything other than a couple things, which was basically, religion, don't make fun of the royals. Other than that, it was all everything was like, open."
Here's Burr's retelling of his actual time on stage:
I'm not gonna lie, it was a mindfuck, right? So I'm standing there, waiting to go on, and somebody in the crowd sees me, you know, and he's dressed in all their traditional shit, right? And he just goes [Saudi(?) accent] "Hey, Bill Burr, I love you. Kick ass, man." And I could just feel, I'm like these fuckin' people—the people, OK, they want a fuckin' show. You could feel it. I was talking to the other comics. You could feel it. They wanted you to push, right? Was really fuckin' exciting. So I go up on stage and I start doing my shit, and they're fuckin' into it. Everything's going good. And I'm not going to lie to you. I'm checking out the diplomats as I'm doing this stuff and they're all fuckin' laughing. All right, so I'm going to push a little farther, and all of a sudden, I start getting in the zone. Well, Billy's feeling loose up there. And my brain just goes, "Gay gym." And the other part of my brain goes, "Don't do that." And then I said, "Fuck it, I'm going to do it." So I started doing the joke, and it fuckin' murdered. It murdered."
Interesting word choice.
Meanwhile, comic Chris Distefano is having an absolutely electric time out there in Riyadh, best seen in this excruciating video interview:
Increased scrutiny of the festival did lead to at least one change in the expected lineup. One comic, Nimesh Patel, pulled out of a scheduled appearance, but managed to do so while whining about money. “I’ll just do 40 shows that I had not planned on doing here in the perfectly clean, moral, above-everyone-else, United States of America—I’m tired just thinking about it—to make up for the lost bag,” he said in a TikTok video. Like many dumbasses in his industry, he seemed to conflate "doing comedy geographically inside a country that commits atrocities" with "doing comedy while receiving pay directly from the authors of atrocities." Patel deleted that video and, as far as I can tell, has since been trying to promote a new, more tactful explanation on Reddit.
Hart, Chappelle, Jeff Ross, and Gabriel Iglesias stuck to their original plans, and will leave their hands in Saudi Arabia—specifically, in a "Wall of Fame."
Very cool. Look at how much fun Dave's having:
Men will literally headline the Riyadh Comedy Festival instead of going to therapy.
