Billed as “the biggest comedy festival in the world”, the inaugural Riyadh Comedy festival, which is running 26 September to 9 October, features some of the biggest names in US comedy. The lineup features Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, Whitney Cummings, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari and Jo Koy, among many others who are all taking their fees directly from the Saudi government.
The event’s producers include Sela (a live events company owned by Saudia Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund) and the kingdom’s General Entertainment Authority, chaired by Turki Alalshikh, a royal adviser dogged by allegations of human rights violations, including the detention of people who criticize him on social media.
US-based talent agency William Morris Endeavor (WME); and Bruce Hills, the president of the famed Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal are also involved as consultants and producers.
These comedians have already received criticism from Human Rights Watch, which argued in a news release that the festival is an effort by the Saudi regime to whitewash its notorious abuses. “This whitewashing comes amid significant increase in repression,” said HRW researcher Joey Shea, “including a crackdown on free speech, which many of these comedians defend but people in Saudi Arabia are completely denied.”
They have also taken flak from their peers. “The same guy that’s gonna pay them is the same guy that paid that guy to bone-saw Jamal Khashoggi and put him in a fucking suitcase,” said Marc Maron in a standup clip posted on his Facebook. Stavros Halkias, in a conversation with Riyadh headliner Chris Distefano, said he turned down the gig because he cannot take money from Saudi Arabia, which he finds “spooky”.
Tires star Shane Gillis, meanwhile, said in multiple episodes of his podcast that he turned down a “significant” offer from the festival because of Saudi Arabia’s alleged involvement in 9/11, though it was hard to parse his reasons for doing so; he told his co-host Matt McCusker a few weeks ago that he “took a principled stand” in saying no, he immediately qualified: “It wasn’t even that. I didn’t even think about it,” referring to Saudi Arabia’s alleged wrongdoing.
On Tuesday, Arrested Development’s David Cross wrote a searing open letter criticizing comics who were taking part. “I am disgusted, and deeply disappointed in this whole gross thing,” wrote Cross on his website. “That people I admire, with unarguable talent, would condone this totalitarian fiefdom for … what, a fourth house? A boat? More sneakers?”
Comedians performing at the festival’s headliners do not seem particularly concerned about the criticism – or the alleged wrongdoing. “One reporter was killed by the government – unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I’m gonna die on,” Jim Jefferies said on Theo Von’s podcast in August, arguing it is for the greater good that “freedom-of-speech machines” such as himself bestow their “edgy” material on the kingdom and its subjects. (Since making the comments, Jefferies has since disappeared from the festival’s lineup; his representatives did not respond to inquiries about this.)
Distefano, chatting with Halkias, joked that an upside to the kingdom’s repression of women is that his fiancee can’t come with him. Mark Normand, on the other hand, joked he would bring his wife to show her how good she has it in America: “I want to be like, ‘You see? You think I’m an asshole? Well, they’ll cut your clit off, bitch.’”
Some comics were transparent about their willingness to ignore their moral convictions in order to play at the festival. “So what, they have slaves?” asked Tim Dillon in a podcast segment that led to his firing from the festival. “They’re paying me enough money to look the other way.” Pete Davidson offered a similar take, acknowledging in a chat with Von that people have asked him why, given his father’s death on 9/11, he would take a paycheck from the Saudi government. He did not address the criticism directly, but he did suggest he was happy to forget 9/11 for the right price: “I just know I get the routing, and then I see the number, and I go, ‘I’ll go.’”
How high is that number? According to Dillon, pretty high: in the same podcast that got him fired, he said the organizers offered him $375,000 and claimed that some comedians were offered millions. Gillis did not reveal how much the organizers offered him, but he did say that when he initially refused, they “doubled the bag”. Tough news for Dillon, who elsewhere claimed he asked for $500,000 but had to settle for less.
The comedian and former SNL writer Nimesh Patel, in an Instagram story post announcing that he had dropped out of the festival, said he was offered “a lot of money … I’m not in a position to say no to life-changing money. But it wasn’t life-changing.” In a since deleted post on TikTok, he suggested that he could make up for the loss by performing “40 shows … here in the perfectly clean, moral, above-everyone-else United States of America.”
Even if the bigger names on the bill were offered huge sums, none of them are hard up for cash. Chappelle, Hart, Burr, Koy and Gabriel Iglesias are multimillionaires who sell hundreds of thousands of tickets playing big venues across the globe. Louis CK’s income may have taken a dent in recent years, but an invoice sent to his promoter, obtained via public records request, appears to show that he grossed more than $300,000 over a weekend in Seattle this past July, and he has dates booked around the globe through April 2026. Similar records appear to show that in 2019, Davidson earned $100,000 for a gig at Florida State University; in 2023, he grossed more than $130,000 over a weekend in Buffalo.
Not only do they not need the money, but many of the comics billed have spent the last decade-plus fashioning themselves as the vanguard of free speech, decrying backlash to bigoted jokes as tantamount to the very sort of state repression they are now endorsing.
Chappelle released multiple Netflix specials containing transphobic jokes, declaring himself “team Terf”. Afterwards he defended the material to a room full of schoolchildren: “The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it,” he said. Jeff Ross once described the celebrity roast as “one of the last bastions of free speech”, and speculated a few years ago that his friend Norm Macdonald died because he did not want to live in a world where “everyone’s trying to cancel everybody.” Andrew Schulz, who has used racist and anti–transgender language in the recent past, recently criticized the right for abandoning its values as “the party that ended cancel culture, the party that is keeping free speech alive”. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Whitney Cummings posted: “If you are happy someone was publicly executed because they don’t share your beliefs congrats you’re the Taliban.” (Incidentally, Human Rights Watch notes that the Saudi regime executed a journalist in June “because of his peaceful speech and commentary.”)
Some of the festival’s headliners have even explicitly criticized their new patrons in the past. “I’m not going over there and getting kidnapped and getting my head sawed off on fucking YouTube,” Burr said in 2016, responding to a question about when he would visit Saudi Arabia, Dubai or Kuwait. He went on to criticize slave labor in the United Arab Emirates, where he has since performed and even met a member of the royal family. (He has also since called for billionaires to be put down “like rabid fucking dogs”, though perhaps he envisions a carveout for Gulf royalty.) When Netflix pulled a critical episode of Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act from its Saudi platform in 2019, Riyadh headliner Maz Jobrani said the service should have “sided with freedom of speech”.
Over the years, Schulz has joked about the Khashoggi murder and Saudi connections to 9/11; tweeted that “the Saudi people are begging for help from a tyrannical regime full of sexism, racism and homophobia”; and argued that the country “exists because we allow them to exist” in order to “give us fucking gas, bitch.” While not mentioning Saudi Arabia explicitly, Jessica Kirson, one of two women on the festival’s lineup, once said of the plight of female comedians in the Middle East: “They’re not allowed to talk about the government or the royal family. Or they’re not allowed to curse or talk about sex. We are so fucking privileged here.”
Riyadh headliners likely had to agree to those same proscriptions. Although Jefferies and Davidson said in separate conversations that they had not received any content guidelines from the festival’s organizers, the comedian Atsuko Okatsuka recently posted a screenshot of the proposed contract she received (and turned down) from the festival’s organizers. The section she shared, titled “Content Restrictions”, forbade material that denigrates “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including its leadership, public figures, culture, or people”, as well as the country’s legal system.
It is a far cry from the principled stands comedians have taken against censorship in the past. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, role models for many of today’s free speech warriors, both did battle with government censors: Bruce was arrested, prosecuted and convicted for his act, while Carlin’s led to a landmark supreme court decision that upheld the FCC’s authority to regulate indecency and obscenity on the public airwaves. Today’s generation of comedians prefer to use their hard-won liberties not as a weapon against the powerful, but as a license to operate free of any ethical obligations whatsoever. For these comedians, “freedom of speech” means the freedom to say anything you want, including to be cruel to racial minorities, women, trans people and immigrants; to associate with conspiracy theorists and lend their platforms to politicians set on undermining democracy.
Yet for all their claims of free speech absolutism, it now seems clear comedy’s champions of liberty are all too happy to censor themselves for the right price. In an August episode of the podcast We Might Be Drunk, Kirson chatted with hosts Normand and Sam Morril about the festival, which she apparently had not yet been booked on. She said shewould love to perform in the region, even though the prospect made her nervous – after all, Morril pointed out, she’s a gay Jewish woman. “I wouldn’t do any gay material there at all,” she quickly said, adding that sh would steer clear of Jewish material too. Still, she marveled at how well the kingdom treats its guests. “You get treated like gold,” she said. “It’s five-star, crazy treatment, hotels and car service, and food. And they really take care of you.”
