For weeks, ridicule poured in against the American comedians set to perform this week in Saudi Arabia — a country not known for its civil liberties.
But by the time they took to the stage, the comedians had turned the joke on U.S. free speech.
“Right now in America, they say that if you talk about Charlie Kirk, that you’ll get canceled” the comedian Dave Chappelle quipped on Saturday at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, the first event of its kind in Saudi Arabia. “I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m gonna find out.”
A headline act, Mr. Chappelle was met with whoops, cheers and applause as he told an audience of 6,000, “It’s easier to talk here than it is in America.”
Though happening thousands of miles away from the United States in the conservative Saudi kingdom, Mr. Chappelle’s act tapped into the strange currents of American politics that were coursing through the event.
He was performing in Riyadh at the same time as a divisive free speech debate was roiling the United States. It began after the late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel was briefly pulled from the airwaves after growing criticism by many conservatives and a federal regulator over a monologue about the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Mr. Kimmel returned to television last week.
Despite the furor, President Trump has called on regulators to consider revoking licenses for networks that broadcast his critics.
More than 50 of the biggest names in American and Western comedy have been scheduled to perform at the Riyadh festival, which runs through Oct. 9. The acts were paid for by the Saudi government, which harshly curtails free speech — an ideal many of those same comedians claim to champion.
Mr. Chappelle has talked frequently about being canceled after an uproar caused by his jokes mocking trans people. But in Riyadh, he also took aim at the recent suspension of Mr. Kimmel.
Like other comedians at the event who said they felt muzzled by American political correctness, Mr. Chappelle reveled in making uncouth jokes in Saudi Arabia. Yet he overlooked an eight-year crackdown that has led to many of the country’s writers, businesspeople, activists, clerics and social media influencers being arrested.
The irony was not lost on the Saudi audience, who marveled at the idea of watching political satire skewering the United States in their once famously austere Islamic society.
“I found it so interesting to hear political jokes targeting Trump and Charlie Kirk,” said Abdulrahman Mohammad, a 23-year-old dental student. He said it was “surprising to hear him talk about it in Riyadh, when just recently America canceled Jimmy Kimmel doing the same.”
Playing host to major entertainment events, like the comedy festival, is part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 agenda, spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The plan aims to diversify the kingdom’s economy, which is highly dependent on oil, and create a more relaxed social environment for overseas investors and ordinary Saudis alike.
For Saudis, the event — featuring stars including Kevin Hart, Jimmy Carr and Bill Burr — was a sign of how the country was changing. Music, once effectively prohibited in public, thumped from loudspeakers outside, as D.J.s spun techno remixes of Jennifer Lopez and 50 Cent songs.
The festival has been held at Boulevard City, a sprawling entertainment complex with a quarter designed to resemble Times Square.
Young Saudis gathered in gender-mixed spaces beneath the glare of giant screens rather than the watchful gaze of the once-feared religious police, whose powers were stripped by the crown prince as part of his reform drive.
Women in flowing black abayas, paired with jeans and T-shirts, mingled with women in conservative face veils and with men, many of whom sported a white robe known as a thawb, along with a baseball cap.
Still, societal transformation has its limits. Political humor was warmly received; the sex jokes, not so much.
When the comedian Cipha Sounds began a gag about men airdropping photos of their genitalia, uncomfortable laughter rippled through the arena. “Oh, sex jokes don’t land in Riyadh,” he conceded with a wry smile. “Got it.”
As the Saudi authorities have loosened social restrictions, they have also been whittling away the space for domestic political discourse. For that reason, the comedians who performed at the festival have faced harsh criticism from rights organizations and other comics.
They accuse participants of “artwashing” — allowing their performances to draw attention away from the Saudi government’s troubling human rights record. That record includes the gruesome 2018 killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, and the imprisonment and alleged torture of several women’s rights activists.
Joey Shea, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that the festival came at the same time as “a crackdown on free speech, which many of these comedians defend but people in Saudi Arabia are completely denied.”
In the audience for Mr. Hart’s performance on Sunday, some Saudis argued that refusing to engage with their country was not the answer.
“It doesn’t mean we should be cut off from the world, and vice versa,” said Taher al-Naser, 27. “If they want to call it whitewashing, so be it, but we’re still on the path of transformation.”
In the past, Prince Mohammed has defended the political crackdown as a necessary step in the country’s reshaping, saying that it was “a small price” to pay to “get rid of extremism and terrorism without civil war.”
Mr. Hart acknowledged the public controversy. “But I love what y’all are doing here,” he told the audience. “I’ll continue being a positive ambassador of your change to the world.”
Facing flak from their peers, other comedians framed their participation in the event as a form of cultural exchange to promote free speech.
Ahead of the event, Jim Jefferies, an invited performer, told the podcast “This Last Weekend” that festival organizers had invited “some edgy-ass comedians.”
“If you don’t agree with how they run their place, isn’t this a step in the right direction?” he said.
Not every comedian took up Saudi Arabia’s offer. Some said they had declined to perform on principle, saying that there was censorship embedded in the contracts they were asked to sign.
The American comedian Atsuko Okatsuka, who boycotted the festival, posted screenshots of what she said were parts of the contract. According to the posts, organizers prohibited “any material considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Any jokes about the Saudi royal family, or any religions, were also forbidden.
One comedian, Tim Dillon, was upfront about how money had been a motivating factor to perform. Mr. Dillon — who was later dropped by organizers after making slavery jokes about migrant workers in the kingdom — said he was offered $375,000 and that others had received up to $1.6 million.
The General Entertainment Authority, the main organizer of the festival, did not respond to questions about the payments the comedians received or whether participants were contractually obliged to censor their material.
Israel, and its conduct of the war in Gaza, also factored in Mr. Chapelle’s show. The comedian, who has been critical of Israel before, ended his act by telling the audience that he feared returning to the United States, because, “They’re going to do something to me so that I can’t say what I want to say.”
To alert his fans that this had happened, he said he would use a code phrase.
“It’s got to be something I would never say in practice, so if I actually say it, you’ll know never to listen to anything else I say after that,” he said. “Here’s the phrase: I stand with Israel.”
For Patrick Sellers, an American expatriate at the festival, the shifting boundaries of what constituted free speech in the United States were troubling.
Mr. Sellers, a 40-year-old consultant, said he was disconcerted that American comedians were telling jokes in Riyadh that they felt they “might have to pay for” back home.
“Once we lose the ability to laugh at ourselves,” he said, “we start losing our freedoms.”
Ismaeel Naar is an international reporter for The Times, covering the Gulf states. He is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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