Let’s start with the good news: As an exercise in artwashing, the Riyadh Comedy Festival was a complete failure. The Saudi regime spends billions of dollars promoting cultural and sporting events in an effort to distract from its endless human rights abuses. This time, it only succeeding in drawing attention to them.
Performers at the event, which ran from Sept. 26 to Oct. 9, faced a torrent of criticism from NGOs and, more pertinently, from their fellow comedians. Arrested Development star David Cross wrote, “I am disgusted, and deeply disappointed in this whole gross thing,” condemning artists willing to “condone this totalitarian fiefdom” for a huge paycheck. British comedian Stewart Lee took aim at the “evil, amoral, grifting bastards” taking Saudi money to perform.
Writing in the Carnegie Endowment, Tulane University Professor Andrew Leber noted that “there has been far more discussion of freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia in the past two weeks than when the Saudi government executed a journalist on national-security grounds in June.” That journalist, Turki al-Jasser, founded online news outlet Al-Mashhad Al-Saudi (The Saudi Scene) but it is common knowledge among the dissident community that the real reason he was arrested, tortured, convicted on terrorism charges, and executed was his anonymous satirical Twitter account poking fun at the regime. Like all dictators, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is terrified of comedians, and having a laugh at his expense is a capital crime.
Saudi Arabia is suffering an unprecedented execution crisis. Last year, authorities executed 345 people. Previously, the most executions in a calendar year was 196 in 2022. This year, the regime is on pace to smash its own blood-soaked record. At the time of writing there have been at least 292 executions in a little over nine months.
In 2023, Reprieve and the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights analyzed over a decade’s worth of execution data. In the five years before bin Salman and his father, King Salman, took power, the average number of executions was 71 per year. This year, the regime is on course to kill almost 400—a fivefold increase that remains shockingly underreported.
You wouldn’t hear about this at the festival, of course. Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posted the contract she was offered (and declined), which explicitly prohibited any comic material ridiculing the Saudi royal family, government, legal system, religion, or culture. Jim Jefferies was dropped from the bill after a stray comment about a reporter “killed by the government”—an apparent reference to assassinated Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
The performers who did accept gave well-rehearsed justifications. The most honest admitted to being mercenaries. “They’re paying me enough money to look the other way,” said Tim Dillon. Pete Davidson candidly acknowledged: “I see the number, and I go, ‘I’ll go.’”
Dave Chappelle sought to portray his critics as hypocritical, riffing in his set that “it’s easier to talk here than it is in America.” While there may be a grain of truth in this when the Trump administration is pressuring networks to take comedians poking the president off the air, in Saudi Arabia, anyone telling the sort of jokes about the nation’s rulers that got Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert into trouble would be in a torture cell faster than you can say “free speech.”
Other performers insisted they had noble intentions. Louis C.K. claimed the festival was contributing to the “opening up” of a closed society. Omid Djalili put it like this: “Allowing international performances in Saudi, especially comedy, subtly broadens what’s thinkable and sayable in a society. Every laugh at a taboo subject shifts norms, albeit slightly.”
Again, this is half true. Young Saudis enjoy freedoms their parents dared not dream of, but these come at an extremely high cost, and with strict limits. The enforced social contract between the Saudi government and its citizens mirrors the contract offered to performers at the comedy festival: Whatever you do, you must never, ever criticize the authorities. U.S. comedians who flouted the terms were uninvited; Saudi citizens who break the rules end up dead.
This is the gaping flaw in the self-interested reasoning of Aziz Ansari, who claimed to have “put a lot of thought into” whether or not to appear at the festival. “There’s people over there that don’t agree with the stuff that the government’s doing,” he told Deadline, “and to ascribe the worst behavior of the government onto those people, that’s not fair.”
I was forced to flee Saudi Arabia and live in exile because I “don’t agree with the stuff that the government’s doing.” Turki al-Jasser and Jamal Khashoggi were killed because they sometimes didn’t agree either. In August, Jalal al-Labbad was executed for the “crime” of attending demonstrations calling for basic human rights when he was 15 years old. His brother Fadel was executed in 2019, also for protest-related offenses. A third brother, Mohammad, is on death row, at imminent risk of execution. In August, his death sentence was upheld, alongside that of child defendant Youssef al-Manasif—another kid rounded up for allegedly attending a protest, tortured into making a false confession and charged with terror offenses.
Jimmy Carr talks about being a “free speech absolutist,” but has just been handsomely paid to launder the reputation of an authoritarian regime with zero tolerance for dissent. In Saudi Arabia, telling the wrong kind of joke can have severe, even fatal consequences. Salman al-Ouda faces a death sentence for “sarcasm and mockery of the government’s achievements.”
There were only eight executions in Saudi Arabia during the two weeks of the festival. I say “only” because this was a relatively quiet period for 2025, in which executions have averaged more than one per day. Two were for non-violent drug crimes, two were for murder, and three were for protest-related crimes, including Mohammed Al-Ammar, who was executed on the final day of the festival, for “terrorism” offenses related to taking part in demonstrations and sit-ins in Qatif, during the Arab Spring.
So what should artists and athletes invited to Saudi Arabia do? We are not saying they must boycott the kingdom: Saudis deserve to watch great performances and elite sport, and whether to perform there is a matter of personal conscience. But we do say these performers and athletes must come with their eyes open, admit they are helping to normalize a brutal and repressive regime, and expect to be criticized.
We need more global stars with the courage of Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton, who raced in Saudi Arabia and drew attention to executions of child defendants while he was there. The boy he mentioned, Abdullah al-Howaiti, has been imprisoned since he was arrested and tortured at age 14, and remains on death row. He could be executed at any time.
This week, the biggest stars in men’s tennis will be in Riyadh for the Six Kings tournament. In December, major musical acts will perform at Soundstorm. Now is the time for their peers to speak out and for journalists to ask tough questions.
If enough people are willing to pull back the glittering curtain, to reveal the cruel reality, these efforts to sportswash and culturewash Saudi Arabia’s reputation will fail, just like the comedy festival. Now, that would be pretty funny.
The post What I Want the Comedians Who Went to Saudi Arabia to Know appeared first on Foreign Policy.
