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It’s hard to be a comedian; it’s never just bits and punch lines. They expect you to weigh in on so much serious stuff: cancel culture, political repression. And now the latest heavy question plaguing the world of stand-up is: “Should you decline to perform at a comedy festival in a country that has arrested and jailed some of its own comedians?” The Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia concludes this week, but the outrage (from comedians who didn’t go) and self-justification (from comedians who did) continues.
The festival is an outgrowth of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, a plan launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to attract Western investment and glitz up his country’s draconian image. According to the Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama, who has covered the Gulf states for decades, the country has changed considerably—at least on the surface. Women drive, work in different sectors, and dress more vibrantly. The country has launched a women’s soccer league and expressed interest in hosting the Women’s World Cup in 2035. But the country’s leaders still jail and harass critics, and U.S. intelligence still suspects MBS of participating in the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which are some of the reasons why Human Rights Watch said the comedy festival “whitewashes abuses.”
In this episode, we talk to Salama and our colleague Helen Lewis, fresh back from seeing Louis C.K. and Jimmy Carr perform in Riyadh, about what happened at the festival and how to understand Saudi Arabia’s push for modernization.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Okay, how about this for a setup: A bunch of comedians walk into a festival hosted by a country that has arrested and jailed some of its own comedians, a country accused in American courts of providing support to the 9/11 hijackers, whose leader allegedly participated in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, among other human rights violations. And then, days before the festival starts, a different comedian says—
Marc Maron (from Instagram): Well, there’s a Riyadh comedy festival; I don’t know if you heard about that.
(Audience laughs.)
Maron: This is true. There’s a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, comedy festival.
[Music]
Rosin: That’s Marc Maron, from a recent video he posted on social media.
Maron: I mean, how do you even promote that? From the folks that brought you 9/11, two weeks of laughter in the desert! Don’t miss it!
(Audience laughs.)
Rosin: And then another comedian says—
Shane Gillis (from Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast): Everyone’s like, Yeah, you should do it. Everyone’s doing it. It’s like, For Saudis?
Rosin: That was Shane Gillis, who declined to go.
Gillis: Weren’t those the 9/11 guys?
(Laughter.)
Zach Woods (from TikTok): Guys, it’s that special time of year: It’s the Riyadh Comedy Festival. And all of your favorite comedians are performing at the pleasure of Turki al-Sheikh, and—
Rosin: That’s Zach Woods.
Woods: Human Rights Watch has been begging the comedians not to participate in the whitewashing of the horrors that are ongoing in Saudi Arabia. Ugh, what a cockblock Human Rights Watch is for comedy.
Let’s have some fun—
[Music]
Rosin: Atsuko Okatsuka said she was offered a spot in the festival but declined. And then she posted on social media what looked like a contract, where it stated that performers could not make fun of Saudi Arabia and its leadership, the Saudi royal family, and basically anything regarding religion.
Now, the comedians who did sign on to the festival included some pretty heavy hitters: Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, and Bill Burr, among dozens of others. The amount they were paid isn’t known for sure, though at least one comedian has said he was offered $375,000 and that others received more than $1 million—which is a lot more than some of them make in the U.S.
In an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher last Friday, Louis C.K. said he had “mixed feelings” about attending.
Louis C.K. (from Real Time With Bill Maher): I think everything that’s being said about it, that’s a worthy discussion: When are you appeasing? When are you engaging? And I have mixed feelings about it too. I struggled about going once I started hearing what everyone was saying.
Rosin: Jessica Kirson, who is a gay comedian with a big queer following, also went to the festival and then apologized to her fans when she got back.
Aziz Ansari, meanwhile, told Jimmy Kimmel this week that he saw performing there as an overall good thing for Saudi Arabia.
Jimmy Kimmel (from Jimmy Kimmel Live): So you felt that, in the long term, this will be a positive: people seeing comedy and American comedy and free speech—
Aziz Ansari: Yeah, so many people were there talking about stuff. And I hope people see that, and they go, Wow, this was really great, and I want more of this. Not just in comedy, but in everything.
Rosin: All of this, whether intended or not, brought a lot of attention to a festival that otherwise may have gone largely unnoticed.
Rosin: So you literally just got back from Saudi Arabia.
Helen Lewis: Yeah, my plane landed about two hours ago.
Rosin: I mean, we even sent Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis there.
Lewis: This is a country that has been a theocracy, essentially, practicing one of the more conservative forms of Islam. Some stuff was genuinely pretty groundbreaking. This is probably the first time anyone has joked about dildos onstage in Saudi Arabia.
[Music]
Rosin: We’ll hear more from Helen about what it was like to be at the festival later in the show.
And in case you were wondering, or waiting, I do not have a punch line to this setup. But in the end, maybe it’s Saudi Arabia that gets the last laugh, because the Riyadh Comedy Festival is just one small part of a much bigger plan the country has put in place that goes way beyond comedy—a plan to compete with its neighbors, pull in Western investment, dominate sports, and generally be known for things other than 9/11 and human-rights violations.
Vivian Salama: You could really kind of envision the skyline of Dubai: You know that it’s a shopping hub, and there’s all these celebrities that go there, and it’s glitzy, and it’s glamorous.
Well, Saudi Arabia has a lot more money and kind of looked on all these years very jealously, in some ways, of the fame and fortune that came with Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Qatar’s transformation. And it wanted that, but it had some restrictions.
Rosin: That’s my colleague Vivian Salama, who lived and reported in the Gulf for several years.
Salama: After all, this is the home of Islam. Mecca and Medina hold very, very spiritual significance for Muslims around the world. Saudi Arabia was known for morality police and things like that; it was not known for comedy and fashion and entertainment.
And then all of a sudden, about a decade ago, you had a young crown prince—who came in somewhat forcefully into power, pushing his cousin out of the way—and he vowed to change things, and that’s when some of these new patterns began. And so it’s been a gradual shift, a comedy festival being part of that bigger picture.
Rosin: What is the bigger picture? I’ve heard of Vision 2030. What is that? What is that about?
Salama: So Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia—who, by the way, just turned 40 years old in August—he launched something called Vision 2030, he and others, the king included.
[Music]
Salama: Vision 2030 is their economic-diversification plan and which gets very in the weeds in terms of the different sectors of development. But one of the big parts of this framework was that they were gonna diversify their economic, social, and cultural life. If you read through this very long plan, it talks about the pillars for promoting a “vibrant society,” among it getting its citizens to exercise more, getting them to spend more on entertainment, things like that.
They really believe that they cannot rely exclusively on the fact that they are the world’s largest exporter of oil as the sole basis for generating economic revenue; they needed to diversify— which is what, by the way, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Qatar had been doing in the decades before. It’s just a more sustainable model. And Saudi Arabia, up until about a decade ago, was really in trouble in that regard because of the fact that it needed to find other alternative avenues for revenue. They weren’t getting tourism the way that Dubai and Qatar were. They weren’t getting any of that other money. The retail shopping hubs were not looking to go there.
And it’s partly because of their record on a number of issues. Human rights, for example, has been problematic all along. Repression of women was always something that was notable for Saudi Arabia. They have been trying to change this, in conjunction with this diversification plan that they’re also trying to execute on.
Rosin: It’s funny—you’re saying it in a straight way, but as you’re saying it, I’m like, This does not necessarily hang together. How does “comedy festival” dropped into the middle of this make any sense? Comedians are known for making fun of everything. And so how do you think they thought through that? It’s not a shopping center; it’s a different animal, you know?
Salama: The fact that we are here talking about it is what they are trying to accomplish. They want to bring eyes and people’s attention to Saudi Arabia for things other than, say, negative headlines or just the Hajj, for Islamic pilgrimage. They want to be known for other things. They want us to be talking about Saudi Arabia: Did you see that festival in Saudi Arabia? Did you see that fashion show in Saudi Arabia?
Rosin: So Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, has actually made headway in this goal, proving to the world that this is not your grandma’s Saudi Arabia. He’s also an ally of President Donald Trump.
During Trump’s first presidency, his very first international visit was to Saudi Arabia. In the spring of 2018, Trump hosted MBS at the White House for some classic Trumpian dealmaking.
Donald Trump (from PBS NewsHour): We’ve become very good friends over a fairly short period of time; I was in Saudi Arabia in May. And we are bringing back hundreds of billions of dollars into the United States, and we understand that—
Rosin: Then, just about six months after that warm welcome in the Oval Office, news broke about the shocking killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Salama: It was eventually determined by U.S. intel that the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, either knew about or directed the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, which was an extremely brutal event, as we know now—happened extraterritorially in Istanbul, likely with the use of a bone saw. And so you had this very jarring image of this journalist working for a Western publication who was brutally killed by this man, and at the same time, he was out there talking about: I’m a different kind of ruler. I’m a reformer. I want to engage with the West. And so you had this split-screen situation, and it just so happened that the Trump administration had come into office right around that time.
President Trump did acknowledge, with some trepidation, these reports. He reportedly, according to my sources, told the crown prince and the king privately, I hope there wasn’t a bone saw; I’ll be very mad if there was a bone saw, but also made very clear that he wasn’t gonna get involved in their domestic affairs, that this relationship is a business relationship above all else: We can help each other do really well.
Rosin: Do you, as an observer of the country and its ebbs and flows, think that MBS, for being young and kind of desiring this cultural opening, has made any actual meaningful reforms?
Salama: Oh, yeah, most certainly. When I last visited Saudi—a year and a half ago, maybe—I couldn’t actually believe how much it had changed. There was a time less than a decade ago where I could not walk around without an abaya, the full dress that goes to the floor, that covers the very modest clothing. Oftentimes, I’d have to have a veil at least on hand so that if anyone yelled at me, I’d just kind of throw it on my head, if not always wearing it.
I walked around in jeans and a T-shirt. Women were wearing bright, vibrant abayas that were open and showing their jeans and T-shirts underneath—and I’m talking Saudi women. Their hair was exposed much more than I’d ever seen before. Women are now driving, which is one of the big headliners that came out during the MBS period.
But also, Saudi Arabia was a little bit of an interesting mix even before this because you did have women who were involved in government, who were business leaders, and they’ve just been given a platform to expand their influence in the kingdom more as these reforms have set in over the years. And so definitely, there’s been significant changes, and you can see it even superficially when you go to visit.
Rosin: So thinking about the comedy festival again, one obvious argument is: “You have a comedy festival. You have comedians show up. Saudis are in the audience. They hear this kind of comedy. Even if it’s not free comedy—it cannot criticize the crown prince or the government or the royal family—it’s still an edgy kind of comedy, and that, in and of itself, has an opening effect.” Do you believe that to be true?
Salama: I mean, it is surprising to me, having been now traveling and/or living in the Gulf for close to 20 years, it is surprising to me to see where we are. It’s definitely a change; it has to be acknowledged.
At the same time, whether or not you can criticize the government, for example, that’s obviously still a red line, and it’s problematic. And a lot of these comedians just decided that they’re not going to participate in a festival that draws red lines, that tells them what they can and cannot say, because comedy is notoriously sort of a free rein—or at least it used to be; things are changing even here. But the Gulf governments—and I’m not just talking about Saudi Arabia—the governments in the Middle East across the board don’t take criticism very well. They’re not a free-speech society by any stretch.
[Music]
Rosin: Yeah. I guess what you’re observing is openness is a big, broad term. There is some openness in the way women walk around on the streets, the fact that women drive, the kinds of comedians that were invited. But that doesn’t mean all kinds of openness; it doesn’t mean criticizing the government, it doesn’t mean comedians can say what they wanna say, and it doesn’t necessarily even translate into the exact same standards for a Saudi citizen. But it is something different.
Salama: That’s right. That’s right. And a lot of these comedians have just determined that any restriction is a no-go.
Rosin: After the break, the view from inside the comedy festival.
[Break]
Rosin: The Riyadh Comedy Festival just wrapped today, and as fans and comedians return home, a clearer picture of what the event was actually like is taking shape.
Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis just arrived home from Riyadh when we spoke.
Lewis: So we went to see the co-headliners of the comedy festival, who are Louis C.K. and Jimmy Carr, a British comedian. And they had a Saudi comedian as a support act, and he said, I just want everyone to give a big round of applause for Mohammed bin Salman. (Laughs.) And I was just like, No, no. And obviously, I don’t applaud anything anyway, and I thought, Well, what a way to go, what a way to be dragged off by the secret police, is for showing insufficient enthusiasm for the comedic potential of Mohammed bin Salman.
But this was organized by the General Entertainment Authority. This was a state-sanctioned comedy festival. So I think performing there implies not even quite an endorsement, but certainly a level of comfort and ease with what the government is doing that, even in an American context, never mind a Saudi context, I think lots of people would have a problem with.
Rosin: So that expectation was not on the American comedians, exactly—like: Share a big round of applause. But when comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posted a picture of the contract, the contract was essentially: No insulting, degrading, embarrassing the leadership or religion. It was specifically about insulting the heads of state.
Lewis: Yeah, and I think that’s really worth noting because, actually, the material was pretty blue—pretty blue—so that is kind of interesting. This is a country that has been a theocracy, essentially, practicing one of the most conservative forms of Islam. Some stuff was genuinely pretty groundbreaking. This is probably the first time that anyone has joked about dildos on stage in Saudi Arabia. Might not be the last.
Rosin: Well, I was wondering about Jimmy Carr. I was like, He’s a filthy comedian, you know?
Lewis: He is a filthy comedian. I would say about 75 percent of his set is about: Ooh, wouldn’t it be funny if I was a sex offender? (Laughs.) And you’re like, You do know that they kill those over here, Jimmy? (Laughs.)
Rosin: Yes! So how did that roll out?
Lewis: Well, actually, you know what, almost all of it went down really well—and, actually, in this slightly intoxicated way, where he kept saying, like, Let’s push it a little bit more, shall we? Which is something that came up in Bill Burr’s reflections on the event, right? That there was a feeling that people were really excited to be there. This was thrilling to them, that this is kind of slightly titillating, to hear this kind of what, to you and me, would be like, Oh, 9 p.m. at the Comedy Store any night of the week, kind of sex-based comedy. This is the first time that’s been heard in public.
But I will say, Jimmy Carr, I will give him some credit because he did—I mean, I think it was an unpleasant joke—but he did do a political joke, which was he’d done a long section on euthanasia that said, We put a dog to sleep, but we allow people to go on living in what can only be described as, and then there was a beat, and then he said, Yemen.
Rosin: (Laughs.) Oh my God, wow.
Lewis: Yeah, and there was genuinely a kind of collective: (Gasps.)
Rosin: Yeah.
Lewis: Because mentioning the Saudi war with Yemen and the bombing of the Houthi rebels there is an incredibly touchy political subject. Then he went back to some light-hearted anal-sex material, and everybody kind of calmed back down again.
The other thing I thought was very interesting about Louis C.K. is that he basically did, as far as I can tell, his current tour show. So he did a whole bit that was about how much he hates jury duty. Well, no one in Saudi Arabia does jury duty.
Rosin: (Laughs.) Yeah.
Lewis: And then he did a bit about how terrible it is when it rains. It’s literally a desert.
Rosin: So he is playing it safe, yeah.
Lewis: And then he did a bit about how the woman down his hallway’s really elderly and yet still, despite that, still wears a tube top and cropped shorts, and he finds this disgusting. And I was like, Again, not a problem that these people will encounter in their day-to-day life, Louis C.K.
Rosin: Right.
Lewis: So it was—and he did do a bit about his own religion. He said, Am I okay to mock my religion? Am I okay to talk about Catholicism? And so technically violating the spirit of the contract, except that we all know that the spirit of the contract really was: Don’t mock Islam.
Rosin: There’ve been some comedians—like Aziz Ansari, for example—who have come out after the event and said, I think it was net positive. It was net good for Saudi Arabia. It exposed people to a kind of talk and humor that they hadn’t heard before.
On the Bill Burr podcast that we mentioned—you were not in this show. But he talked about a comedian—who he did not name—who, when three members of the audience who were Saudi got up to go to the bathroom, this comedian, who was gay, said, Oh, are you going to check Grindr? Which Bill Burr thought was like, Whoa, that’s really pushing it.
And so there are some voices coming out of that saying, like, They really did push the boundaries in some way. Did you talk to any comedians? What was your sense of, like, did they feel good about what they’d done, whether it had had any impact?
Lewis: I talked to Andrew Maxwell, who I’ve previously done panel shows with, comedy panel shows in Britain. And he gave a very interesting defense, which was, he’s Irish, and he said, I grew up in a de facto theocracy—divorce was illegal; abortion was illegal; homosexuality was completely frowned upon. And all that changed during the time that I was growing up, and Ireland is now a much more liberal society. And if this has a chance to do that, I want to be part of it. And already, I can hear the bit in my head that’s going, Do we really think that Saudi Arabia is gonna creep towards Western liberal democracy through the medium of dildo jokes?
Rosin: Right, right.
Lewis: It seems hopeful. But I can understand the fact that this is a very young country, right? It has de-Islamized in very visible and obvious ways. So the most obvious one is the way that the religious police no longer have powers of arrest, and if you went over 10, 20 years ago and you weren’t correctly dressed, or whatever it might be, that was a really scary and repressive thing. And I’m not saying now it’s a free-speech paradise, but that is definitely something that has changed.
So the paradox of Mohammed bin Salman’s rule of Saudi Arabia is that you can liberalize up to the exact point that he allows, but no more, and you must never question how much or how little he has liberalized. So the most obvious example of this being: Around the time that women were allowed to drive, also, a very prominent women’s rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, who was a big campaigner for women’s driving rights, she was jailed. She’s not been heard from in public since; she’s not allowed to speak publicly. So the government has adopted this policy that they’ve said that her position was essentially the correct one, but she did it wrong because she spoke out against—she questioned the Saudi state. And that’s the bit that I think is—people from Europe and America, it’s hard to grapple with—is: What price are you willing to pay for this liberalization? And what authoritarian penalty will you put up with? Should you be grateful for the good things while condemning the bad thing?
[Music]
Lewis: And also, part of this is, I think, when I read all the defenses of the comedians about why they were doing it, two things came across. One was a kind of nihilism, which was a kind of Doesn’t matter. You know, Tim Dillon saying, They’re paying me enough to silence the screams. I don’t care. You just take the money, keep your head down.
And then the other one was moral relativism, which was, really, essentially boils down to: America’s done some bad shit too. Who are we to preach to other people? And I heard that sentiment, and I think particularly because of Israel’s war in Gaza, lots of comedians in that kind of sphere who took the invitation and took the money are like, Our ally Israel is bombing a country back to the Stone Age; who are we to lecture Saudi Arabia on its human-rights record?
And I heard that sentiment again and again and again. And it’s one that I think is quite widespread now among younger, disaffected people who listen to that kind of podcast-comedian sphere, a real deep dissatisfaction with American foreign policy—which is not a new thing, right? You could have said the same thing around the time of the war in Iraq in 2004. But I think it complicates what some people might feel, that America is a great liberalizing force and is morally superior to other people.
Rosin: So now that you’ve been there, which of those do you find the most compelling? Or do you think, in the end, none of them should have gone?
Lewis: I wouldn’t have gone. But then, you and I are in a different position, as journalists, right? There’s an honor system in Britain, and sometimes people who are editors of newspapers take honors, and they become Sir Such and Such, and I think, What are you doing? (Laughs.) If the government likes you, you’ve done it wrong, essentially, as a journalist. So that’s my perspective that I bring to this.
And now, it’s not the same for comedians. And I think the bit that is kind of crucial to this is, at what point did we stop having public intellectuals, and we started having comedians and started treating them as kind of philosopher-kings, right?
Rosin: Yeah.
Lewis: The idea is these are people whose job is like dinner theater: You go out for the evening, and they make you laugh. And I think I wanna go back to why we’ve ceded this much moral authority to this class of people who are—you know, many of my best friends are stand-up comedians. But they are heat-seeking missiles for getting the right reaction from an audience. And that’s not the same thing as telling the truth, right? Sometimes the jokes are lazy or easy, and those ones are the guaranteed laughs. So for me, this whole festival should make us reappraise why we take the political thoughts of comedians so seriously and whether or not they’ve really earned that right to be taken seriously.
Under that argument, lots of American businesses already trade with Saudi Arabia. Why are we holding Bill Burr to a higher moral standard than Chili’s or Dunkin’ Donuts?
Rosin: A last question, which is maybe the one I should have asked you first: Why did you wanna go? It’s an interesting choice. It’s not as if you cover the Middle East. I’m curious why—what you were looking for.
Lewis: I thought it would be funny.
Rosin: (Laughs.) That’s not …
Lewis: In many different ways. No, should I tell you what—(a) when I saw it, the two words: Riyadh—the most austere Saudi city; the home of the Sauds, the ruling family—in conjunction with standup comedy. Then I saw the lineup, and it was lots of people that I’ve covered for The Atlantic for a long time, right? And I was thinking about this: that the festival really owes its existence to two things. One of them is Mohammed bin Salman and his liberalizing regime, and the other one is cancel culture.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Lewis: And you look down that list, and it’s Dave Chappelle—huge backlash at Netflix over his jokes about trans people. It’s Louis C.K.—got MeToo’ed. But there is a sense that, in the last couple of years in American comedy, that lots of people got pushed out of the mainstream, and they rebuilt a whole new—you know, in the same way there was alt-comedy in the 1980s, this is kind of alt-alt-comedy, anti-woke comedy.
So for me, this whole festival was really reflective of the state of American comedy and the new energy that pulsed through it, and I think pulsed through it last year, leading so many of these guys to flirt with Trump, interview Trump, maybe full-on endorse Trump. And that is a big challenge to people my age, who’ve grown up with the default assumption that comedy is kind of liberal.
Rosin: Well, Helen, get some sleep, and thank you for talking to us after your trip.
Lewis: As ever, thank you for having me.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Genevieve Finn fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
The post Saudi Arabia Gets the Last Laugh appeared first on The Atlantic.
