The Riyadh Comedy Festival!?

Saudi Arabia usually lands on the world’s front pages when oil prices move, a dissident turns up dead, or its crown prince flexes another billion-dollar venture. 

This time it’s category three again, with the Kingdom now hosting the first-ever Riyadh Comedy Festival through 9 October.

Ordinarily we might respond with ‘meh’.

But that option faded like the Rosso Fuoco paint job on a Ferrari in the Saudi sun, once Riyadh started billing this as the world’s largest comedy festival, then announced their epic line-up of names like Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, Chris Tucker, Kevin Hart, and 50 more. 

And of course, that sparks a familiar debate:

• The Saudi civil rights record is no laughing matter: the Kingdom hit pause on executing journalists after copping blowback for hack-sawing US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate in 2018. But it’s now hit that resume button this year, beheading (🇸🇦) Turki al-Jasser just in June. He was the journalist behind an anonymous X account highlighting royal corruption.

So the question of course becomes… are these millionaire Western entertainers selling out their ideals? The line-up even includes Pete Davidson, whose father died on 9/11, famously perpetrated by hijackers who were mostly (15 out of the 19) Saudi nationals.

Word is the main acts earned a crisp $1.6M to help them deal with any unease.

And… lest there be room for nuance around this old free speech debate, the Saudis even helpfully lobbed strict content rules into the mix, banning jokes about the Kingdom, its royals, or any religion. And one of the many funny things about this is the fact the line-up features comics whose whole schtick is railing against snowflakes who can’t take a joke.

And… just when you try to wedge a sliver of nuance into any incy remaining crack, the Saudis go ahead and axe two comedians because of stuff they said before game day:

• Tim Dillon shrugged that “they are paying me enough money to look the other way”, then got canned after joking about slave labour in the Kingdom, and

• Jim Jefferies disappeared too (from the line-up, to be clear!), though it’s unclear if it was because of his reference to Khashoggi’s murder, or his self-reference as a “freedom-of-speech machine” heading to Riyadh with zero censorship.

[Side-note, but the irreverent if often hilarious Jefferies is one of the few comedians to ever make us spit our tea in shock, and we can only imagine how his gig would’ve played in Riyadh].

Anyway, the comics have defended their attendance via a mix of a) you gotta pay the bills, b) it’s not like the West is perfect, and c) engagement is better than isolation.

And while you make up your own mind on the ethics, here’s the geopolitics in two points: 

1. It’s a big PR move

This Riyadh Comedy Festival is part of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Vision 2030, which aims to modernise and diversify his Kingdom’s economy. It’s the same driver behind his big moves in sport (football star Ronaldo just scored a cool $700M to stay), and film (celebs like Will Smith and Gwyneth Paltrow hit the 2023 Red Sea Film Festival).

Ie, spend enough cash and your turf eventually becomes a global events and tourism hub, less reliant on oil and gas, and more likely to attract Western investment, plus maybe even advanced arms sales (often blocked on human rights grounds).

But while several of the acts have argued the importance of engagement with the Saudis, the question is who’s changing who here: are these Western stars shaping Saudi views, or are they just shaping Western views towards the Saudis? Which brings us to…

2. Who’s the real target audience?

In a strict sense, it’s of course the predominantly-Saudi nationals lmao-ing in Riyadh’s Mohammed Al-Ali Theatre.

But the fact the event was pretty much exclusively in English also hints at two other aims: first, it’s probably aimed at keeping local elites happy with the Crown Prince’s endless rule.

But second, it’s probably also aimed at luring high-cash, high-influence citizens of the USA and the broader West, in hopes of amplifying all the artwashing.

And Bill Burr is already playing his part, pivoting from a 2016 refusal to do a local gig lest he get his “head sawed off”, to now praising the whole thing: “they just wanted to laugh!”

We can only guess whether locals like Abdulrahman al-Sadhan (the satirist doing 20 years for tweets), or Manahel al-Otaibi (the fitness instructor doing 11 years for pics without her abaya), or ‘A’ (the pseudonym for one of the many doing time for converting to Christianity) were also eagerly jumping aboard Burr’s roflcopter.