Bill Burr did what his Saudi handlers hoped he would do – he put over the authoritarian kingdom, where slavery is very much legal, where women are second-class citizens, at best, as being, you know, pretty much just like America.
“You think everybody’s going to be screaming, Death to America, and they’re going to have, like, fucking machetes and want to, like, chop my head off, right?” Burr said on a podcast once he’d made it back to the States from his set at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which featured an embarrassing number of the top stand-up comedians, all paid enormous sums to tell their jokes, as long as they didn’t offend the Saudi royals writing the checks.
The royals have been using their money to create and sell a new image of their backwards nation-state, primarily funding sports – for examples there, creating a rival to the PGA Tour, buying live WWE shows that are broadcast live worldwide.
The comedy festival is by far the best investment they’ve made to date.
Golf and pro ‘rasslin are niche sports, but standups are all over TV, streaming and movies, and command much bigger mainstream audiences.
“I thought this place was going to be really tense, and I’m thinking, like, is that a Starbucks next to a Pizza Hut next to a Burger King next to McDonald’s? They got a fucking Chili’s over here,” Burr said, and there you go, see, Saudi Arabia isn’t the birthplace of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the royals there aren’t the folks who had an American journalist beheaded for writing critically of the country.
Why, it’s practically wherever you live in America.
Louis CK, who you may remember having been briefly canceled at the beginning of “Me, Too” for subjecting female comedians to watching him masturbate in front of them, did a set at the festival.
Shocker, yeah, I know.
CK noted in an appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher” last week that the contract from festival organizers made clear that “their religion and their government” were off-limits as topics.
“I don’t have jokes about those two things. It used to be when I got offers from places like that, there would be a long list, and I’d just say, No, I don’t need that. But when I heard it’s opening, I thought, that’s awfully interesting. That just feels like a good opportunity. And I just feel like comedy is a great way to get in and start talking.”
CK seems to trying to spin the decision to take hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a comedy set as a modern nod to Richard Nixon’s ping-ping diplomacy with China in the early 1970s.
Um, no.
“The seventh anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder is no laughing matter, and comedians receiving hefty sums from Saudi authorities shouldn’t be silent on prohibited topics in Saudi like human rights or free speech. Everyone performing in Riyadh should use this high-profile opportunity to call for the release of detained Saudi activists,” said Joey Shea, a Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Now, that’s funny right there – the idea that a comedian getting upwards of $375,000 for a few minutes of their act; that’s what Tim Dillon said he was set to be paid before the Saudis fired him for jokes he made on his podcast, recorded on American soil, on the Saudis treatment of migrant workers, ahem, slaves.
“I addressed it in a funny way, and they fired me,” said Dillon, adding:
“I certainly wasn’t going to show up in your country and insult the people that are paying me the money. But on my own show, in my own country, where I have the freedom to speak and say the things I want, I am going to be funny.”
The problem there being, Dillon didn’t pull a Bill Burr and make his observations about all the American restaurant chains that he saw on his guided visit.
“Superficial observation based on a few days in the city is really just a pathetic and ignorant observation, ignoring the fact that at this moment Saudi men and women are literally in solitary confinement facing sentences of decades,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, a nonprofit founded by Khashoggi in 2018, in an interview with CNN, adding:
“That there appears to be more freedom in the country is definitely true, but the reality is that Saudi Arabia remains an absolute authoritarian dictatorship where voices that criticize the government, criticize the royal family, criticize the economic performance of the public investment fund literally face decades and decades in prison.”
The likes of Dave Chappelle, who said “it’s easier to talk here than it is America,” are useful idiots to the Saudis; and speaking of useful idiots, we have Pete Davidson, the frustratingly untalented whatever he is, famous for being famous guy.
Davidson’s father died in the 9/11 terror attacks.
His approach to doing Riyadh: “I just know I get the routing, and then I see the number, and I go, ‘I’ll go.’”