Comedy is all about speaking truth to power. That’s why, this weekend, you’ll find America’s hottest knee-slappers jet-setting to Saudi Arabia. The Riyadh Comedy Festival kicks off today in the nation’s capital with an absurdly heavy-hitting lineup: Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari, and Louis C.K., just to name a few. See, “woke” might have killed free speech in Brooklyn, but it appears to be alive and well in Saudi Arabia—a country whose “years-since-last-executing-a-journalist counter” never seems to reach the double digits. 

It’s no secret that celebrities are selling out at higher rates, and with less shame, than we previously thought humanly possible. I recently wrote about my deep disappointment upon watching Eric André shill for the sports-betting app FanDuel—blissfully unaware that soon, Hannibal Buress would be accepting a blood money check directly from the Saudi Prince. Just when you thought we’d reached rock bottom, our heroes pull out a shovel and keep on digging. (Don’t stop, guys! You might find oil down there!)

To give these guys some credit, the price tag on their dignity is pretty damn high. Last week, comedian Tim Dillon complained on his podcast that he was fired from the festival after organizers heard his jokes about Saudi slave labor: “They heard what you said about them having slaves," Dillon recalled his manager saying. “They didn't like that.” Before his unceremonious sacking, Dillon claimed he was going to be paid $375,000 for one show, while comedians in a “higher bracket” stood to make around $1.6 million. “They’re paying me enough money to look the other way,” he said without an ounce of shame. “Do you understand?” 

So it’s not that these celebrities aren’t aware of what’s going on in Saudi Arabia; they just don’t give a shit. Comedian Jim Jefferies—an Australian who has nonetheless adopted American-style right-wing politics—defended the festival on a recent episode of Theo Von’s podcast: 

Jefferies: Now people have been going, "Oh, how dare you go over there after, oh, they killed a reporter." That was the big one. There's been a reporter who they killed. You don't think our governments fucking bump people? Oh, I think Jeffrey Epstein was fucking bumped off. You know what I mean?

 

Von: Oh, I'm sure that every place, we've damaged a lot of places.

 

Jefferies: Yeah, yeah. One reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I'm gonna die on.

 

Don’t worry Jim, you’re not at risk of dying on any hills. I know the Theo Von podcast isn’t exactly a paragon of intellectual thought, but this has got to be one of the stupidest conversations I’ve ever heard (even excluding the comparison of Jeffrey Epstein to a dissident journalist). To list Saudi Arabia’s endless crimes feels futile, but it seems our A, B, and C-listers need reminding.

Just last month, the Saudi government executed a 30-year-old man and his brother for allegedly participating in anti-government protests as a teenager. In June, a journalist named Turki al-Jasser was executed—most likely via beheading with a sword—for reporting on women’s issues and posting critical tweets about the Saudi government. In 2023, a father of seven was sentenced to death for his social media posts criticizing the country's leadership; the retired teacher reportedly had only ten followers between the two anonymous accounts he ran on Twitter (“X”).

Then, of course, there was the brutal 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The journalist was ambushed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey after entering the building to gather documents for his wedding. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered, though his remains have never been released. Following public outcry over the assassination, President Donald Trump reportedly bragged about shielding the Saudi Crown Prince from consequences: “I saved his ass,” Trump said in an interview with Post reporter Bob Woodward. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” Shortly after the killing, Trump bypassed Congress to sell over $8 billion in precision-guided missiles and other high-tech weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Joe Biden later dismissed a lawsuit against the prince, claiming his standing as prime minister gave him sovereign immunity.

That’s not to mention Saudi Arabia’s alleged ties to the 9/11 attacks. Despite consistent denials from the Saudi government, decades of legal fights and newly declassified FBI documents suggest links between Saudi operatives and some of the hijackers, of whom 15 were Saudi Arabian nationals.

So there we go, Mr. Jefferies—I found some hilarious material for you in case your “ugh, the LGBTQ acronym is too long”  bits get stale. But maybe it's sanctimonious to expect comedians to take even the most basic of stands against human rights abuses. After all, they’re occurring every day in the United States and comics still perform here. No one asked John Mulaney to cancel his tour when federal agents started kidnapping people off the streets! But the straw-man doesn’t stand. Participating in this event is more than simply performing in a country that does bad things. The Riyadh Comedy Festival is directly organized by the Saudi government as part of a multi-billion dollar campaign to sanitize the nation’s image. It’s not like performing at Coachella; it’s like if Lana Del Rey performed a headlining set at Alligator Alcatraz and the proceeds went toward hiring bonuses for new ICE recruits. (Though some fans wouldn’t put it past her). 

Under the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has been working overtime to promote the Kingdom as a world-class entertainment destination. Oil currently accounts for about 43 percent of the country’s GDP and roughly 75 percent of its fiscal revenue: a dependence known as the “resource curse” for its tendency to create unstable economies. That dependency is exactly what Vision 2030, Mohammed bin Salman’s grand rebranding campaign, is designed to fix. The plan aims to diversify the economy, attract foreign investment, and make Saudi Arabia look less like a brutal petrostate and more like a futuristic hub of culture and commerce. To sell that vision, the Kingdom has leaned heavily on American help. 

Some of the public relations assistance has been literal. In June 2020, Saudi security forces killed a member of the indigenous al-Huwaitat tribe for refusing to surrender his land for the government’s planned Neom mega-city: a $500 billion project that will supposedly include flying cars, robot maids, and a giant artificial moon. After the killing, the Crown Prince quietly signed a $1.7 million contract with U.S. public relations firm Ruder Finn to counter the bad press. 

Later, Saudi Arabia hired the Boston Consulting Group, along with a slew of other American firms, to boost its reputation as a Western sports capital. While they were unsuccessful in their bid to co-host the 2030 World Cup, the Prince managed to use his own connections with FIFA president Gianni Infantino to secure the 2034 tournament outright. 

The most brazen piece of the Vision 2030’s sportswashing might be LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed league that turned the golf world upside down. At first, the PGA and LIV embarked on an ugly feud, with American golf officials painting LIV defectors as sellouts to authoritarian money. But the battle shockingly ended with a merger: in 2023, the PGA, LIV, and the DP World Tour (formerly the PGA European Tour, now sponsored by the United Arab Emirates) agreed to “unify” professional golf under one organizational umbrella. The announcement stunned fans and particularly enraged families of 9/11 victims, who had long protested Saudi involvement in the sport: “All of a sudden they’re business partners? It’s unconscionable,” said one family spokesperson. Unfortunately, time and time again, Americans are forced to learn that their country’s only loyalty lies with profit.

Perhaps then, in light of the United States’ heavy hand in Saudi Vision 2030, we shouldn’t be too surprised by the spinelessness of U.S. comedians. Even Bill Burr accepted the payout—the same Bill Burr who mercilessly roasts the wealthy (“Billionaires are not happy having a billion dollars… They’re horrible, heartless people”) and called Jeff Bezos a “nerd” who “spent $38 million to get married.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to turn down a check. Comedian Marc Maron recently ripped the festival’s headliners to shreds, saying, “I mean, the same guy that’s gonna pay them is the same guy that paid that guy to bonesaw Jamal Khashoggi and put him in a fucking suitcase.” Meanwhile, Stavros Halkias simply said “Saudi Arabia is spooky to me” when fellow comedian Chris Distefano asked if he was joining “the gig”—which makes this incredibly lucrative festival sound like some last-minute set at an Austin stand-up cellar. (Distefano, incidentally, will be performing, because apparently his wife said they need the money for their upcoming wedding.) Shane Gillis, on the other hand, said he refused a “significant” offer to join the lineup: “Everyone’s like ‘Yeah, you should do it. Everyone’s doing it.’ It’s like, for Saudis? Weren’t those, uh, the 9/11 guys?” he said in a recent episode of the Secret Podcast. "You don't 9/11 your friends," he added. (This might be a low blow, but it should be noted that Pete Davidson, whose own firefighter father died in 9/11, is one of the headliners.)

They say that good comedy punches up. But as every great sell-out knows, “up” is where the money is. That doesn’t mean that grifters never feel sellers’ remorse, though. We all remember when podcaster Andrew Schulz invited Trump on his podcast and doubled over in laughter—nearly causing his Party City stick-on mustache to fall off—as they guffawed over the nickname “Comrade Kamala.” A few months later, Schulz was apparently so ashamed to admit he might have been wrong about Trump that he felt the need to wear a literal tin-foil hat while acknowledging the link between the president and the Epstein files. Meanwhile, it’s hard to say what kind of payout the NELK boys received for interviewing Benjamin Netanyahu; but there was something satisfying about watching the pair of podcasters later try to rub two brain cells together to realize they’d platformed a genocidal maniac. Theo Von, too, appears to be feeling some shame for using his faux-hillbilly “every-man” act to endorse a would-be dictator. After attending Trump’s inauguration in January, Von recently asked the Department of Homeland Security to remove a clip of his they’d used in one of their fun “deportation montage videos.” When you’re grifting for fascists, it’s fun to reap, but not always so fun to sow.

My point is this: the comics headlining the Riyadh Comedy Festival might eventually come to regret joining the payroll of a murderous dictator. Maybe that remorse will kick in immediately, when they’re hauled offstage mid-set for making fun of the Crown Prince. Maybe it’ll happen in the coming days, as they lose hordes of fans, or later, when they discover there’s no check large enough to buy a crumb of self respect. But for now, the Saudi government gets to point at its comedy festival and say, look, we’re fun! And our comics, who love to brand themselves as free-speech warriors, turn out to be just another set of mercenaries.

George Carlin once said: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” This weekend, the club is in Riyadh, and the guest list includes some of America’s most famous “truth-tellers.”