Laughing Their Heads Off

On 30 August, the American comedian Tim Dillon took to his podcast, The Tim Dillon Show, to defend his decision to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. ‘I know that people are very upset about it, they’re angry that comedians are going … Get over it,’ he said. ‘A lot of people are doing it. Like a lot. Like almost everyone. They bought comedy … So what they have slaves? … They’re paying me $375,000 … enough money to look the other way.’ The Saudi government, unluckily for Dillon, was listening. Three weeks later, he released an episode called ‘Fired from Riyadh’. His agent had rung him up: ‘“They heard what you said about their having slaves.” And I said: “I was being positive about it. I was defending them.”’

It wasn’t good enough for the Saudis, who have reportedly paid their headliners up to $1.6 million each with the proviso that they mustn’t mock religion, the royal family or Saudi ‘culture’ – including, apparently, slavery. The festival, which is running from 26 September to 9 October, is part of the Vision 2030 strategy launched in 2016. While the primary objective is to reduce the economy’s dependence on oil, the government also aims to ‘amaze the world again’ – to secure Saudi Arabia’s image both as the ‘heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds’ and as a friendly tourist destination.

‘We are well aware,’ the Vision 2030 authors said, ‘that the cultural and entertainment opportunities currently available do not reflect the rising aspirations of our citizens and residents.’ More than $2 billion has been invested in a new General Entertainment Authority, and its first events have included the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, a country music concert and annual WWE shows. (The women’s events were banned at first; now female wrestlers compete in full-length leggings and T-shirts.)

Neom, the megacity being built from scratch on an area the size of Belgium in the north-west, is part of Vision 2023. Villages were razed to make way for it. Its signature building, or ‘linear city’, is the Line: 170km long, 500m high and but only 200m wide. Its mirrored exterior, in artistic projections, juts up from the desert like a giant blade. Thousands of people have been forcibly evicted to make way for Neom, and those who have tried to resist, such as members of the Huwaitat tribe, have been killed by security forces, sentenced to death or given long prison sentences. An ITV documentary in 2024 estimated that 21,000 workers, most of them of Bangladeshi, Nepalese or Indian origin, have died since 2017 working on Vision 2030 projects. According to the Global Slavery Index, 740,000 people in Saudi Arabia live in slavery – around 2 per cent of the population.

The comedy festival was unveiled on X in July by Turki al-Sheikh, the head of the General Entertainment Authority and a minister in Mohammed bin Salman’s government. (In April 2024, the Athletic reported that so many people were in jail for tweeting critically about al-Sheikh that a wing of al-Ha’ir prison in Riyadh was nicknamed after him.) The first act to be announced was Kevin Hart, followed by fifty other comedians including Jimmy Carr, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle and Pete Davidson.

Many of them had already incurred the outrage of the public and the liberal media in their home countries, though the reasons vary from sexual misconduct (C.K.) to homophobic tweets (Hart), transphobic jokes (Chappelle), tax avoidance (Carr) or just having a bad vibe (Carr again). They have often been described as ‘edgy’, and all of them have publicly denigrated ‘cancel culture’ in the US and UK over the last ten years or so. ‘It’s the new book burning,’ Carr said last year. Chappelle, hosting Saturday Night Live in 2022, said: ‘It shouldn’t be this scary to talk about anything. It’s making my job incredibly difficult.’ Davidson, in 2019, said during a stand-up set that ‘jokes are very scary to tell. That’s the scariest thing you could do right now. Tell a joke.’

If there’s anything ironic about being so scared of telling the wrong joke that you run straight into the arms of the House of Saud, it seems lost on the festival performers, who have, on the whole, described their experiences in Riyadh as positive – or at least positive enough to clear their consciences. The pervasive fright of the middle-aged stand-up comic didn’t go away immediately. Burr, on his podcast, admitted that his idea of the Middle East had been hazy: ‘I literally think I’m going to fucking land … and 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.’ He was reassured when he saw that the Saudis have Starbucks, Pizza Hut and Dunkin’ Donuts. By the time he was delivering his material about ‘going to my gym and there was a bunch of gay guys there’, he was feeling a ‘great exchange of energy’ with the crowd: ‘It was fucking amazing.’ ‘It’s easier to talk here than it is in America,’ Chappelle said during his set.

There may be sincere excitement on display here, the thrill of a genuinely felt connection through laughter across a cultural divide. But it’s obvious what else the festival (and the free promotion the comedians are providing on their many podcasts) was meant to achieve: for the Saudis, a veneer of respectability and yet another distraction from their alarming human rights abuses; for the comedians, a chance to escape the liberal finger-wagging while taking home a cool half mil. (Authoritarian finger-wagging is OK.)

Has it worked? Many people in the West are aware of the backlash against the festival and the warnings meted out by organisations such as Human Rights Watch, which noted that it was taking place over the seventh anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It’s certainly possible that the festival has raised awareness about the Saudis’ repression of free speech, in part by emblematising it. At least one comedian, Jessica Kirson, has expressed regret about taking part and pledged to donate her fee to charity.

The Gulf monarchies are old hands at the exercise of soft power. So far, they’ve mostly concentrated on sport: Manchester City is owned by Abu Dhabi’s royal family and Newcastle United by the Saudis. Turki al-Sheikh has hosted a number of high-profile boxing matches, and is preparing a bid for Bristol City FC. When the men’s football World Cup was in Qatar in 2022, there was a feint towards concern about the forced labour used to build the stadiums, but the competition went ahead anyway and made the emirate more than a billion dollars. In 2034, Saudi Arabia will host.

Should comedians be held to a higher standard than footballers? It would help if they weren’t so fond of touting their own importance, their skewering of the ruling class, their ‘speaking truth to power’. The festival has highlighted how inauthentic their claims of censorship in the West are. After wowing the sheikhs, Chappelle, Davidson et al. will continue to sell out theatres, make TV deals and put out their podcasts back home.