“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
What it is
Dates/venue: Sept 26–Oct 9, 2025, at Boulevard City (ANB Arena) in Riyadh; organized under Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority (GEA) and promoted as part of Riyadh Season.
Lineup: 50+ global comics; U.S. headliners include Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Bill Burr, Pete Davidson, Louis C.K., Whitney Cummings, Tom Segura, Jo Koy, and more.
Why it’s controversial
Human-rights backdrop: Human Rights Watch called the festival an attempt to “whitewash” ongoing repression, noting the 7th anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder (Oct 2, 2018) falls during the fest and citing recent executions linked to speech. (Human Rights Watch)
Alleged content restrictions: A contract snippet shared by comedian Atsuko Okatsuka bars material that “denigrates the Kingdom… leadership… legal system,” etc.—raising free-speech concerns. (The Guardian)
Flashpoints this week
Chappelle on free speech: Onstage in Riyadh, he quipped it’s “easier to talk” there than in the U.S., which ignited backlash given Saudi censorship and rights issues.
Peer criticism & money talk: Comedians like Marc Maron and David Cross blasted participants; Tim Dillon said payouts were huge, then said he was dropped after jokes about Saudi abuses.
Jason K. Pargin – A Prophet for the New Millennium
US Comedians Defend Decision to Play in Saudi Arabia.
“They are paying me enough to look the other way.”
Beyond this current controversy, there’s something really important that you need to understand, which is that, with very few exceptions, your favorite entertainers care way more about making money that what you think.
And some of you are gonna say, “I already knew that. I’ve seen my favorite actor take terrible roles. They clearly just did it for a paycheck. And I’ve seen how much my favorite musician charges for merch.”
And yet people seem genuinely shocked by the comedians who took part in this.
And if you’re not aware of what’s going on, there’s a huge comedy festival happening in Saudi Arabia, where basically all of the most famous comedians went over there to perform specifically on behalf of people who have journalists and entertainers killed for speaking out against them.
This includes free speech warriors like Dave Chappelle performing on behalf of a regime who specifically does not believe in free speech.
And they did it because they got gigantic paychecks to do it.
And that includes guys like Bill Burr and Louis C.K. who, even if hate him, has always portrayed himself as having kind of a blue collar aesthetic. You know, he portrays himself as kind of a schlub who just eats junk food.
And the part that really seems to surprise people is how ravenously these people will lunge at a chance to go from a net worth of $100,000,000 to $103,000,000. But I am telling you average entertainer, even if all of their work is about the evils of capitalism and greed, even if the have a punk-rock anti-corporate aesthetic, the probably spend more time and energy focusing on how to get richer than you can possibly imagine.
There’s a reason why Hollywood superstars are constantly doing voice-over for TV commercials or launching liquor brands. See if you think of the hungriest people as being the ones living in their cars trying to get their first big break, but I’m telling you Ryan Reynolds is just as hungry to go from having $900,000,000 to having $1,000,000,000. Most of them know that it’s just not cool to talk about it.
But it has always been like this. It was a formative experience of my youth that my favorite band as a kid, Nirvana, a band that always had a punk-rock anti-corporate aesthetic, almost tore themselves apart the moment the money started rolling in, because they started out splitting everything equally three ways like a commune. But their albums started selling millions of copies and immediately Kurt Cabain started maneuvering to get a bigger cut – a guy who was living in his car just a few years earlier.
I’m not even here to condemn these people or call them hypocrites. Other people have done that. I’m just saying that it is nearly universal that once you start getting money, you only want more. It is so incredibly addictive that very, very few people are immune to it.
Fahad al-Butairi and Loujain al-Hathloul: The well-known Saudi comedian Fahad al-Butairi and his ex-wife, activist Loujain al-Hathloul, were arrested in 2018 in what was widely seen as a government crackdown on dissidents. Al-Butairi was reportedly forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia from Jordan and pressured to divorce al-Hathloul, who was later imprisoned. Al-Hathloul was not killed, but her case drew significant international attention.
Gemini
You can watch the video of Loujain driving into Saudi Arabia on this Facebook video. Note that this video was recorded two years before the Jamal Khashoggi murder, when people had hopes for reform thru the Crown Prince. But no.
Loujain al-Hathloul (Arabic: لجين الهذلول Lujjayn al-Hadhlūl; born 31 July 1989) is a Saudi women’s rights activist, social media figure, and political prisoner.
She was arrested on several occasions for defying the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia. In May 2018, she and several prominent women’s rights activists were kidnapped in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and deported to Saudi Arabia where they were charged with “attempting to destabilise the kingdom.”
Her ex-husband, Saudi stand-up comedian Fahad al-Butairi, was forcibly returned from Jordan to the Kingdom and placed under arrest.
In December 2021, al-Hathloul announced she and the Electronic Frontier Foundation would be suing three former American intelligence officers, Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke, for hacking her communications devices, leading to her kidnapping in the UAE and deportation to Saudi Arabia. The three officers had already admitted to providing the UAE with hacking services and equipment in a separate case.
Saudi Activist Loujain al Hathloul is Out of Jail. But Justice Remains a Distant Hope In July 2019, American human rights researcher Bethany Alhaidari was on the receiving end of a decision taken by members of that establishment. In a custody hearing after she had sought a divorce from her Saudi Arabian husband, judges pored over social media photographs of her wearing a bikini and determined that her Western values made her unfit to parent, she told TIME last year. The courts awarded custody of the pair’s then four-year-old daughter Zaina to her husband’s mother.
The only way to see Zaina, al-Haidari says, was to pretend to reconcile with her husband. They lived together for three months until he gave al-Haidari permission to visit her family in the U.S. with Zaina, where they have remained since.
On Feb. 8, a Washington court ruled against enforcing the Saudi custody order that would have forced al-Haidari and her daughter to return to the Kingdom where, the court noted last year, al-Haidari would be “subject to imprisonment and possibly death.”
[ed. note: this Time Magazine article was written during Joe Biden’s presidency. tRump was a big fan of the murderer Salman.] That signaled a marked departure from the approach of former President Trump, who boasted to veteran journalist Bob Woodward that he had “saved” bin Salman’s “ass” over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent women’s rights activist in Saudi Arabia whose story became an international rallying cry against alleged human rights abuses by the Saudi government, has been released from prison after nearly three years.
“Loujain is at home!,” her sister Lina al-Hathloul tweeted on Feb. 10. The previous day, amid reports that Loujain’s release was imminent, Lina tweeted: “Can I kindly ask that we don’t use the word ‘free’ or ‘freed’ in noting Loujain’s potential release as it is not freedom. It is a potential release from prison and she is still under probation, travel ban and awaiting news of the appeal process.”
Loujain, now 31, had pushed for an end to Saudi Arabia’s ban on women driving, including filming herself trying to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2014.
Who is Performing at the Saudi Arabia Comedy Festival?
[ed. note: These performers have a lifetime ban from all WLBOTT festivities, but are welcome to our rehabilitation camps.]
Mo Amer
Aziz Ansari
Wayne Brady
Hannibal Buress
Bill Burr
Jimmy Carr
Dave Chappelle
Louis C.K.
Whitney Cummings
Pete Davidson
Chris Distefano
Omid Djalili
Zarna Garg
Ben Hart
Kevin Hart
Gabriel Iglesias
Jim Jefferies
Jimeoin
Maz Jobrani
Jessica Kirson
Jo Koy
Bobby Lee
Sebastian Maniscalco
Sam Morril
Mark Normand
Russell Peters
Jeff Ross
Sugar Sammy
Andrew Santino
Andrew Schulz
Tom Segura
Ali Siddiq
Aries Spears
Chris Tucker
Jack Whitehall
Which Comedians Have Refused?
The comedian Shane Gillis said on his podcast, Secret Podcast, that he had turned down an invitation and a significant appearance fee.
Atsuko Okatsuka posted screenshots of what she said was her invite to the festival on the social media platform Threads. Mike Birbiglia and Leslie Liao responded to this and said that they too had rejected the offer.
Stavros Halkias said in a podcast episode that he had also refused to perform.
Nimesh Patel was also slated to participate in the festival, but announced on social media that he would be dropping out on ethical grounds.
Comedians Marc Maron and David Cross have both come out and publicly criticized the comedians participating in the festival.
Tim Dillon was originally slated to perform but was removed from the list of performers because of jokes that he made on his podcast about slavery in Saudi Arabia.
How Much Are Comedians Being Paid? Official figures for how much comedians are being paid for the Riyadh Comedy Festival have not been released to the public.
In a podcast appearance released on August 30, Dillon said that he was being paid $375,000 and that other performers had been offered as much as $1.6 million.
The Sad Spectacle of American Comedians Selling Out in Saudi Arabia
It turns out that edgy free-speech warriors will scuttle their principles for a check from a brutal autocratic regime.
[H]ired court jester to Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman (known familiarly as MBS), on his podcast Monday. “Everyone was happy.”
That’s a relief, because the last people in Saudi Arabia you want unhappy with you is the Saudi royal family. Burr had just returned from the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which claims to be the biggest in the world. It’s running from September 26 to October 5, in case you’re in the neighborhood, and boasts Louis C.K., Pete Davidson, Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, and many others, who received significant pay bumps to play birthday-party clowns to a despot.
“They’re just like us!” Burr assured his listeners. You can’t get too mad at Burr for saying that about the hereditary monarchs of the House of Saud, because that is what they paid for: a normalization of Saudi Arabia’s abysmal image worldwide—an image that is especially well-earned in the realm of human rights. The litany of abuses the Saudis have on their permanent record is staggering.
Images by Elder G
The Saudis understand that—and the organizers of the Riyadh Comedy Festival took pains to ensure that none of the performers would allude to the daily horrors beneath the glitz. Each contract signed came with a list of prohibited topics not to mention onstage.
With Saudi Arabia’s star-studded debut comedy festival kicking off this weekend, comedian Atsuko Okatsuka has revealed some of the event’s strict terms.
“The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process. A lot of the ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ comedians are doing the festival,” added Okatsuka with screenshots of the contract. “They had to adhere to censorship rules about the types of jokes they can make.”
Human Rights Watch researcher Joey Shea explained to CBS News, “The Saudi government has invested billions into high profile entertainment events like these in a deliberate effort to whitewash the country’s human rights record and deflect from the egregious abuses that continue to happen inside of the country.
“These investments are a part of the broader strategy to… have people thinking about a comedy event, for example, rather than the soaring number of executions that are happening inside of the country,” added Shea.
