Saudi Arabia Gets the Last Laugh

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I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Okay, how about this first setup?

A bunch of comedians walk into a festival hosted by a country that has arrested and jailed some of its own comedians, a country accused in American courts of providing support to the 9-11 hijackers.

And then days before the festival starts, a different comedian says, Well, there's a Riyadh comedy festival.

I don't know if you heard about that.

This is true.

There's a Riyadh Saudi Arabia comedy festival.

That's Mark Maron from a recent video he posted on social media.

I mean, how do you even promote that?

You know, like, from the folks that brought you 9-11,

two weeks of laughter in the desert.

Don't miss it!

And then another comedian says, Everyone's like, yeah, you should do it.

Everyone's doing it.

It's like,

for Saudis?

That was Shane Gillis, who declined to go.

What does the

9-11 guys?

Guys, it's that special time of year.

It's the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

And all of your favorite comedians are performing at the pleasure of Turkey Al-Sheikh.

That's Zach Woods.

Human Rights Watch has been begging the comedians not to participate in the whitewashing of the horrors that are ongoing in Saudi Arabia.

Ugh, what a cock block Human Rights Watch is for comedy.

Let's have some fun.

Let's have some Riyadh.

Atsuko Okatsuka said she was offered a spot in the festival but declined.

And then she posted on social media what looked like a contract where it stated that performers could not make fun of Saudi Arabia and its leadership, the Saudi royal family, and basically anything regarding religion.

Now the comedians who did sign on to the festival included some pretty heavy hitters.

Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, and Bill Burr, among dozens of others.

The amount they were paid isn't known for sure, though at least one comedian has said he was offered $375,000 and that others received more than a million, which is a lot more than some of them make in the U.S.

In an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday, Louis C.K.

said he had mixed feelings about attending.

I think everything that's being said about it, about

that's a worthy discussion.

When are you appeasing?

When are you you engaging?

And I have mixed feelings about it too.

I struggled about going once I started hearing what everyone was saying.

Jessica Kerson, who is a gay comedian with a big career following, also went to the festival and then apologized to her fans when she got back.

Aziz Ansari, meanwhile, told Jimmy Kimmel this week that he saw performing there as an overall good thing for Saudi Arabia.

So you felt that it was, that in the long term, this will be a positive people seeing comedy and American comedy and freeze.

Yeah, I mean, so many people were there talking about stuff, and I hope people see that and they go, wow, this was really great.

And I want more of this, not just in comedy, but in everything.

All of this, whether intended or not, brought a lot of attention to a festival that otherwise may have gone largely unnoticed.

So you literally just got back from Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, my plane landed about two hours ago.

I mean, we even sent Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis there.

This is a country that has been a theocracy, essentially, you know, practicing one of the most conservative forms of Islam.

Some stuff was genuinely pretty groundbreaking.

This is probably the first time that anyone has joked about dildos on stage in Saudi Arabia.

We'll hear more from Helen about what it was like to be at the festival later in the show.

And in case you were wondering or waiting, I do not have a punchline to this setup.

But in the end, maybe it's Saudi Arabia that gets the last laugh, because the Riyadh Comedy Festival is just one small part of a much bigger plan the country has put in place that goes way beyond comedy.

A plan to compete with its neighbors, pull in Western investment, dominate sports, and generally be known for things other than 9-11 and human rights violations.

You could really kind of envision the skyline of Dubai.

You know that it's a shopping hub and there's all these celebrities that go there and it's glitzy and it's glamorous.

Well, Saudi Arabia has a lot more money and kind of looked on all these years very jealously in some ways of the fame and fortune that came with Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Qatar's transformation.

And it wanted that, but it had some restrictions.

That's my colleague, Vivian Salama, who lived and reported in the Gulf for several years.

After all, this is the home of Islam.

Mecca and Medina hold very, very spiritual

significance for Muslims around the world.

Saudi Arabia was known for morality, police, and things like that.

It was not known for comedy and fashion and entertainment.

And then all of a sudden, about a decade ago, you had a young crown prince who came in somewhat forcefully into power, pushing his cousin out of the way.

And he vowed to change things.

And that's when some of these new patterns began.

And so it's been a gradual shift, comedy festival being part of that bigger picture.

What is the bigger picture?

Like, I've heard of Vision 2030.

Like, what is that?

What is that about?

So, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who, by the way, just turned 40 years old in August, he launched something called Vision 2030, he and others, the king king included.

Vision 2030 is their economic diversification plan, which, you know, gets very in the weeds in terms of the different sectors of development.

But one of the big parts of this framework was that they were going to diversify their economic, social, and cultural life.

You know, if you read through this very long plan, you know, it talks about the pillars for promoting a quote vibrant society.

Among it, you know, getting its citizens to exercise more, getting them to spend more on entertainment, things like that they really believe that they cannot rely exclusively on the fact that they are the world's largest exporter of oil as the sole basis for generating economic revenue.

They needed to diversify, which is what, by the way, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Qatar had been doing in the decades before.

It's just a more sustainable model.

And Saudi Arabia, up until about a decade ago, was really in trouble in that regard because of the fact that it needed to find other alternative avenues for revenue.

They weren't getting tourism the way that Dubai and Qatar were.

They weren't getting any of that other money.

The retails, you know, shopping hubs were not looking to go there.

And it's partly because of their record on a number of issues.

Human rights, for example, has been problematic all along.

Repression of women was always something that was notable for Saudi Arabia.

They have been trying to change this in conjunction with this diversification plan that they're also trying to execute on.

It's funny you're saying it in this straight way, but as you're saying, I'm like, this does not necessarily hang together.

Like, how does Comedy Festival dropped into the middle of this make any sense?

Comedians are known for making fun of everything.

And so, how do you think they thought through that?

It's not a shopping center,

it's a different animal.

The fact that we are here talking about it

is what they are trying to accomplish.

They want to bring eyes and, you know,

people's attention to Saudi Arabia for things other than, say, negative headlines or just the Hajj, you know, for the Islamic pilgrimage.

They want to be known for other things.

They want us to be talking about Saudi Arabia.

Did you see that festival in Saudi Arabia?

Did you see that fashion show in Saudi Arabia?

So Mohamed ben Salman, or MBS, has actually made headway in this goal, proving to the world that this is not your grandma, Saudi Arabia.

He's also an ally of President Donald Trump.

During Trump's first presidency, his very first international visit was to Saudi Arabia.

In the spring of 2018, Trump hosted MBS at the White House for some classic Trumpian dealmaking.

We've become very good friends over a fairly short period of time.

I was in Saudi Arabia in May, and we are bringing back hundreds of billions of dollars into the United States, and we understand that.

Then, just about six months after that warm welcome in the Oval Office, news broke about the shocking killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

It was eventually determined by U.S.

Intel that the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, either knew about or directed the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, which was an extremely brutal event, as we know, now happened extraterritorially in Istanbul, likely with the use of a bone saw.

And so you had this very jarring

image of this journalist working for a Western publication who was brutally killed by this man.

And at the same time, he was out there talking about, I'm a different kind of ruler, I'm a reformer, I want to engage with the West.

And so you had this split-screen situation.

And it just so happened that the Trump administration had come into office right around that time.

President Trump did acknowledge with some trepidation these reports.

He reportedly, you know, according to my sources, told the Crown Prince and the king privately, you know, I hope there wasn't a bone saw.

I'll be very mad if there was a bone saw.

But also made very clear that he wasn't going to get involved in their domestic affairs, that this relationship is a business relationship above all else.

You know, we can help each other do really well.

Do you, as an observer of the country and its ebbs and flows, think that MBS, you know, for being young and kind of desiring this cultural opening, has made any actual meaningful reforms?

Oh, yeah, most certainly.

I mean, when I last visited Saudi a year and a half ago, maybe, I couldn't actually believe

how much it had changed.

There was a time less than a decade ago where I could not walk around without an abaya, the full dress that goes to the floor that covers the very modest clothing.

Oftentimes I'd have to have a veil at least on hand so that if anyone yelled at me, I'd just kind of throw it on my head, if not always wearing it.

I walked around in jeans and a t-shirt.

Women were wearing bright, vibrant abayas that were open and showing their jeans and t-shirts underneath.

And I'm talking Saudi women, their hair was exposed much more than I'd ever seen before.

Women are now driving, which is one of the big headliners that came out during the MBS period.

But also, you know, Saudi Arabia was a little bit of an interesting mix even before this, because you did have women who were involved in government, who were business leaders, and they've just just been given a platform to expand their influence in the kingdom more as these reforms have set in over the years.

And so definitely there's been significant changes and you can see it even superficially when you go to visit.

So thinking about the comedy festival again, one obvious argument is, you know, you have a comedy festival, you have comedians show up, Saudis are in the audience, they hear this kind of comedy.

Even if it's not free comedy, it cannot criticize the crown prince prince or the government or the royal family.

It's still an edgy kind of comedy, and that in and of itself has an opening effect.

Do you believe that to be true?

I mean, it is surprising to me, having

been now traveling and or living in the Gulf for close to 20 years, it is surprising to me to see where we are.

I mean, it's definitely a change.

It has to be acknowledged.

At the same time, you know, whether or not you can criticize the government, for example, I mean, that's obviously still a red line and it's problematic.

And a lot of these comedians just decided that they're not going to participate in a festival that draws red lines.

Yeah.

That tells them what they can and cannot say because comedy is notoriously sort of, you know, free reign, or at least it used to be.

I mean, things are changing even here.

But, you know, the Gulf governments, and I'm not just talking about Saudi Arabia, the governments in the Middle East across the board don't take criticism very well.

They're not a free speech society by any stretch.

Yeah.

I guess what you're observing is openness is a big, broad term.

There is some openness in the way women walk around in the streets, the fact that women drive,

the kinds of comedians that were invited.

But that doesn't mean all kinds of openness.

It doesn't mean criticizing the government.

It doesn't mean comedians can say what they want to say.

And it doesn't necessarily even translate into the exact same standards for a Saudi citizen.

But it is something.

That's

That's right.

And a lot of these comedians have just determined that any restriction is a no-go.

After the break, the view from inside the comedy festival.

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The Riyadh Comedy Festival just wrapped today.

And as fans and comedians return home, a clearer picture of what the event was actually like is taking shape.

Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis just arrived home from Riyadh when we spoke.

So we went to see the co-headliners of the comedy festival, who are Louis C.K.

and Jimmy Carr, a British comedian.

And they had a Saudi comedian as a support act.

And he said, I just want everyone to give a big round of applause for Mohammed bin Salman.

And I was just like, no, no.

And obviously, I, you know, I don't applaud anything.

Anyway, and I thought, well, this is what a way to go.

What a way to be dragged off by the secret police is for showing insufficient enthusiasm for the comedic potential of Mohammed bin Salman.

But this was organized by the General Entertainment Authority.

This was a state-sanctioned comedy festival.

So I think performing there implies not even quite an endorsement, but certainly

a level of comfort and ease with what the government is doing that even in an American context, never mind a Saudi context, I think lots of people would have a problem with.

Aaron Powell, So that expectation was not on the American comedians exactly, like share a big round of applause.

But when comedian Atsuko Okatsukut posted a picture of the contract, the contract was essentially no insulting, degrading, embarrassing the leadership or religion.

It was specifically about, you know, insulting the heads of state.

Yeah, and I think that's really worth noting because actually the material was pretty blue, pretty blue.

So that is kind of interesting.

You know, this is a country that has been a theocracy, essentially, you know, practicing one of the most conservative forms of Islam.

So there was, you know, some stuff was genuinely pretty groundbreaking.

This is probably the first time that anyone has joked about dildos on stage in Saudi Arabia.

Might not be the last.

Well, I was wondering about Jimmy Carr.

I was like, he is...

He's a filthy comedian.

He is a filthy comedian.

I mean, about, I would say about 75% of his set is about, oh, wouldn't it be funny if I was a sex offender?

And you're like, you do know that they kill those over here, Jimmy.

Yes.

So, how did that roll out?

Well, actually, you know what?

Almost all of it went down really well.

And actually, in this slightly intoxicated way, where he kept saying, Let's push it a little bit more, shall we?

Which is something that came up in Bill Burr's reflections on the event, right?

That there was a feeling that people were really excited to be there.

This was thrilling to them.

This is kind of slightly titillating to hear this kind of thing, you know, what to you and me would be like, oh, you know, every 9 p.m.

at the comedy store, any night of the week, kind of sex kind of of based comedy.

This is the first time that's been heard in public.

But I will say, Jimmy Carr, I will give him some credit because he did, I mean, I think it was an unpleasant joke, but he did do a political joke, which was

he done a long section on euthanasia that said, you know, we put a dog to sleep, but we allow people to go on living in what can only be described as, and then there was a beat, and then he said, Yemen.

Oh my god, wow.

And there was genuinely a kind of collective

Because mentioning the Saudi war with Yemen and the bombing of the Houthi rebels there is, you know, is an incredibly touchy political subject.

Then he went back to some, you know, light-hearted anal sex material and everybody kind of calmed back down again.

The other thing I thought was very interesting about Louis C.K.

is he basically did, as far as I can tell,

his current tour show.

So he did a whole bit that was about

how much he hates jury duty.

Well, no one in Saudi Arabia does jury duty.

And then he did a bit about about how terrible it is when it rains.

It's literally a desert.

So he is playing it safe, yeah.

And then he did a bit about how the woman down his hallway is really elderly and yet still, despite that, still wears, you know, a tube top and cropped shorts.

And he finds this disgusting.

And I was like, again, not a problem that these people will encounter in their day-to-day life, Louis C.K.

So it was, it was, you know, and he did do a bit about his own religion.

He said, am I okay to mock my religion?

Am I okay to talk about Catholicism?

And so technically violating the spirit of the contract, except that we all know that the spirit of the contract really was don't mock Islam.

There have been some comedians like Aziz Ansari, for example, who have come out after the event and said, you know, I think it was net positive, like it was net good for Saudi Arabia.

It exposed people to a kind of talk and humor that they hadn't heard before.

On the Bill Burr podcast that we mentioned, you were not in this show, but he talked about a comedian who he did not name who, when three members of the audience who were Saudi got up to go to the bathroom, this comedian who was gay said, oh, are you going to check Grinder?

Which Bill Burr thought was like, whoa, that's really pushing it.

And so there, so there are some voices coming out of that saying like they really did push the boundaries in some way.

Did you talk to any comedians?

What was your sense of like, did they feel good about what they'd done, whether it had had any impact?

I mean, I talked to Andrew Maxwell, who I've previously done panel shows with comedy panel shows in Britain, and he gave a very interesting defence, which was he's Irish.

And he said, you know, I grew up in a de facto theocracy.

Divorce was illegal, abortion was illegal, homosexuality was completely frowned upon.

And all that changed during the time that I was growing up.

And Ireland is now a much more liberal society.

And if this has a chance to do that, I want to be part of it.

And I can see already I can hear the bit in my head that's going, do we really think that Saudi Arabia is going to creep towards Western liberal democracy through the medium of dildo jokes?

Right.

It seems hopeful, but I can understand the fact that this is a very young country, right?

It has de-Islamized in very visible and obvious ways.

So the most obvious one is the way that the religious police no longer have powers of arrest.

And, you know, if you went over 10, 20 years ago and you weren't correctly dressed or whatever it might be, you know, that was a really scary and repressive...

thing.

And, you know, I'm not saying now

it's a free speech paradise, but that is definitely something that has changed.

So the paradox of Mohammed bin Salman's rule of Saudi Arabia is that you can liberalize up to the exact point that he allows, but no more.

And you must never question how much or how little he has liberalized.

So the most obvious example of this being...

Around the time that women were allowed to drive, also a very prominent women's rights activist, Lujain Al-Hathlul, who was a big campaigner for women's driving rights, she was jailed.

She's not been heard from in public since.

You know, she's not allowed to speak publicly.

So the government has adopted this policy that they've said, you know, that her position was essentially the correct one, but she did it wrong because she spoke out against, she questioned the Saudi state.

And that's the bit that I think as, you know, people from Europe and America, it's hard to grapple with is what price are you willing to pay for this liberalization?

And, you know, what authoritarian penalty will you put up with?

Should you be grateful for the good things while condemning the bad thing?

And also part of this is, I think, when I read all the defenses of the comedians about why they were doing it, two things came across.

One was a kind of nihilism, which was a kind of doesn't matter, you know, Tim Dylan saying, you know, they're paying me enough to silence the screams.

I don't care.

You just take the money, keep your head down.

And then the other one was moral relativism, which was really essentially boils down to America's done some bad shit too.

Who are we to preach to other people?

And I heard that sentiment.

And I think, particularly because of the, you know, Israel's war in Gaza, lots of comedians in that kind of sphere who took the in invitation and took the money are like, our ally Israel is bombing a country back to the Stone Age.

Who are we to lecture

Saudi Arabia on its human rights record?

And I heard that sentiment again and again and again.

And it's one that I think

is quite widespread now among younger, disaffected people who listen to that kind of podcast comedian sphere.

A real deep dissatisfaction with American foreign policy, which is not a new thing.

You could have said the same thing around the time of of the war in Iraq in 2004, but I think it complicates what some people might feel that America is a great liberalizing force and is morally superior to other people.

So now that you've been there, which of those do you find the most compelling?

Or do you think in the end they shouldn't, none of them should have gone?

I mean,

I wouldn't have gone.

But then, you know, you and I are in a different position as journalists, right?

I don't, you know, I

I don't, like, there'sn't, there's an honours system in Britain, and, you know, and sometimes people who are editors of newspapers take honours and they become sir, such and such.

And I think, what are you doing?

You know, like, if you, if the government likes you, you've, you've done it wrong, essentially, as a journalist.

So that's my perspective that I bring to this.

And now it's not the same for comedians.

And I think the bit that is kind of crucial to this is at what point did we stop having public intellectuals and we started having comedians and started treating them as kind of philosopher kings right yeah

you know the idea is these are people whose job is it to you know like dinner theater like they you go out for the evening and they make you laugh and i and i think i want to go back to why we've ceded this much moral authority to this class of people who are you know i many of my best friends are stand-up comedians um but they are like heat-seeking missiles for getting the right reaction from an audience.

And that's not the same thing as telling the truth, right?

Sometimes the jokes are lazy or easy, and those are the, you know, those ones are the guaranteed laughs.

So for me, this whole festival should make us reappraise why we take the political thoughts of comedians so seriously and whether or not they've really earned that right to be taken seriously.

Under that argument, lots of American businesses already trade with Saudi Arabia.

You know, why are we holding Bill Burr to a higher moral standard than you know, chilies or Dunkin' Donuts?

A last question, which is maybe the one I should have asked you first.

Why did you want to go?

It's an interesting choice.

It's not as if you cover the Middle East.

I'm curious why, what you were looking for.

I thought it would be funny.

That's not.

In many different ways.

No, should I tell you what?

A, when I saw it, and

the two words Riyadh, you know, the most austere

Saudi city, you know, the

home of the Saudis, you know, the ruling family.

and in conjunction with stand-up comedy.

Then I saw the lineup and it was lots of people that I've covered for the Atlantic for a long time, right?

And, you know, I was thinking about this that the festival really owes its existence to two things.

One of them is Mohammed bin Salman and his liberalizing regime, and the other one is council culture.

And you look down that list, and it's Dave Chappelle, you know, huge backlash at Netflix over his jokes about trans people.

You know, it's Louis C.K., got me too'd.

But that is a sense that in the last couple of years in American comedy, that lots of people got pushed out of the mainstream and they rebuilt a whole new, you know, in the same way there was alt comedy in the 1980s.

This is kind of alt, alt comedy, you know, anti-woke comedy.

So for me, this whole festival was really reflective of the state of American comedy and the new energy that pulsed it.

And I think pulsed it last year, leading so many of these guys to flirt with Trump, interview Trump, maybe full-on endorse Trump.

And that, you know, that is a big challenge to people my age who've grown up with the default assumption that comedy is kind of liberal.

Well, Helen, get some sleep and thank you for talking to us after your trip.

As ever, thank you for having me.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Janae West.

It was edited by Claudina Bade.

Rob Smirciak engineered and provided original music.

Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at theatlantic.com slash listener.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Thank you for listening.

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