Saudi Arabia wants you to laugh. They want you to think everything is fine — that they’re a nation just like any other. They want to host “the biggest comedy festival in the world” to cover up their ongoing human rights abuses, extrajudicial assassinations and slave labor. The Riyadh Comedy Festival began on Friday and has been a hot button topic in the comedy world in the past few weeks. Numerous comedians have spoken out, criticizing individuals who have accepted spots in the lineup. David Cross, Marc Maron, Shane Gillis, Gianmarco Soresi and others have all spoken out saying it is a morally reprehensible decision. For the ones who have joined the lineup, it is their responsibility to go as hard as they can against the Saudi government when they get up on stage, or else they will bear the shame of this mistake for the rest of their days.
This isn’t just a festival. It’s part of the much larger campaign called Vision 2030. The goal of this campaign from the Saudi government is to appear more progressive and modern by diversifying investments, partly into entertainment and sports. They want to invite self-deigned champions of free speech to lend legitimacy to a regime that rejects it as a human right, imprisoning people just for their tweets. To that end, though they want the positive press surrounding getting these comics onstage, they don’t want the heat from the comics themselves. For example, Tim Dillon and Jim Jeffries were both removed from the lineup after using language that the Saudi government found unacceptable. Even though he was defending his participation in the festival, Dillon’s use of the word “slave” in describing the working conditions of slaves in Saudi Arabia was enough to get him the boot, despite being uncritical of the practice. On Theo Von’s podcast, Jeffries acknowledged that “one reporter was killed by the government” and that it was “unfortunate,” but he would still perform at the event. However, his bringing up the assassination at all was sufficient to have him removed from the lineup.
The problem with this is obvious: stand-up comedy is meant to punch up, to speak truth to power. The quintessential example of this was Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner performance that was so pointed they opted not to have a comic perform the very next year. She made jabs at Trump’s treatment of women, collusion with Russia and jabs at how the liberal media eggs on the right in pursuit of content. This is the only acceptable way for these comics to perform at this festival and their only way out of criticism: to upset their employer so terribly that they risk incarceration or worse. In the words of Soresi: “If this becomes a new annual festival, I think these comedians have failed to do their job as comedians.”
You may ask what room we have to judge this government from our own land with our own human rights abuses and actively fracturing democratic infrastructure. What’s so bad about performing over there versus performing in a club here? The difference is that it isn’t government funded. To perform for a government without criticizing that institution is a failure to speak truth to power. Politicians and comedians should be forever at odds with one another. It is a deeply strange world where Donald Trump tours on comedians’ podcasts to garner votes, though it is the abysmal state of comedy right now.
Comedy is not supposed to be comfortable. It’s not supposed to flatter. It’s supposed to unsettle the powerful and remind audiences that authority is fallible, absurd and human. The minute comedy becomes a tool of the state, it stops being comedy at all. Neutrality here is not neutrality, it is the side of the regime. It is to side with silence and money. It is the moral duty of the comics who have not yet performed to speak out and be critical during their performances, to confront the absurdity of the situation. Failure to do so is to cut out their own tongues and besmirch their names forever.