Now that Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air, comedy’s hottest discourse is the Riyadh Comedy Festival. A large group of well known comedians signed on for the Saudi Arabian festival, while other stand-ups from across the political spectrum criticized the decision to take money from the Saudi royal family. Amid all the debate, there have been few genuine jokes—but Michelle Wolf has a few.
Wolf, of course, has some experience making political jokes in a high-stakes, high-pressure environment. She was offered a spot on the Riyadh lineup, but declined in part because her pregnancy would’ve made it impossible anyway. Nevertheless she cooked up some boundary-pushing jokes she would’ve told at the festival for her show “Michelle Wolf’s Thought Box.” For instance: “This festival is sponsored by the Saudi government, so if my set doesn’t go well, if I crash and burn, you can just call me Flight 93.” Throughout the compilation of Riyadh jokes, she judges her own material by how likely it would be to get her killed. After one set, for instance, she ponders, “I think actually both of those I would’ve stayed alive for… maybe not the [one about the] funding of 9/11.”
Wolf didn’t target the comedians who did attend the festival, unlike David Cross or Gianmarco Soresi, who challenged the participating comics to be daring with their material. Soresi joked in a set posted online that President Trump wouldn’t be particularly motivated to save him if he got in trouble with a foreign government, but “If you’re a comedian and go to Saudi Arabia and not say a joke that insults the powers that be, then what was even the point of having Trump on your podcast?”
Much of this humor stems from a set of censorship rules (shared by comedian Atsuko Okatsuka) that the comics had to agree to in order to participate in the festival. But on his own podcast on Monday, Bill Burr claimed those rules were softened ahead of the event. “When they first set it up, the rules on what they had about what you could and couldn’t say in Saudi Arabia, [organizers were told], ‘If you want some good comedians, this isn’t going to work.’ And, to their credit, they said, ‘All right, what do we got to do?’ And they just negotiated it all the way down to just a couple things, which were, basically: Don’t make fun of royals [and] religion,” he said (via The Hollywood Reporter).
Burr said that the festival was “a great experience” and that he ended up doing most of his regular set (even material about gay men), despite the censorship agreements. “The royals loved the show. Everyone was happy. The people that were doing the festival were thrilled,” he reflected. “The comedians that I’ve been talking to are saying, ‘Dude, you can feel [the audience] wanted it. They want to see real stand-up comedy.’ It was a mind-blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences I’ve had. I think it’s going to lead to a lot of positive things.”
Burr said he was struck by how his Middle Eastern audiences were “just like us,” saying, “You think 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, right? Because this is what I’ve been fed about that part of the world. I thought this place was going to be really tense. And I’m thinking like: ‘Is that a Starbucks next to a Pizza Hut next to a Burger King next to McDonald’s…? They got a fucking Chili’s over here!”
Of course, Burr’s impression of the country and the festival is exactly what Saudi Arabia was trying to sell as it strengthens its ties to the U.S. The country has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into American entertainment, from video games to sports to music—and into Trump’s administration. Meanwhile, the Saudi government has been condemned for various human rights abuses by the Human Rights Watch, which argued that the Riyadh festival was meant “to deflect attention from its brutal repression of free speech and other pervasive human rights violations.” As Wolf put it in her final Riyadh joke: “In a time where free speech is being tested everywhere, it’s nice to be in Saudi where neither a comedian nor journalist has been killed since… oh, June! Anyway, so nice to be here, I love all your hats.”
