George Clooney recently pointed out how ridiculous it is that the most trusted voices in media today are late night talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel. But Kimmel is one of the few to push back on his fellow comedians about performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia. (That’s more than Conan O’Brien can say.) On Tuesday night, Kimmel hosted Aziz Ansari, and questioned his guest for joining the Riyadh lineup.
“This is something that’s become a big part of the news because people, a lot of comedians especially, are very upset, because the people who paid the comedians to come to this are not good people. It’s a pretty brutal regime. They’ve done a lot of horrible, horrible things,” Kimmel said of the Saudi royal family, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “People are questioning why you would go over there and take their money to perform in front of these people. I’m curious as to why you decided to do that.”
Ansari trotted out a now-familiar defense: “There’s people over there that don’t agree with the stuff that the government’s doing, and to ascribe like the worst behavior of the government onto those people, that’s not fair. Just like there’s people in America that don’t agree with the things the government is doing.” Kimmel—who has experienced the censorship of the U.S. government firsthand—pushed back, referencing the murder of reporter Jamal Khashoggi that was reportedly ordered by MBS. “I was just there to do a show for the people,” Ansari replied. “Whenever there’s repressive societies like this, they try to keep things out—whether it’s rock and roll music or blue jeans—because it makes people curious about outside ideas, outside values. And this is a very young country, like half the country is under the age of 25, and things can really change. And to me, a comedy festival felt like something that’s pushing things to be more open and to push a dialogue.”
Reaching the real Saudi people (while taking money directly from the Saudi government) is a reasoning that has been trotted out by many of the Riyadh Comedy Festival participants so far, including Jessica Kirson, Bill Burr, and headliner Louis C.K. “Allowing international performances in Saudi, especially comedy, subtly broadens what’s thinkable and sayable in a society,” Omid Djalili, who also performed, argued in an op-ed for The Guardian. But “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,” said The Atlantic‘s Helen Lewis, who attended the festival.
Given that the Riyadh Comedy Festival was arranged by the government, there’s reasonable doubt that the audience was made up of the “regular” Saudi people who might be inspired by such “revolutionary” comedy. (Burr described at least a few audience members at Kirson’s set as “diplomats.”) Human Rights Watch has said the whole event “whitewashes abuses” perpetrated by the government, a position reiterated by The Atlantic‘s Vivian Salama, who sees the festival (among other recent entertainment events under the auspices of Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” plan) as a way for the country to become known for something other than human rights violations. Meanwhile, scholar Andrew Leber suggests that the “driving forces” of the Riyadh Comedy Festival are domestic, rather than international. Leber points out that Mohammed bin Salman previously “noted that ‘good recreational and cultural opportunities’ could compensate for lower per-capita incomes.” The festival does reflect an interest in Western culture from the Saudi people, but it also “reflects an effort by Saudi authorities to shape what Saudi citizens should want—anything other than a political voice or political causes.”
Like Clooney marveling over late night hosts replacing journalists in the cultural consciousness, Lewis returned from the Riyadh Comedy Festival questioning “why we’ve ceded this much moral authority” to comedians. Though other American entertainers have done Saudi events, none have caused so much community in-fighting as this has within comedy. Those like Ansari profess lofty goals of broadening the cultural horizons of a “repressive society,” yet agreed to a government-approved censorship list for a government-sanctioned pay check. You get the sense that any stage will do, so long as there’s an audience and the money’s good.
