Riyadh Comedy Festival

I mean, yeah, or it's just deluded enough to think that they still are.

I think it really got bad because in the fall of 2025, Chappelle performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which ran across the seventh anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi's murder.

Human Rights Watch warned that the Saudi government was using the event to deflect attention from its repression.

Comedians were reportedly paid between $375,000 and $1.6 million, and that they had contracts that barred jokes about the royals and religion.

Saudi Arabia, uh, they...

A lot of people went to the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Uh, a lot of, uh, famous people went to the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Kevin Hart, Louis CK, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, Whitney Cummings, Pete Davidson, Hannibal Buress.

Uh, and, and they, again, they made a lot of money doing something they probably should not have done.

Yes, yes, yes, the show.

And then, and I also think it's a very odd decision to go and do the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Did you turn down Last One Laughing?

Yeah.

Like, my agent said, "It's c- it's come in.

Do you wanna do it?" And I said, "Do you honestly think that given the material that I'm doing right now, it would not be massively hypocritical for me to do that or 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown or any of the 3 million shows he hosts?" And she said, "It's quite a lot of money." [laughs]

Which is what his agent said to him about the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

[laughs] And I said, "Yeah, it just, I don't feel like, I don't feel that I can..." Like, I like having f- fun on these shows.

The audience that had been listening to Bill Burr on this podcast since 2009 wasn't gonna stop because David Cross wrote something on social media.

In 2025, Bill Burr performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia.

Other performers included Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Andrew Schultz, and 50 other comedians.

Human Rights Watch called that festival a whitewashing campaign.

"Bill, do you want to do Cats?" "No." [laughs] Again, Bill Burr is tomorrow's deep dive episode, the weekly Saturday deep dives, and then in eight days from now, Norm Macdonald.

Bill Burr played the Riyadh Comedy Festival, so did Pete Davidson, who co-owns a ferry with Colin Jost.

[laughs] He joked, "Scotty," his daughter, "will inherit this one day.

I'm very lucky and excited to be a dad.

As the coach, I'm going to go...

Hey, Bill, didn't you play the Riyadh Comedy Festival? And then he's going to get a little, yeah, you know, I played it, played it.

Yeah, that was like a lame-ass mood.

And I'm going to fire Bill Burr up and get the angry Bill Burr out there to just be on fire and do something similar to what he did in Philadelphia.

Like the

Riyadh Comedy Festival for

context.

Had I taken the $125K, which would have been like net like $70,000, $80,000 after taxes and managers and all that stuff.

And we've yet to really see like very noticeable results of the current.

All of the men that got ran out of town during Me Too and went to their vacation homes upstate or in the Hamptons, they're all back now on tour in the Riyadh Comedy Festival and elsewhere.

They are all all over Hollywood.

They're back.

should go.

I'll be at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Oh, that's funny.

Yeah, get back in there, Jim.