The Riyadh job

On Friday, September 27, on the stage at Boulevard City—a purpose-built venue in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—the comedy phenomenon Dave Chappelle joked it was “easier to talk” there than in the United States. The crowd cracked up. Chappelle was headlining the opening weekend of the Riyadh Comedy Festival, a two-week event running through October 9 that organizers billed as “the world’s largest comedy festival.” The lineup is all-star: Kevin Hart, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Jim Gaffigan, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari, Chris Tucker. About 50 comedians in total are playing, a lot of them among the most recognizable names in American stand-up.

Turki Al-Sheikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority—yes—announced the festival in July. It’s part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 initiative—an ambitious program to position Saudi as an international destination for culture, sports, and entertainment.

Atsuko Okatsuka, who declined an invitation to perform, posted excerpts from the contract she’d been sent: no material that violated Saudi censorship rules, no jokes about the royal family, no jokes about religion. Bill Burr later claimed on his Monday Morning Podcast that organizers had “negotiated it all the way down to just a couple things” after comedians balked at the initial restrictions. He called the experience “one of the top three” he’d ever had. “The royals loved the show,” Burr said. “They got a Chili’s over there. They’re just like us.”

Some got further along than Okatsuka without going all the way. Saudi authorities removed Tim Dillon from the lineup after he made jokes on his podcast about slavery in Saudi Arabia—though not before he’d mentioned he was being paid $375,000, and that other performers had been offered as much as $1.6 million. Marc Maron started mocking the festival in his own show: “I mean, how do you even promote that? ‘From the folks that brought you 9/11. Two weeks of laughter in the desert, don’t miss it.’”

Then on Monday, September 30, David Cross posted an open letter. Cross hadn’t been offered the gig, he noted, “but it should go without saying that there’s not enough money for me to help these depraved, awful people put a ‘fun face’ on their crimes against humanity.” He called it blood money. “These are some of my HEROES” Cross wrote, naming Chappelle, C.K., Burr, and Gaffigan specifically: “How can any of us take any of you seriously ever again? All of your bitching about ‘cancel culture’ and ‘freedom of speech’ and all that shit? Done. You don’t get to talk about it ever again. By now we’ve all seen the contract you had to sign.”

Why are they doing this?

The entertainment-industrial complex. We should start with the obvious answer: money. For performers like these guys, six or seven figures for a weekend’s work—a premium over their usual rates.

• But not that much of a premium. High-end private events and corporate gigs already pay in this range. What makes Riyadh different is the intentions of the client. Saudi Arabia isn’t hiring comedians for a product launch or a CEO’s birthday party; it’s hiring them for legitimacy.
  
  
• The Riyadh Comedy Festival is part of a huge Saudi influence infrastructure: Since 2016, the kingdom has spent billions on what its critics call “sportswashing”—hosting major boxing matches, golf tournaments, and Formula 1 races. They even bought the English Premier League football club Newcastle United.
  
  
• They’re not the only Gulf autocracy in this game, either. Qatar, following a similar playbook, bought the football club Paris Saint-Germain in 2011, hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and acquired a stake in the company that owns Washington’s professional hockey and basketball teams in 2023. The United Arab Emirates sponsors the NBA’s in-season tournament (now the Emirates NBA Cup) and the U.S. Open tennis championship. All three Gulf monarchies have made massive investments in American universities, think tanks, and Hollywood studios.
  
  
• The comedy festival is an extension of this infrastructure into a new territory—one with particular symbolic value. If there’s a single idea stand-up comedy cultivates about itself as an institution, it’s that it’s inherently transgressive—the art form above all others that cuts through pretension and speaks truth to power. Securing 50 of the world’s most prominent stand-up artists to perform under censorship rules in a country that executed 198 people in 2022 alone—that’s a remarkable testament to what money can buy.
  
  

The transaction. What Saudi Arabia is buying here, then, isn’t primarily the entertainment itself. It’s the association—the presence of culturally super-influential figures willing to treat Saudi Arabia as a normal place to do normal business. Where they’re “just like us.”

• Every Instagram post from Boulevard City, every podcast episode defending or commending the experience, every interview downplaying concerns like David Cross’s contributes to a progressive normalization of a brutal dictatorship.
  
  
• At the same time, what the performers are selling isn’t primarily their material. It’s their cultural capital. When Dave Chappelle—who walked away from a $50 million Comedy Central deal on principle in 2005—tells a Riyadh audience it’s “easier to talk” there than in America, he’s not making a serious factual claim about press freedom or political expression in the two countries. He’s performing a kind of equivalence. The effect is to suggest that concerns about Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record are overblown or hypocritical, or both—delivered by someone whose credibility was built partly on his willingness to resist commercial pressure.
  
  
• The contract Okatsuka shared prohibited material on politics, religion, sexual orientation or identity, and so on—subjects that, it won’t surprise you, map directly onto areas where Saudi Arabia faces the most sustained international criticism: the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the imprisonment of women’s-rights activists, the criminalization of homosexuality, Saudi’s ongoing proxy war in Yemen. The censorship isn’t just some side effect of doing business in a different cultural context; the censorship is the point. When these performers work with it, they’re working for it. That’s a big part of Saudi Arabia’s return on investment.
  
  

The broader ecosystem. The festival makes more sense when you understand where it fits in Saudi’s influence architecture globally—not least in the United States.

• As Ben Freeman discusses here in The Signal, the Gulf monarchies—particularly the United Arab Emirates, but increasingly Saudi Arabia and Qatar—operate the most sophisticated and well-funded foreign-influence operations in Washington. The U.A.E. alone spends tens of millions annually on registered lobbying and public-relations firms. These governments fund major American think tanks with millions of dollars, hire former U.S. military officials at remarkable rates, and invest heavily across the entertainment and sports industries.
  
  
• This all creates an ecosystem where influence becomes self-reinforcing through what Freeman calls “Darwinian selection.” Autocratic governments don’t need to change people’s opinions of them; they just need to hire and fund enough people who already agree with them—or don’t disagree enough for it to matter. A former defense official who sees the U.A.E. as a partner against terrorism takes a lucrative position with an Emirati-backed firm, then moves to a think tank that receives U.A.E. funding, where, what do you know, he ends up advocating for deeper U.S.-U.A.E. military cooperation. A comedian who’s already skeptical of “cancel culture” and resentful of domestic criticism accepts Saudi money, then frames that decision as a blow against American hypocrisy. The system selects for people willing to participate in it—and then their participation makes the next person’s decision easier. That’s how corruption works.
  
  
• The comedy festival helps grow this ecosystem in a few ways. It demonstrates that Saudi money can access even culturally prestigious spaces previously beyond its reach. (Comedy!) It creates new pathways for future collaborations—streaming specials filmed in Riyadh, comedy tours sponsored by Saudi entertainment companies, media deals with Saudi-backed platforms. And it generates a class of high-profile defenders who now have financial—and reputational—stakes in portraying Saudi Arabia favorably, or at least in attacking critics who question the deal they made.
  
  
• And it does most of this work beyond public scrutiny. As Ben points out, foreign-influence operations in Washington succeed partly because most Americans don’t pay attention to foreign policy, and media outlets tend almost never to disclose when think-tank “experts” commenting on Middle East issues work for organizations funded by Gulf monarchies. The Riyadh Comedy Festival uses obscurity in the same way. For every David Cross willing to call it what it is, there are millions of comedy fans who’ll simply stream the next special from a performer in Riyadh—and just laugh through it.
  
  

Think about what happened here. Saudi Arabia didn’t bribe these comedians in the sense that U.S. Senator Bob Menendez took bribes from, say, the Qataris—no gold bars, no bags of cash, nothing that would violate U.S. law. They just offered very good money for very normal-seeming work, with only a few content restrictions that they could frame as “cultural sensitivity” rather than political censorship. The performers didn’t become Saudi agents. They just became people with a financial interest in not thinking too hard—and not wanting their audiences or anyone else to think too hard—about where the money came from or what accepting it might mean.

That’s how this kind of autocratic influence infrastructure works when it’s functioning well—through choices that could seem defensible in isolation, transactions that are perfectly legal, and normalization that happens gradually enough that each step on its own feels unremarkable.

Whether this represents a meaningful expansion of Saudi soft power or just an expensive PR stunt no one will remember in six months—who knows. Still, the festival shows how autocratic influence is operating in democratic societies: not mainly through hard corruption in a criminal sense, but through the patient construction of relationships, incentives, and dependencies that make certain criticisms harder to land—and questions harder to ask in the first place.