Michelle Wolf Reveals All the Anti-Royals Joke She Would Have Told at the Riyadh Comedy Festival

Stand-up comedian Michelle Wolf says that she was invited to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival alongside Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. and other American comedy stars. Considering the jokes she prepared for the gig, Wolf’s decision to pass on Saudi Arabia literally saved her neck.

Last weekend marked the beginning of the Riyadh Comedy Festival, an international event put on by the Saudi Royal Family and for the Saudi Royal Family that featured almost the entire A-list of American humor. Despite the insistence of comedians like Chappelle and Burr that they felt free to joke about (almost) anything while performing for the pleasure of billionaire despots who torture and murder their own citizens for criticizing the government, the leaked list of contractually banned joke topics at Riyadh precluded any performers from treating their royal hosts to a taste of some good, old-fashioned, American roast comedy.

Wolf, on the other hand, never signed the contract that the Saudi Royal Family offered her, so she is free to crack wise at the expense of Saudi Crown Prince and bloodthirsty butcher Mohammed bin Salman as much as she sees fit. In fact, ever since Wolf got the offer to perform in a country where the legal system sentences rape victims to public flogging, she’s been regularly trying out all the material that the Saudi Royal Family deserves to hear.

“I definitely would have been Khashoggi’d,” Wolf says of the jokes she would have told in Riyadh. “And, by that, I mean murdered by the government.”

It’s unclear if Wolf was joking when she said that the organizers of the Riyadh Comedy Festival tried to book her, but if she really did get an offer to abandon her convictions and her freedoms to spend a weekend in one of the world’s most repressive countries for women, then that’s practically a punchline in and of itself. Wolf is one of the most outspoken feminist comedians in America, and, to many comedy fans, her shining moment came when she hosted the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and laid into a far-right government that looks positively progressive when compared to the Saudi power structure.

Then again, the Saudi Royal Family did manage to book male comedians whose entire shtick is fighting for free speech and speaking truth to billionaires, so maybe they didn’t care what the Riyadh comics joked about in America, so long as the they were willing to leave their backbone at home. But, ultimately, the price of Wolf’s integrity is far more than the 70 cents on the dollar that the Saudis offered her.