Bill Burr Says Playing Riyadh Festival ‘One of Top Three Experiences I’ve Ever Had’

It’s funny how quickly Bill Burr went from “put the billionaires down like the rabid dogs they are” to “performing for the Saudi Royal Family was the honor of a lifetime” once the blood money started flowing his way.

Now that the many A-list American headliners at the Riyadh Comedy Festival are starting to return home from Saudi Arabia, the stand-ups who scored massive paydays in exchange for their participation in a propaganda campaign to whitewash crimes against humanity have the unenviable task of justifying their actions as anything more than a soulless, morally bankrupt cash-grab. For weeks now, comedians and comedy fans have been blasting Burr, Dave Chappelle, Aziz Ansari and the rest of the Riyadh crew for their complicity in diverting attention away from the Saudi government’s horrific human rights record by advancing the Saudi Vision 2030 campaign to turn the country into an international entertainment destination.  

As a proud servant to Saudi Crown Prince and ruthless butcher Mohammed bin Salman, Burr is now selling a Saudi Arabian vacation with the hyperbolic, fantastical praise that one would use to advertise weekend passes at Disney World. “It was a mind-blowing experience,” Burr gushed about the Riyadh Comedy Festival in the newest episode of his Monday Morning Podcast. “Definitely top three experiences I’ve had. I think it’s going to lead to a lot of positive things.”

It will certainly lead to Mohammed bin Salman blowing more minds — or, more likely, removing them by the neck.

“On the road, Ol’ Billy, fuckin’ trying to go to as many countries as he can,” Burr started of his stand-up tour in the Middle East. “I went to two new countries: Bahrain and then I went to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.” 

Rather than discussing how the same despot who cut Burr his exorbitant check was the guy who commissioned the torture and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Burr framed his trip to Saudi Arabia as a humanitarian effort to spread the gospel of stand-up to the other side of the world.

“You know, stand-up is new to this part of the world, so they always have, like, fuckin’ restrictions and shit when you go over there,” Burr said of the list of banned topics that he and his fellow comedians had to avoid if they wanted their sweet, sweet blood money. Before signing on for the festival, the Riyadh comics had to agree not to make any jokes about the Saudi government, the Saudi Royal Family or any of the country’s religious or cultural practices.

Burr admitted that he was “nervous” upon his arrival in Saudi Arabia, given what little he knows about the country. “My whole fuckin’ idea of Saudi Arabia is what I’ve seen on the news. I literally think I’m gonna land, and everybody’s going to be screaming, ‘Death to America!’ and they’re going to have machetes and chop my head off, right?” Burr said of his flight to Riyadh.

“And then we land, and now here we are, right? And we end up driving into town, it’s a city and everything, right? And everybody’s just regular,” Burr said of the Riyadh residents. “Like people are just shooting the shit, like, ‘Hey, how you doing? Welcome!’ And we’re like, ‘Hey, we’re happy to be here!’ And we’re driving around, and I’m going, like, ‘I thought this place was going to be like really tense,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Is that a Starbucks, next to a Pete’s Coffee, next to a Burger King?’”

As for the show itself, Burr explained how exciting it was to get the royal treatment. “They say, ‘Alright, the front two rows is going to be all diplomats and these padded seats, and then up top, the Royals are going to be there,’” Burr described of the Riyadh Comedy Festival audience. “And it was like in the round and everything, and everyone was like ridiculously excited that there was going to be standup comedy there.”

“This is what’s amazing about the arts and stand-up comedy, is comedians have always pushed the boundaries,” Burr congratulated himself. “And this was a classic case — I guess, tipping the cap to the people who set up the festival over there, when they first set it up, the rules on what they had about what you could and couldn’t say in Saudi Arabia, the people running the festivals were like, ‘Alright man, well that’s game, set, match. If this is all you can talk about, and you want some good comedians, this isn’t gonna work.'”

“And then, to their credit, they said, ‘Alright, what do we gotta do?’” Burr said of the Saudi Royal Family’s gracious compromise in letting comedians joke about absolutely no part of their country, culture or government. “And they just negotiated it all the way down to, like, you can talk about anything, other than a couple things.”

So, when Burr took the stage, he bravely made no mention of his bloodthirsty billionaire patrons, the setting of the festival or any aspect of Saudi Arabian life. And, as Burr reported, he absolutely killed. “I had to stop a couple times during the show (and say), ‘I’ll be honest with you guys, I cannot fucking believe any of you have any idea who I am. This is really amazing,’” Burr said of the show. “And it was just this great exchange of energy. They know their reputation. So they were extra friendly.”

The fact that Burr is blatantly ignoring is how this “great exchange of energy” and “mind-blowing experience” wasn’t just a bunch of comedy fans coming together to bring A-list talent to their home country. Like Burr himself, the organizers of the Riyadh festival were under the employ of the Saudi Royal Family, who have been executing journalists and torturing political prisoners all throughout the planning stages of the festival. So, when Burr agreed to never utter an unkind word about the Crown Prince, he was taking a payoff from one of the most brutal, bloodthirsty billionaires on the planet to put an end to the whole “eat the rich” shtick he’s been doing for the last year.

Burr’s decision to reframe his participation in the Riyadh Comedy Festival as an artistic mission to the far corners of the globe is a sickeningly insincere attempt at a high-mindedness that has no part in the international discussion about Burr’s new masters and the horrific crimes committed by the Saudi government. No matter how much Burr bloviates about how everyone in the world is exactly the same and we should all just get along and eat fast food together, that wasn’t the point of the festival — the whole reason the Crown Prince cut Burr that check was so that the comedian would go on his podcast and gush about how warm, welcoming and tolerant his hosts were, despite what you read about them in the news.

This schmaltzy rationalization for laundering the reputations of billionaire tyrants is a disappointing loss for anyone who believes that comedians like Burr should speak truth to power when human dignity desperately needs defenders — and a complete win for power.