‘How Could You F---ing Do That to Another Human Being?’ Bill Burr Once Cared About Jamal Khashoggi

In 2018, the kidnapping, torture and murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s paid assassins shocked the free world and all believers in the free press, democracy and human dignity — a group that once included Bill Burr.

When Burr agreed to headline the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which started September 26th and concluded yesterday evening, he clearly underestimated how much the rest of the American comedy community would disapprove of their colleagues playing a Saudi state-funded festival that was organized by the guy who has so many political prisoners that there’s a wing named after him in the Riyadh jail. Ever since Burr returned to the United States, he has been angrily defending his participation in the Saudi Royal Family’s official comedy festival, and he continues to argue that his decision to take a check from the same Crown Prince who ordered the murder of Khashoggi was actually a big win for freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia, where, he reports, they even have a McDonald's.

For all his many attacks on his critics, Burr has been cagey about actually acknowledging who organized the festival (Turki Al-Sheikh) and who paid his performance fee (MBS). Perhaps that’s because Burr is ashamed of how, shortly after Khashoggi's murder, he went on the Jim & Sam Show with fellow future Riyadh comic Mark Normand and expressed his disgust about the brutal crime commissioned by his recent patrons. 

Just two weeks after Saudi operatives loyal to the Crown Prince tortured and murdered Khashoggi, Burr expressed his moral outrage at the brutality of the killing on the record. “How could you fucking do that to another human being?” Burr asked when host Jim Norton pointed out that audio tapes of Khashoggi’s killing captured the moment the murderers cut off his fingers. “Listen to them scream in agony and then you continue?”

“Human beings, we deserve whatever the end of this is. We’re just awful,” Burr lamented of the brutality of Khashoggi’s killers, whom he joined on the Saudi payroll late last month. However, even then, Burr realized that his outrage wouldn’t lead to any kind of positive action.

“Now what am I gonna do, as a person, to continue — to make sure that doesn’t happen?” Burr asked rhetorically. “Am I going to get involved? Or am I gonna go buy a New York Post and get a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich?”

At the time, Burr didn’t realize that there was a third option that he would gladly take: perform a show for the people who ordered the horrific murder and accept enough blood money to buy every bacon, egg and cheese sandwich in New York. 

In a Reddit thread about Burr’s past comments on the Khashoggi killing, Burr’s fans mocked him for forgetting that the Saudi Royal Family once made him so disgusted with humanity that he looked forward to our extinction. “330 beheadings in 2024,” one commenter wrote of the well-documented increase of Saudi executions in the last few years, often of journalists and dissidents just like Khashoggi.

“Indeed, Bill. How could you do that? Stand on that stage built by slaves and tell jokes to drown out Jamal Khashoggi’s screams to the world,” another fan asked.

However, Burr’s defenders pointed out that Burr simply didn’t have enough information about Saudi Arabia to make better choices in the past. Said one apologist, “To be fair, he didn’t know Saudi Arabia had a Chili’s when he made those comments.”