Contra Trump

豬八戒照鏡子

… the festival takes place on the seventh anniversary of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi being murdered by Saudi government officials on October 2, 2018. In 2021, President Joe Biden found Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s personal security detail Rapid Intervention Force responsible for killing Khashoggi, but the Saudi royal court has continued to deny involvement. That same government is sponsoring the Riyadh Comedy Festival, and paying all of these comedians reportedly generous amounts of money.

— Samantha Bergeson, Why Are Comedians So Fired Up About the Riyadh Comedy Festival?,
Vanity Fair, 30 September 2025

October 2 falls half-way through the Riyadh Comedy Festival, 26 September-9 October 2025. The murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is one of many taboo topics that American stand-up comedians will be avoiding. They are as attuned to the stipulations of the contracts they signed as they are covetous of the fees and fellowship they enjoy in the kingdom.

Atsuko Okatsuka 岡塚敦子, a Japanese-Taiwanese-American comedian who turned down an offer to perform in Riyadh, shared a screenshot of the ‘content restrictions’ that performers were contractually obliged to accept:

ARTIST shall not prepare or perform any material that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule

• A) The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including its leadership, public figures, culture, or people;
• B) The Saudi royal family, legal system, or government, and;
• C) Any religion, religious tradition, religious figure, or religious practice.

Samantha Bergeson reported in Vanity Fair that:

While none of the performers themselves have shared their contracts publicly, Tim Dillon said on his eponymous podcast that he had been offered $375,000 to perform a set at the festival. According to Dillon, other comedians were paid as much as $1.6 million to appear. “They bought comedy,” Dillon said on August 30, explaining his own rationale for participating in the event—before he was allegedly fired from the festival. “Do I have issues with the policies towards freedom of speech? Of course I do, but I believe in my own financial wellbeing.”

Some of Dillon’s peers don’t feel the same way. Shane Gillis explained on his own podcast that he said no to performing at the festival…even after the organizers offered to double his salary for it. (Gillis did not specify what amount he was offered.) Leslie Liao also said no to performing. Marc Maron—who was not offered a slot at the event himself—slammed the festival for being “from the folks that brought you 9/11.” Mike Birbiglia confirmed that he passed on the festival as well, and commended Gillis and fellow comedian Atsuko Okatsuka for doing the same thing.

Hollywood Reporter wrote that:

Okatsuka not only turned down the fest, but posted an alleged letter in which organizers offered her a 60 to 75 minute set in a theater seating between 600 and 900 audience members. The alleged offer also asked her to share a “reasonable number” of social media posts as an “endorsement” of the festival itself.

Okatsuka pointed out the hypocrisy of comedians like [Dave] Chappelle—who have complained extensively about oversensitive audiences, and their right to tell jokes about any topic—participating in an event that explicitly does not allow criticism of the Saudi government and royal family. “The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process,” she wrote. “A lot of the ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ comedians are doing the festival…they had to adhere to censorship rules about the types of jokes they can make.”

— McKinley Franklin, Atsuko Okatsuka Details ‘Censorship Rules’ for Riyadh Comedy Festival, 27 September 2025

In the event, however, the highly emotive topic of Israel and its conduct of the war in Gaza did get a mention in Chapelle’s Riyadh set and The New York Times reported that:

The comedian, who has been critical of Israel before, ended his act by telling the audience that he feared returning to the United States, because, “They’re going to do something to me so that I can’t say what I want to say.”

To alert his fans that this had happened, he said he would use a code phrase.

“It’s got to be something I would never say in practice, so if I actually say it, you’ll know never to listen to anything else I say after that,” he said. “Here’s the phrase: I stand with Israel.”

— Ismaeel Naar and Erica Solomon, At Saudi Comedy Festival, American Free Speech Becomes the Punchline, The New York Times, 2 October 2025

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In Other People’s Thoughts XLVI, we noted an earlier egregious act of submission to power for commercial benefit: a dinner party at the White House hosted by US President Trump for leading tech executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Tim Cook and Sergey Brin. As Scott Galloway observed to Kara Swisher, the co-host of their podcast Pivot:

The guests were full of praise for the president. It was pretty grotesque to watch. Bill Gates thanked him for, quote, setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the US.

Galloway went on to say:

I thought they made sex work look dignified. I mean, I think paying some guy 50 bucks to suck my cock is more dignified than what these guys did. …

What is the point of aggregating all these skills? These guys work so hard, they’re so talented, they rally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, they build these amazing products, so they can become billionaires, so they can go and fillate an insurrectionist. …

They’re prostitutes with a half bottle of cheap Jack, of cheap bourbon drink, condoms hanging out of their ass, and the pimp has just said, you got another eleven johns tonight.

— Scott Galloway, Trump’s Tech Bro Dinner, Pivot, 9 September 2025

Shamelessness is the currency of the realm, be it in Donald Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ United States or in MbS’s Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In a different context, and writing about an earlier time, Clive James observed that:

… we should be ready to accept the possibility that an all-knowing state will know enough to co-opt the arts by letting people love them, as long as that love does not interfere with the state’s ideological precepts. A smart bad state could afford to let the arts survive, because it would know that they are better at encouraging contentment than arousing rebellion. We should beware, then, of their seduction. Liberals and humanists are always saying that art is the soul of truth. But they are quite often ignoring the truth while they say so.

— Stefan Zweig in Cultural Amnesia

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The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Contra Trump — a series that tracks US-China cultural and political doppelgängers — is 豬八戒照鏡子 Zhū Bājiè zhào jìngzi, ‘Piggy looks at his reflection in a mirror’, a comic saying that infers the follow-up line 裡外不是人 lǐwài bù shì rén, ‘no human in sight’. It’s a saying that means you’ll get it either way, or that you’re simply reprehensible no matter what. In America’s age of shamelessness and grift, the grasping behaviour and laughable justifications of headliner comedians hardly seem to be out of place. An ebbing tide drags down all vessels.

Below we feature the response of the comedian David Cross to the news about the American comics who signed up for Riyadh Comedy Festival. Such high dudgeon was, like the old story of artists selling out, pretty much by the book (see Charlie Lewis, A Short History of Selling Out, Crikey, 3 October 2025).

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China’s hardly edgy tradition of comic dialogue 相聲 was swiftly neutered during the early years of Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, truly a ‘kingdom of cancellation’ and, although anodyne Chinese stand-up flourishes, some of its better practitioners decamped to New York and points west long ago (see Chang Che, The Aftermath of China’s Comedy Crackdown, The New Yorker, 24 March 2024). Today, however, they too face the ‘cancel cultures’ of Beijing and of Washington. Perhaps the purveyors of Chinese soft power will take heart from all of these shenanigans; after all, autocrats are always learning from each other. Who knows if a laugh-in at Boao in Hainan might be on the cards at some point or, for those outré influencers, perhaps a comedy festival that showboats American pay-to-play celebrities in Kashgar, Xinjiang?

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
2 October 2025

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群醜圖

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My Thoughts on the Riyadh Comedy Festival

David Cross

I’ve been asked for my opinion on the Riyadh Comedy Festival and rather than answer the same question 23 times, I’ll just put this out here. Oh, and I should preface this with the fact that I was not offered the gig 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.

Here goes:

What do you think I think? I am disgusted, and deeply disappointed in this whole gross thing. That people I admire, with unarguable talent, would condone this totalitarian fiefdom for…what, a fourth house? A boat? More sneakers?

We can never again take seriously anything these comedians complain about (unless it’s complaining that we don’t support enough torture and mass executions of journalists and LGBQT peace activists here in the states, or that we don’t terrorize enough Americans by flying planes into our buildings). I mean that’s it; you have a funny bit about how you don’t like Yankee Candles or airport lounges? Okay great, but you’re cool with murder and/or the public caning of women who were raped, and by having the audacity to be raped, were guilty of “engaging in adultery”? Got any bits on that?

These are some of my HEROES! Now look, some of you folks don’t stand for anything so you don’t have any credibility to lose, but my god, Dave and Louie and Bill, and Jim? Clearly you guys don’t give a shit about what the rest of us think, but 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.

You’re performing for literally, the most oppressive regime on earth. They have SLAVES for fuck’s sake!!!

I don’t understand how being rich can make someone such a whore. Poor people desperate to improve their (or their families lives), sure. Still not acceptable but I can understand the desperation to put food on the table. But this? I mean, it’s not like this is some commercial for a wireless service or a betting app. This is truly the definition of “blood money”. You might as well do commercials for Lockheed Martin or Zyklon B.

Holy shit, I remember the backlash I got for appearing in Alvin and the Chipmunks! You would’ve thought that I had taken money from a bunch of people responsible for funding Al Qaeda!

Unless you open your sets with, “This is dedicated to all of the widows and widowers and kids orphaned by this bloodthirsty oppressive regime especially from the zany shenanigans on 9/11. Never Forget Motherfuckers! Alright, so it’s great to be here. I’m gonna be killing it tonight! But in the good way! Straight up. No MbS.” then your hypocrisy will never not be noted.

— David

P.S. for anyone who wants to actually spend their money on something worthwhile, the Human Rights Foundation does amazing work. Learn more and donate at https://hrf.org

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Source:

• David Cross, My Thoughts on the Riyadh Comedy Festival, Official David Cross Online Store

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An additional comment:

More Useful Idiots

I honestly have some sympathy for the comedians performing at the Riyadh comedy festival, who have been getting dragged for taking enormous amounts of blood money from a medieval regime that discriminates against women and religious and sexual minorities and whose leadership ordered the execution of a journalist in cold blood in a Turkish consulate a few years back. Being a comedian is hard! It’s a hard life, with lots of travel, and no certainty about the next paycheck. You get your money where you can take it.

And, honestly, I don’t really have a moral problem with this on a macro level. Trade with bad actors happens all the time—just look at our reliance on China—and I think cultural boycotts are somewhere between pointless and counterproductive. If oil-flush oligarchs want to throw around some cash to get people to pretend their ridiculous barbarism isn’t a form of horrendous primitivism, who am I to judge? We all need to make the mortgage; if someone from The Kingdom wants to give me a million bucks to judge a film festival, well, I’d probably have to at least discuss it with my financial advisers.

What I do find kind of annoying is when comedians like Bill Burr play dumb about what they’re doing. “My whole fucking idea of Saudi Arabia is what I’ve seen on the news. I literally think I’m gonna fuckin’ land, ya know, and everybody’s going to be screaming ‘Death to America’ and they’re going to have like fucking machetes and want to chop my head off,” Burr said on his podcast. But Bill, man, surely you knew you’d be going to a Potemkin village where things are lightly westernized and some of the restrictions are loosened. I don’t expect the royals—whom Burr says “loved the show,” by the way; good job singing for your supper, man—to come at you with the bone saw because they want you to return to the United States and tell all the rubes in America that, hey, it’s pretty cool over there. Mission accomplished.

What I find very annoying is when guys like Dave Chappelle pretend that getting yelled at for making jokes about trans people or making jokes about Charlie Kirk means that “it’s easier to talk [in Riyadh] than it is in the United States.” To be clear, I think most of the jihads against Chappelle have been dumb—his routines have been funny and genuinely edgy in a way that I appreciate, even when I disagree with him—but they aren’t, you know, actual jihads. No one’s dismembering him in a closet because he pissed off the professional scolds at GLAAD. I’m glad the audience of rich Saudis enjoyed your material, Dave, but I am curious if they would’ve liked to hear from Mohammad al-Ghamadi, who was sentenced to death for tweeting.

(Don’t worry, al-Ghamadi’s sentence was reduced to thirty years after whining whiners in the west pointed out this was “insane barbarism.” I imagine he still has more difficulty talking than Chappelle, however.)

Anyway, I’m not going to run through the whole litany of literal government repression up to and including murder engaged in by the Saudi Royals, whose country is rated “not free” by Freedom House; none of the useful idiots at the Riyadh Comedy Festival will be likely to care, and I’m sure they’ll just throw out a “well whatabout the FCC in America” as if these are even remotely similar circumstances.¹ I just wish they could feel a tiny modicum of shame for censoring themselvesat the behest of people who oppose everything these supposed truth-tellers have claimed to believe in.

Source: 

• Sonny Bunch, Saudi Arabia’s Useful Idiots, The Bulwark, 3 October 2025

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