David Cross Slams Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle and the Other Comics Taking Saudi Money to Play the Riyadh Comedy Festival

Balkis Press. Shutterstock Images.

When you think of the real hotbed venues for doing stand up comedy, you think Las Vegas, New York, Chicago, LA, Boston. More recently, Austin. Maybe Branson or Nashville. And if you kept expanding that list, you might get to every single city in the English speaking world, from Christchurch, NZ to Weymouth, MA before you'd mention Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I've never been there, so I'm pleading ignorance here. I'd just don't associate Riyadh as a great place to workshop your new bits about drunk driving and the differences between men and women. 

And yet, here we are:

In the Saudi Arabian government's ceaseless efforts to put a new face on their image, from LIV Golf to UFC:

Chris Unger. Getty Images.

… they've now offered dump truck filled with money to 50 of the best stand ups in America to come and turn their capital city of 7 million people into Evening at the Improv for a couple of weeks. 

Which isn't sitting well with everybody:

Variety - Comedian David Cross released a fiery statement on his website Monday condemning the comedians who agreed to perform at Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival. …

 The “Mr. Show” star isn’t the first comedian to take issue with the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Marc Maron recently took to his “WTF” podcast to slam those participating in the event.

“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!’” he said. “I mean, the same guy that’s gonna pay them is the same guy that paid that guy to bone-saw Jamal Khashoggi and put him in a fucking suitcase. But don’t let that stop the yucks, it’s gonna be a good time!”    

Shane Gillis also disavowed the festival, saying on his “Secret Podcast” that he turned down an invitation and a “significant bag” for an appearance fee.

He said, “I took a principled stand. You don’t 9/11 your friends.”

Other U.S. comedians set to appear at the Riyadh Comedy Festival include Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Russell Peters, Gabriel Iglesias, Wayne Brady, Jeff Ross, Tom Segura and Hannibal Buress.

Let me add here that Tim Dillon also agreed to take the money, but then got fired from the Festival after he made jokes about it on his own podcast and Joe Rogan's:

And he's said those jokes cost him $375,000. Which makes you wonder what kind of a haul Burr and Chappelle are getting. 

Personally, I can certainly respect the moral stance David Cross, Marc Maron and Shane Gillis are taking. (Full disclosure, I worked with Cross once. He was hosting when I did my like third stand up show ever, in 1990 at Catch a Rising Star in Harvard Square. He was a condescending, supercilious prick to me. But I have no ill will. I can honestly say I probably deserved it.) It shows a real strength of character to turn down that kind of money in order to stand on your principles. And both Cross and Maron were brilliant in the way they framed their outrage. In particular, that Alvin and the Chipmunks line is gold.

But I'm going to say about the 50 comics (plus Dillon) what I said about the golfers who left the PGA for LIV and got accused of helping "Sportswash" an evil, repressive regime with their driving, chipping and putting. The world is a shitty place. Complex, messy, entangled, intertwined, and it bears repeating, shitty. Filled with people doing terrible things. And rich people being made richer by taking money from even richer - often insanely richer - people. And governments. I mean, go down the list of evil regimes that get Olympics and World Cups. The evildoers who get to host these prestige events didn't begin with the 1936 Berlin Games, and it sure as hell didn't end there. And won't any time soon.

That's the world our fallen species have created. It's not black and white. Morality comes in an infinite palette of gray shades. You make deals with a wide variety of devils that come in all shapes, sizes and colors.  The evil that exists doesn't end at the Saudi border. Nor does the selling out what you believe in begin with stand up comics. Last year I did a show at a Jewish Temple that was getting turned down by a lot of comics on political grounds. And because the place was constantly receiving threats. There's no those same people think I was being immoral to work that show. You're entitled to your opinion. I'm entitled to do my bit about having a crush on Tom Brady. To each his own.

The people being righteously indignant about telling jokes for the Saudis don't think twice about how the petroleum they the gas station attendant puts in their tanks got there. They don't hesitate to buy their phones and footwear from factories using forced labor. Or putting solar panels on their summer house made from rare earth minerals dug out of the ground by children. 

The point being, there's ambiguity all over the place, no matter which direction you look. There's not a sane person among us who isn't still livid about the Saudi's role in 9/11. But you know who could've done something about it but didn't? The United States fecking government, that's who. We're on our fifth presidential administration, with four presidents from two different political parties, and not one of them has as much as given the Saudis a little passive/aggressive side eye over it. All they've done is sign deals worth trillions of dollars with them in the 24 years since, and negotiated highly complex security deals with them. 

So what do we to expect Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson and Aziz Ansari to do about it? If we're asking our comics to conduct a sane, rational, and principled foreign policy for us, our country is beyond redemption. 

I'll end this with the same point I made when the PGA was demagoguing 9/11 to shame the LIV guys. Oscar Wilde wrote a play called Major Barbara, about the moral complexities of the Salvation Army accepting money from liquor companies or weapons manufacturers. And Wilde took the unusual step of having his pal George Bernard Shaw write a forward explaining the fictional point of the entire play. Which is that yes, you should always take the money. Then use it to do good in the world according to your own definition of what that good is. Even if that's a fourth house, a boat or sneakers.

This doesn't mean the people cutting the checks to these comics aren't horrible. It's merely acknowledging the reality that we all do business with horrible people, whether we intend to or not. So you might as well get paid for it.