Barely Legal<\/em> magazine?<\/p>\nHonestly, I thought it would be funny. The instant I heard about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, I pleaded with the editor of this magazine to send me. Despite a series of legal reforms over the past decade, Saudi Arabia remains one of the most conservative Muslim societies in the world, while Louis C.K. is famous for his foul mouth and his record of masturbating in front of a succession of unimpressed women. A match made in heaven!<\/p>\n
My boss suggested that I take a male chaperone, which would allow me to move more freely in a place that remains deeply segregated by sex. Sadly, my husband declined to use his precious vacation allowance on the trip, and my 80-year-old father would rather stay home in England and watch cricket. And so my long-suffering editor, Dante, stepped up instead. Our presence would be a test of how much Saudi Arabia has really changed: I\u2019m on my second husband; Dante is on his first. Both of us have freely and sometimes enthusiastically committed what are technically capital offenses under Saudi law.<\/p>\n
Listen: Saudi Arabia gets the last laugh<\/p>\n
The editor in chief, clearly beginning to enjoy himself, urged us to stay at the Ritz-Carlton. That\u2019s the very luxurious but also Shining<\/em>-like hotel where Saudi Arabia\u2019s crown prince imprisoned his rivals in 2017\u2014room service was included, plus a bit of light torture\u2014completing his ascent to absolute power. The trip would be like something out of Hunter S. Thompson, our boss said, with one difference: no drugs. <\/em>Our being beheaded by sword, the usual method of execution in Saudi Arabia, would be bad publicity for The Atlantic<\/em>, and leave the magazine down an editor at a time when we are already shorthanded. We had, he implied, plenty of writers to spare.<\/p>\nFayez Nureldine \/ AFP \/ Getty<\/p>\n
The Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia<\/p>\n
Louis C.K.<\/span> was one of dozens of prominent comedians who had agreed to play the festival. Most are Americans, and many, like C.K., have had previous encounters with left-wing cancel culture. Kevin Hart, who quit presenting the Oscars over past homophobic jokes. Aziz Ansari, the subject of one of the more unfair #MeToo incidents. Dave Chappelle, whose jokes about trans people prompted protests at Netflix. Plus a whole bunch of independent podcasters whose material would never make it onto Saturday Night Live<\/em>. Louis C.K.\u2019s co-headliner would be Jimmy Carr, who got into medium trouble in Britain for a joke about killing Gypsies and rather larger trouble for engaging in an offshore tax-avoidance scheme.<\/p>\nWhat could stand-up comedy look like in a theocracy? Would enough crude jokes about incest, pedophilia, and anal sex really usher in Western liberal democracy to Saudi Arabia? Ahead of the Riyadh event, I had already enjoyed weeks<\/em> of watching comedians scramble to explain why they had agreed to perform for a brutal authoritarian regime. The podcaster Tim Dillon said on his show that he\u2019d accepted $375,000 to \u201clook the other way,\u201d and, in any case, \u201cthere are so many beautiful things that have happened as a result of forced labor.\u201d (He flashed up a picture of the pyramids, which are located in a completely different Arab country, to underline the point.) Saudi Arabia\u2014showing an unexpected grasp of comic timing\u2014promptly canned him from the festival. Dillon said that his manager had told him, \u201cThey heard what you said about them having slaves. They didn\u2019t like that.\u201d<\/p>\nJim Jefferies\u2014an Australian comic best described as a Temu Ricky Gervais\u2014stepped on the same rake. Referring to the killing and dismemberment of the regime critic Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Jefferies told the podcaster Theo Von, \u201cOne reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I\u2019m gonna die on.\u201d People could criticize golfers or soccer players for taking blood riyals, but not comedians. \u201cBasically, we are freedom-of-speech machines being sent over there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Sorry, I\u2019m getting an update regarding freedom-of-speech machines: They will not <\/em>be sent over there. Jefferies disappeared from the lineup, too.<\/p>\nThe festival is an outgrowth of Vision 2030, the grand Saudi project to prepare for the kingdom\u2019s post-oil future. The old Saudi brand was \u201caustere theocracy,\u201d but the new one is \u201cfun, fun, fun, but still with beheading.\u201d The Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo was lured to a Riyadh team, Al-Nassr, for about $200 million, tax free. The annual Esports World Cup, held in the city this summer, had a prize pool of $70 million. The Six Kings Slam tennis event, held this week in the city and broadcast on Netflix, offers the half-dozen players involved a potential payout of $6 million for two or three matches. A group led by the kingdom\u2019s public investment fund just dropped $55 billion to buy Electronic Arts, the company behind FIFA<\/em> and other video games. (Jared Kushner was also involved in the deal.) Entities controlled by Saudi leaders also plan to invest up to $1 billion in a Hollywood studio.<\/p>\nThe man holding Saudi Arabia\u2019s giant and extremely open checkbook is 40-year-old Mohammed bin Salman, universally known as MBS\u2014a Millennial crown prince for a country where two-thirds of the population is younger than 30. MBS has undoubtedly modernized the country, allowing women to drive and standing down the hated religious police (yay!). But he has done this through a reign of terror in which his opponents have been executed, exiled, or intimidated into silence (oh).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe comedians on that stage are performing in a gilded cage,\u201d the exiled Saudi satirist Ghanem al-Masarir wrote before the festival, adding, \u201cIn MBS\u2019s Saudi Arabia, the punchline is always prison.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maya Siddiqui \/ Bloomberg \/ Getty<\/p>\n
Salwa Palace in the At-Turaif district of Diriyah, Saudi Arabia<\/p>\n
Maya Anwar \/ Bloomberg \/ Getty<\/p>\n
King Abdullah Financial Center in Riyadh<\/p>\n
As our car<\/span> crawled toward the gig, which began at 9:30 p.m. on a Monday night, the temperature had fallen to a moderate 90 degrees, and Riyadh was coming alive. During the day, the city\u2019s shiny new high-end malls and public parks are deserted, as if some lost civilization built a dozen Dolce & Gabbana outlets and then blinked out of existence. After dusk, though, people emerge onto the streets, visiting a cinema\u2014allowed again since 2018\u2014or a restaurant, whether that be a Texas Roadhouse or a satellite location of Spago. American corporations abound: There is a KFC in Mecca, a short walk from the Kaaba, and the first thing you see after immigration at Riyadh airport is a Dunkin\u2019 branch. In nearby Diriyah, a historical site that was the original stronghold of the House of Saud, the fencing outside a massive high-end development carried the legend WHERE TRADITION MEETS MODERN RETAIL. A perfect slogan for what I saw of today\u2019s Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\nThe Louis C.K. gig was held in Riyadh\u2019s entertainment district, the Boulevard, a glorified parking lot that is also home to a WWE Experience, an esports arena, and numerous stores selling comic-book figurines. Last year, the district hosted a pop-up Harry Potter World, allowing Saudi Arabians to imagine they were playing Quidditch or drinking nonalcoholic Butterbeer. (It was not that long ago that the Anti-Witchcraft Unit of the Ministry of Interior had banned Harry Potter<\/em> books from the kingdom.) This year, they\u2019re getting a temporary theme park based on MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber in the world. To promote the comedy festival, the entire place was decked out with expensive faux-neon signs of ungrammatical menace\u2014YOUR LAUGH FROM THIS WAY and HA HA HA!\u2014and statues of the festival\u2019s mascot, a giant smiling microphone with arms and legs. I walked past made-for-Instagram street furniture and a professional photographer taking a picture of a smiling family\u2014dad, two kids, and mom in a full-face veil.<\/p>\nWe entered the main venue, ANB Arena, after a hopeful dash across several lanes of traffic\u2014sidewalks and crosswalks are no more reliable here than in America\u2014and a short line to pass through metal detectors and bag up our phones to prevent recording. I had worried about attracting attention by taking notes during the show, and so instead of a reporter\u2019s pad, I had brought a pastel-pink gratitude journal, which I will expense. The crowd was mostly male, just like it is at American comedy nights, and the much-shorter female security line was staffed by brisk women in niqabs. No food or drink was permitted in the arena, not even water. This pained Dante\u2014who, as a good American, believes that hydration is next to godliness. After we took our seats, he observed that this event would be an obvious location for a terrorist atrocity. This really got me in the mood for a night of incest jokes.<\/p>\n
The first surprise was that I knew the opening performer\u2014the Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell. \u201cI come from a tiny island full of alcohol,\u201d he told the crowd. \u201cBahrain.\u201d They loved that one: Bahrain is Saudi\u2019s Canc\u00fan. Maxwell was followed by Ibraheem Alkhairallah, a Saudi comedian who is big on Arabic-language YouTube.<\/p>\n
Alkhairallah enjoined us all to give a round of applause to the crown prince for being such a great leader of the country, a patriotic innovation that I hope makes it to New York\u2019s Comedy Cellar in the coming Mamdani era. Everyone except Dante and me obliged with apparent enthusiasm. (God, what if <\/em>this is what we get arrested for<\/em>, I thought.)<\/p>\nThen it was on to the main attractions. Jimmy Carr bounded onstage, dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit, his face looking freshly ironed. He has a distinctive whooping laugh, like a haunted seagull. About three-quarters of Carr\u2019s usual material is based on the premise that he is a sex offender, and this event was no exception. \u201cI\u2019m a little bit haram<\/em>,\u201d he said at one point. Then he swerved into a routine about how you can\u2019t say retard<\/em> and mixed-race<\/em> any more\u2014you have to say \u201cHarry and Meghan.\u201d<\/p>\nCarr is not an especially political comedian. He does jokes about stopping his girlfriend from snoring thanks to his \u201cnoise-canceling fists\u201d and<\/em> jokes about how his rape fantasy is \u201csomeone goes to jail for rape.\u201d Nonetheless, he did push the limits of acceptable speech in Saudi Arabia. After a riff about euthanasia, he added: \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t let a dog live like this, and yet people are allowed to go on living in what can only be described as\u201d\u2014here he paused for dramatic effect\u2014\u201cYemen.\u201d The audience gasped: The recent U.S.-backed Saudi war on Houthi rebels in Yemen was high on the list of things not to talk about in Riyadh.<\/p>\nLater on, Carr asked, \u201cAny lesbians here tonight?\u201d The room\u2019s atmosphere contracted, a sudden tightening. Would anyone out themselves as gay in Saudi Arabia? He held the tension for a moment, then added: \u201cOf course not, it\u2019s a comedy show.\u201d The entire crowd relaxed into laughter. Bloody lesbians! They can\u2019t take a joke.<\/em><\/p>\nFayez Nureldine \/ AFP \/ Getty<\/p>\n
The Riyadh Comedy Festival site, photographed on October 6<\/p>\n
The French<\/span> have a brilliant phrase\u2014esprit d\u2019escalier<\/em>, or \u201cstaircase wit,\u201d meaning that pang of realization, as you leave a situation, that you could have unloaded an absolute zinger. This is how I feel about missing the opportunity, as Louis C.K. walked on stage in Riyadh to whoops and cheers, to shout: \u201cGet your cock out!\u201d<\/p>\nMaybe it\u2019s better that I didn\u2019t; the British government advises travelers to avoid \u201cbehaving in ways the Saudi authorities assess disrupt the public order.\u201d But just imagine the celebrities solemnly promoting an Amnesty petition to free me from detention. The editor of this magazine would even hire me a lawyer.<\/p>\n
Louis C.K. was once the titan of thoughtful American comedy\u2014evidence of a strange recent trend of treating comics as public intellectuals, even philosopher kings, rather than entertainers whose success is measured in laughs per minute. He had a sitcom, Louie<\/em>, that was loosely based on his life, and he had the admiration and envy of his peers. Then, in 2017, The New York Times<\/em> published one of the most consequential stories of the #MeToo era. Onstage, Louis C.K. was doing highly praised feminist routines about how men were the No. 1 threat to women: \u201cIf you\u2019re a guy, try to imagine that you could only date a half-bear, half-lion, and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, I hope this one\u2019s nice.\u2019\u201d Offstage, he liked to ask female comedians if he could masturbate in front of them. \u201cWhen you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn\u2019t a question. It\u2019s a predicament for them,\u201d he wrote in his apology statement, adding: \u201cI have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.\u201d<\/p>\nHe took three years, after which he released a special called Sincerely Louis CK<\/em>, with a self-pitying message: \u201cYou all have your thing,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cI don\u2019t know what your thing is. You\u2019re so fucking lucky that I don\u2019t know what your thing is.\u201d The title of his 2021 special, Sorry<\/em>, can be read as either an apology for his behavior or a frustrated, sarcastic response to the depth of the backlash. In that routine, he joked that COVID had forced everyone to live like him\u2014a hermit. But Sincerely Louis CK<\/em> won a Grammy, and by 2023, C.K. was back to selling out Madison Square Garden. His new work hasn\u2019t appeared on streaming services, though, and he has continued to sell his specials for $5 or $10 a pop directly from his website. When he appeared on Bill Maher\u2019s show ahead of the Riyadh gig\u2014comedy was \u201ca great way to get in and start talking,\u201d he said\u2014it was his first television appearance in eight years.<\/p>\nSophie Gilbert: Sorry\/Not Sorry<\/em> and the paradox of Louis C.K.<\/p>\nFor someone like C.K.\u2014or Dave Chappelle, or Kevin Hart\u2014performing in Riyadh doubles as a middle finger to the liberal mainstream. You tried to knock me down, but I\u2019m still making bank<\/em>. To me, the audience that greeted C.K.\u2019s entrance with a standing ovation in Sorry<\/em> seemed to be brushing aside those pesky women who had tried to take away their idol from them. At the time, Chappelle had defended C.K. ringing up a woman to jerk off by saying, \u201cBitch, you don\u2019t know how to hang up a phone?\u201d My position is different: Is it too much to ask people not to ejaculate in professional settings? But, you know, people don\u2019t want to be made to feel bad about things that they like. <\/em>(Understanding this would help the left win a lot more elections.)<\/p>\nLouis C.K.\u2019s material has always been morbid and self-excoriating, but his set in Riyadh was a real downer. He was old, falling apart, and, worst of all, resigned to dating women his own age. Dante told me it wouldn\u2019t be fair to write here that he bombed, despite the incredible opportunity for bad-taste puns that would provide. But I can\u2019t honestly say the set was rapturously received, either. When C.K. announced he was about to wrap up, a small stream of people decided to head out early to beat the traffic. The instant he stepped off the stage, the remaining crowd stampeded for the exits, rather than hoping for an encore.<\/p>\n
The best compliment you could pay the set is that he didn\u2019t appear to have altered it much for local sensibilities. The worst you could say about it is exactly the same thing. He joked about how much he hated jury duty (not a problem in Saudi Arabia), how much he loathed the rain (Saudis would love rain), and how disgusted he was by the elderly woman in his building who wore \u201clittle shorts and a tube top\u201d (not relatable for the man on the Riyadh street). Only once did he acknowledge the cultural divide, when introducing a long and particularly bleak section about putting his elderly father in a care home. That scenario might not land in Arab culture, he said, because \u201cyou\u2019re compassionate and shit.\u201d<\/p>\n
When C.K. launched into the bit on Barely Legal<\/em> magazine, I thought: Honestly, when was the last time anyone saw a physical porn mag?<\/em> There are people alive today who are fully<\/em> legal who haven\u2019t encountered one. By the end of the night, I was, somewhat unexpectedly, annoyed on behalf of the kingdom. You drop six or seven figures to fly in Louis C.K., and he won\u2019t even write some new material? Disrespectful. Send this man to the Ritz-Carlton.<\/p>\nOne of the questions<\/span> I wanted to answer in Riyadh was this: Who is the audience for a Louis C.K. gig in Saudi Arabia? The answer turned out to be a 60\u201340 mix of locals and expats. The two groups were easy to distinguish, because a lot of Saudi men in the audience wore the ankle-length white thobe<\/em> and a traditional headdress; most Saudi women, despite the relaxation of the modesty laws, wear niqabs in public, covering their entire face apart from the eyes. (Some have jury-rigged these out of COVID masks alongside a regular headscarf.) The Westerners, by contrast, are in pants and shirts, and sometimes even shorts; the Saudi Tourism Authority asks visitors only to cover their elbows and knees. Within a five-star hotel like the Ritz-Carlton, anything goes. I saw a man who wasn\u2019t Louis C.K. waiting for the elevator in swim trunks and an open bathrobe.<\/p>\nThere is another group in Saudi society\u2014although, unsurprisingly, they were not conspicuous at the Louis C.K. show. More than 40 percent of the country\u2019s population are migrant workers from countries such as India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, flown over to work in hotels and the construction industry. When I arrived at the airport, the immigration line was filled with the occupants of two planes that had just arrived from Dhaka and Mumbai. Every single person I saw was a man.<\/p>\n
Fayez Nureldine \/ AFP \/ Getty<\/p>\n
Passengers aboard the Riyadh Metro<\/p>\n
Maya Anwar \/ Bloomberg \/ Getty<\/p>\n
The Qasr Al-Hokm metro station in Riyadh.<\/p>\n
The Riyadh Metro, which opened in December, reflects the tripartite nature of Saudi society. The trains have three carriages: \u201cfirst class,\u201d which is filled with men in thobes<\/em>; \u201cfamily,\u201d home to foreign couples and women delicately lifting their niqab to sip iced coffee; and \u201csingle,\u201d disproportionately the preserve of African and South Asian men. The Riyadh Metro is far quieter, cleaner, and more efficient than, say, the New York subway. However, like so much Saudi luxury, it requires a supply of cheap labor last seen in English country houses of the 19th century. As we passed through Al-Urubah station, I watched a man on his hands and knees, polishing the metal rivets on the platform.<\/p>\nThe gender balance in Saudi Arabia is deeply skewed: If you include migrants, the population has millions more men than women. This is a worry in a society that has fretted about the radical potential of alienated young men since at least 1979, when a fundamentalist militia stormed Mecca. The British novelist Hilary Mantel spent four years in Jeddah as the wife of a geologist in the 1980s, and found the experience so stifling that she wrote a novel about it. \u201cIf you left your husband\u2019s side in the supermarket, some sad man followed you and tried to touch you up in the frozen fish,\u201d she recalled later. \u201cYou were probably a prostitute anyway. Most European women were. Male desperation, loneliness and need, the misunderstandings they bred: these hung in the refrigerated air, permeating public spaces like dry ice.\u201d With so much wealth sloshing about, many young Saudi men had little need to work, but they also had few Sharia-approved outlets for leisure. Hard-line clerics forbade musical performances, alcohol, and even all-you-can-eat buffets.<\/p>\n
From the April 2022 issue: Absolute power<\/p>\n
After 9\/11, though, the House of Saud was becoming alarmed about what it had indulged\u2014and exported\u2014by giving the clerics such power. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9\/11 were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden, the son of a well-to-do family in the construction business. In 2003, al-Qaeda stopped being other people\u2019s problem, as some of its terrorists carried out a wave of suicide bombings in Riyadh. Potential jihadists have been deradicalized in specialist prisons through intensive lessons in correct Islam\u2014plus money for a dowry and maybe even the gift of a Toyota. \u201cNo Saudi official will admit it on the record that the Kingdom\u2019s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration,\u201d Robert Lacey wrote in his book Inside the Kingdom<\/em> in 2010, \u201cbut if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex during their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising if some of them channel this frustration into violence.\u201d Bored young men in the Gulf once turned to jihad; now they have Jimmy Carr making jokes about dildos. This is called progress.<\/p>\n\u201cI don\u2019t self-censor,\u201d<\/span> Carr once said, when faced with a backlash against some of his material. \u201cYou have to be authentic and say it, and trust that the audience will get that it\u2019s a joke.\u201d<\/p>\nLuckily, there was no need to self<\/em>-censor in Riyadh, because the government was happy to do that for him. The festival\u2019s big-money offers came with puppet strings attached. In late September, the comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posted the contract that she was offered for a 90-minute gig. She could not \u201cdegrade, defame or bring into public disrepute, contempt or scandal, embarrassment or ridicule\u201d either the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or \u201cany religion, religious tradition, religious figure or religious practice.\u201d (She declined the invitation.) These conditions were later confirmed by the performer Bill Burr, and by Louis C.K., who told Bill Maher: \u201cThey said there\u2019s only two restrictions\u2014their religion and their government. I don\u2019t have jokes about those two things.\u201d<\/p>\nThe news of the restrictions prompted a minor civil war among comedians. Suddenly, on podcasts and social media, every comic in America seemed to be discussing why they were<\/em> going to Riyadh, why they weren\u2019t<\/em> going to Riyadh, or how they would <\/em>have gone to Riyadh if only they\u2019d been invited. \u201cFrom the folks that brought you 9\/11,\u201d Marc Maron riffed in a stand-up routine posted to Instagram. \u201cTwo weeks of laughter in the desert.\u201d David Cross, who came up alongside Louis C.K. in the 1980s and \u201990s, took a different line. \u201cAll of your bitching about \u2018cancel culture\u2019 and \u2018freedom of speech\u2019 and all that shit? Done,\u201d he wrote in a statement. \u201cYou don\u2019t get to talk about it ever again. By now we\u2019ve all seen the contract you had to sign.\u201d (\u201cI\u2019m glad these guys brought this stuff up,\u201d Louis C.K. told Maher. He had \u201cmixed feelings\u201d about the festival, and \u201cstruggled about going once I started hearing what everyone was saying.\u201d) Dave Chappelle went, gave no explanation, and said on stage in Riyadh that he felt freer to speak than he does in America. Jessica Kirson also went, regretted it, and said she donated the fee to a human-rights charity.<\/p>\nOne of the main points of contention was that this wasn\u2019t just a festival in<\/em> Saudi Arabia; this was performing at the pleasure of the Saudi state. The General Entertainment Authority\u2014essentially the government\u2019s Ministry of State-Mandated Fun and Laughter\u2014organized the festival and is overseen by Turki al-Sheikh, a close ally of MBS. (They bonded over their shared love of video games.) Like MBS himself, al-Sheikh is a zealous modernizer with zero tolerance for criticism; some of his critics have reportedly been locked up in jail for unflattering tweets.<\/p>\nSo why take his money? The most common defense was not, as you might expect, the Jim Jefferies one: all that hokum about comedians as emissaries of peace and brotherly love. No, the biggest rationalization was that America does bad shit too<\/em>. Dillon, for example, cited U.S. support for Israel\u2019s war in Gaza as a reason not to single out Saudi Arabia for criticism. Some comics\u2019 lack of belief in America as a moral force for good was accompanied by an ambient nihilism. On the podcast 2 Bears, 1 Cave, <\/em>Stavros Halkias and Chris Distefano agonized over whether to accept invitations to perform. \u201cAll entertainment money is fucking blood money,\u201d said Halkias. He didn\u2019t go; Distefano did.<\/p>\nAnd so did Bill Burr. When he returned from Riyadh, Burr gushed about the experience on his podcast, Monday Morning<\/em>. \u201cMy whole fucking idea of Saudi Arabia is what I\u2019ve seen on the news,\u201d he said. \u201cI literally think I\u2019m going to fucking land, you know, and everybody\u2019s going to be screaming \u2018Death to America!\u2019 and they\u2019re going to have like fucking machetes and want to like chop my head off, right?\u201d However, \u201ceverybody\u2019s just regular\u2014like, shooting the shit.\u201d (His next special should be called Bill Burr\u2019s Low Bar<\/em>.) How could Riyadh be an ethically troubling destination, he added, when it was full of American food brands\u2014Starbucks, McDonald\u2019s, Chili\u2019s? Nowhere with a Dunkin\u2019 could be that<\/em> bad, surely. He might not have known about Deera Square, a short drive from ANB Arena. Known locally as Chop-Chop Square, it\u2019s the traditional location of public beheadings in Riyadh. Although the Saudis executed a record 345 people last year, public beheadings are now considered declass\u00e9, having been ruined by the Islamic State. I\u2019m sure Burr could do something funny with that.<\/p>\nBurr\u2019s words reflect the bland incuriosity that accrues with wealth. As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon against the outside world. A rich person\u2014a successful comedian, say\u2014could glide from the business-class lounge to the front of the aircraft to an air-conditioned limo to a luxury hotel where your dinner is interrupted by five different people asking if everything is okay. Live enough days like this, and the whole world becomes your bellhop. No wonder these guys like Saudi Arabia. The way that daily life bends around rich people is that little bit more obvious here.<\/p>\n
After several days of backlash to his naive musings, Burr returned with another thought: His critics, he told Conan O\u2019Brien, were \u201csanctimonious cunts.\u201d For me, the fairer complaint is that Western detractors were thinking about the festival the wrong way. They deemed it a PR disaster for Saudi Arabia because it exposed the regime\u2019s hypocrisy about free speech and the performers\u2019 cynicism. On the contrary, the festival said to middle-class Saudis: Do you need the vote if you have lots of money and Louis C.K.?<\/em> That\u2019s a trade-off that even many Americans would accept.<\/p>\nBurr also told O\u2019Brien something that I fear is correct: that American society was moving toward Saudi illiberalism by \u201cfucking grabbing moms and dads and sticking them in a van for making illegally made fucking tacos.\u201d This, to me, was the greatest irony of the Riyadh Comedy Festival. With its Cheesecake Factory outlets and newfound interest in comedy, Saudi Arabia is becoming more American\u2014just as America is becoming more Saudi. In the U.S., the government is stifling the media, due process is being eroded, the ruler\u2019s relatives are sent on quasi-governmental missions, and businessmen make overt displays of loyalty. Donald Trump\u2019s White House has given up lecturing other countries on their human-rights records and adopted a purely transactional approach to foreign affairs. Comedians are just following his lead.<\/p>\n
Jeremy Suyker \/ Bloomberg \/ Getty<\/p>\n
Rush-hour traffic in Riyadh<\/p>\n
On the plane<\/span> home to London I spotted Andrew Maxwell, who had warmed up for Carr and C.K. He and I have appeared on British radio together, and he was more than happy to talk about why he had taken the Riyadh gig. \u201cI grew up in a de facto theocracy,\u201d he told me, referring to Ireland. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t get divorced. Abortion was illegal. Being gay was illegal. Yes, it was a democracy, but the church was everywhere. And in 10, 15 years, when I was growing up, it all changed.\u201d He hoped that Saudi Arabia was undergoing a similar process. The country was \u201cspeedrunning\u201d toward modernity, he said, whereas the West had taken 500 years to get there, with a lot of bloodshed.<\/p>\nAnd the Saudis are hardly the only ones limiting what comedians can say. \u201cThat list of restrictions? That is no different from a corporate event,\u201d he told me. \u201cEvery single famous comedian you\u2019ve ever heard of has done private events. I\u2019m not remotely laissez-faire about freedom of speech, but you\u2019ve got to start where people are. We tried top-down state-building in the Middle East, and it failed.\u201d I told him this was the most sincere defense I\u2019d heard for participating in the festival. \u201cIt\u2019s not a defense. It\u2019s a fact,\u201d he said without rancor.<\/p>\n
What about taking money from the Saudi government? \u201cYou and I have worked for the BBC,\u201d he replied\u2014Britain\u2019s state-funded broadcaster. I countered that the BBC had not, to the best of my knowledge, dismembered anyone. Things weren\u2019t the same in the Gulf states, he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t retire like Tony Blair and run a fucking institute. It\u2019s like Game of Thrones<\/em>. You rule or you die.\u201d<\/p>\nThe night before the big event, Maxwell had gone with Louis C.K. to the Comedy Pod, a 180-seater stand-up club in Riyadh. Both men did their sets (in English) to an audience of local comics, who started applauding before C.K. had even said a word. \u201cLouis got a standing ovation on, and another off,\u201d Maxwell said. The atmosphere reminded him of the Dublin club where he came up in the 1990s\u2014a small space where young comics gathered to workshop material and check out the competition.<\/p>\n
Louis C.K. referenced the Riyadh club onstage, at the very end of his set, telling the audience what a great time he\u2019d had, and asked them to applaud the Saudi comedians who perform there. The thing was, Louis C.K. said, comedy was the same everywhere, and so it could bring people together. Even though Riyadh\u2019s comics were performing in Arabic, he went on, \u201cit was all the same jokes. Your wife\u2019s a pain in the ass<\/em>. You can tell.\u201d<\/p>\n*Illustration sources: Dante Ramos; Fayez Nuraldine \/ AFP \/ Getty; Theo Wargo \/ Getty.<\/em><\/p>\n