Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to a very special episode of It Could Happen Here,
Speaker 2: reporting live from the sunny beaches of Riad. I'm Garrison
Speaker 2: Davis this episode joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and
Speaker 2: presenting our special report, Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: I am so happy to talk about our favorite time
Speaker 3: of the year, which is of course the Riod Comedy Festival,
Speaker 3: which occurs from September twenty sixth to October ninth.
Speaker 4: It's the highlight of my year each year.
Speaker 3: Ye happy to say all of Cool Zone will be
Speaker 3: there performing in Riod, immediately getting arrested. It's gonna be
Speaker 3: really good, very much excited, like all of your comedy favorites.
Speaker 3: Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, asas End. Sorry, we will be
Speaker 3: getting paid hundreds of thousands or over a million dollars
Speaker 3: to pretend that the Saudi regime does not execute dissidence reporters,
Speaker 3: civil rights activists, whoever, and doesn't run a torture prison.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So that that's what's happening this week. There's been a
Speaker 3: big backlash against a bunch of very prominent comedians.
Speaker 4: Louis c k. It looks like a mix of.
Speaker 3: Guy Okay, not surprised David Chappelle. I'm surprised that old
Speaker 3: David Chappelle would do this, but I'm not surprised that
Speaker 3: current David Chappelle would do this.
Speaker 4: Bilbert is disappointing. Bilbert is disappointing that one hurts.
Speaker 3: Moe Amer, who is a Palestinian American comedian who lives
Speaker 3: in Houston, has also agreed to go to Riad and
Speaker 3: form not great.
Speaker 2: Comrade Shane Gillis declined the offer.
Speaker 5: Yeah shee.
Speaker 3: Gillis said yes and then said no. Let's be real
Speaker 3: fucking clear on what Shane Gillis did. Okay, I believe
Speaker 3: he's the one that said yes and then said no.
Speaker 3: You get you get a variety of responses from people
Speaker 3: who were invited to this fucking thing. And I'll make
Speaker 3: it clear kind of where my moral line stands. I
Speaker 3: don't actually believe it's inherently wrong to perform inside the
Speaker 3: bounds of any country. It kind of depends on what
Speaker 3: you're doing and how you do it, and this is
Speaker 3: the wrong way to do it, because these are not
Speaker 3: just people. If someone had just shown up at a
Speaker 3: nightclub in Saudi Arabia to do a stand up set,
Speaker 3: I don't particularly care about that, even though there are
Speaker 3: lesma jest laws, Like I wouldn't care if someone did
Speaker 3: a stand up comedy set that couldn't make fun of
Speaker 3: the King of Thailand, right, which is a crime in Thailand.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know, people perform in parts of the world that
Speaker 3: have different or bad laws. The US has bad laws.
Speaker 3: We do bad things. I don't think it's inherently evil
Speaker 3: to just perform at a random club there, which is
Speaker 3: not what the people who are performing at the Odd
Speaker 3: Comedy Festival are doing. This whole convention is being put
Speaker 3: on by a guy named Turkey, I'll shake. Turkey is
Speaker 3: the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority, which is a
Speaker 3: Saudi government department. He grew up with Mohammad Ben Salmon
Speaker 3: playing League of Legends, and it's kind of like key
Speaker 3: to Ben Salmon's planned makes Saudi Arabia cool to like
Speaker 3: bring it into the global entertainment and like social network
Speaker 3: without modernizing its laws or allowing people to, you know,
Speaker 3: make fun of Mohammed Ben Salmon or his friends. For
Speaker 3: an idea of the kind of dude who hired Bill
Speaker 3: Burr and all of these other guys and paid them
Speaker 3: so much money. There is an entire wing of the
Speaker 3: all Higher prison called the Tutu Wing, which references all
Speaker 3: Shake's nickname Tutu, where prisoners that he specifically pointed out,
Speaker 3: often people who made fun of him or made jokes
Speaker 3: that he did not appreciate, are put in tortured. This
Speaker 3: guy has an entire torture prison named after him. That
Speaker 3: is who's writing checks to fucking Pete Davidson, whose dad
Speaker 3: died in Night eleven. Ah fuck, it's fucking shocking the
Speaker 3: fact that Pete Davidson is at this thing, and he
Speaker 3: has been He's been like questioned about it, and his answer, basically,
Speaker 3: I'll say this for Pete, was basically like, yeah, but
Speaker 3: there's a lot of money, right. And I'm separating in
Speaker 3: my head to a degree. I think it's bad to
Speaker 3: take money from the Saudi government to do something like
Speaker 3: this that is being used to like whitewash their human
Speaker 3: rights record to make them look like a cool part
Speaker 3: of global society, even as they this week executed another journalist.
Speaker 3: I think that's bad. I think it's worse if you're
Speaker 3: someone who stood for something. This doesn't change my opinion
Speaker 3: about THEO Vaughn, who sucks and it's like, yeah, he'll
Speaker 3: take money from Saudi Arabia. He's a huge asshole. I'm
Speaker 3: not surprised, right, And there's some other guys in this
Speaker 3: that I'm not necessarily like shocked about.
Speaker 6: Did you see Theovon's beef with Ice this week?
Speaker 5: Oh? Does theovon have beef with Ice this week?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: They use video of him without his consent in one
Speaker 6: of their marketing videos.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Great so.
Speaker 3: Jim Jeffries on August one on Theovon's podcast to talk
Speaker 3: about agreeing to do this show, and he said one
Speaker 3: reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a
Speaker 3: fucking hill that I'm gonna die on, and argued that
Speaker 3: freedom of speech machines like himself would do good by, like,
Speaker 3: you know, making jokes in Saudi Arabia and key in
Speaker 3: the men on the freedom of speech thing. Basically, it'll
Speaker 3: be a net positive for freedom if I go speak
Speaker 3: at this thing. And then the funniest possible follow up,
Speaker 3: he was removed from the festival lineup because he acknowledged
Speaker 3: that they killed a reporter and you can't even do
Speaker 3: that on your own fucking podcast or fucking theo vod's
Speaker 3: goddamn podcast. I want to play a video clip of
Speaker 3: Tim Dillon, because Tim Dillon is another guy who agreed
Speaker 3: to show up and perform at this this fucking nightmare event.
Speaker 3: And Dylan is why we know kind of how much
Speaker 3: money is on the table at this thing, because he
Speaker 3: has said that he was paid three hundred and seventy
Speaker 3: five thousand. He was offered three hundred and seventy five
Speaker 3: thousand for one performance to be there. He said that
Speaker 3: kind of the lowest number people were being offered was
Speaker 3: about one hundred and fifty thousand, and the most like
Speaker 3: highly paid people were being offered up to one point
Speaker 3: six million dollars. So I mean it's possible see people
Speaker 3: were geting more than that, but I'm guessing that's closer
Speaker 3: to like where the Bill Burr's than the Dave Chappelle's
Speaker 3: you are getting right like in the one point six million.
Speaker 3: So these guys were offered an insane amount of money.
Speaker 3: And Tim Dillon went on and like talked about this
Speaker 3: on a podcast, talked about like why he agreed to
Speaker 3: do it, and defended and it's very funny. He like
Speaker 3: brought up like slavery in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia
Speaker 3: has slaves, as a way to like to segue into
Speaker 3: a defense of why it's fine for him to do this,
Speaker 3: and this is just one of the funniest things I've
Speaker 3: ever heard.
Speaker 4: Well, they have slaves, then they kill everyone. Hey hey, hey, hey, heyy.
Speaker 7: Get over it. Get over it? So what, so what
Speaker 7: they have slaves? So what.
Speaker 4: My friend, I not a friend, somebody I don't even know.
Speaker 7: I bumped them and Tribeca and he goes, I would
Speaker 7: never do that because I don't want to interact with slaves.
Speaker 4: I'm like, well why not.
Speaker 7: They'd be deferential, right, I mean, I imagine the slaves
Speaker 7: in those countries are good at what they do.
Speaker 5: Okay, so that's that's the clip I just wanted to.
Speaker 3: One of the most Yeah, and it got him fired
Speaker 3: from the show. He's good bending them, he's big, like
Speaker 3: slavery is not so bad, and he's still got fired.
Speaker 4: That's that's like, Yeah, it's nuts.
Speaker 8: Oh my god, Like.
Speaker 4: It's really bad.
Speaker 2: To cleanse our minds of whatever that was. Here's an
Speaker 2: ad break. Okay, we're back, Robert.
Speaker 3: The degree to which everyone involved in that has just
Speaker 3: nuked whatever credibility they had is shocking. I want to
Speaker 3: read you a quote from Bill Burr in January of twenty.
Speaker 4: Ten to make me sad.
Speaker 3: This is from a set he did at the time.
Speaker 3: This him talking about Beyonce. She's out there singing about
Speaker 3: girl power, telling you to put a ring on it,
Speaker 3: all that crap.
Speaker 5: And then what she does.
Speaker 3: She takes a million bucks to go sing at some
Speaker 3: private party for Kaddafi's kid, Momar Kadaffi, you know, the
Speaker 3: guy who's been blowing stuff up and running a dictatorship forever. Like,
Speaker 3: what the hell You're gonna jet off to Saint Bart
Speaker 3: shake your ass for some terrorist dictator's family, pawking a million,
Speaker 3: and then go back to preaching about empowerment. Come on, man,
Speaker 3: that's the hypocrisy of this whole thing. These celebrities, they'll
Speaker 3: take any gig if the check's big enough. It's like, Oh,
Speaker 3: I'm all about the people, until some crazy dictator weaves
Speaker 3: a stack of cash and then it's where's my private jet?
Speaker 5: It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4: This nuts, Yes, Bill, it is. This sucks.
Speaker 2: This sucks to be a Bill Bard defender for you.
Speaker 2: I notice, truly the first, the first, the first actual
Speaker 2: stain on Bill Bear's legacy.
Speaker 4: It's a very good comedian, that's what her remarkable. Fucking
Speaker 4: stain cold comedians are evil. It's just it's that easy.
Speaker 3: He addressed, it's you know, part of it is that
Speaker 3: and if all. Unfortunately, I kind of think the response
Speaker 3: of some of the scumbags in comedy has been fair
Speaker 3: with it. Just like, man, it was too much money.
Speaker 3: It's just a shitload of money. Like I'll do fucked
Speaker 3: up shit for a crazy amount of money, and it's
Speaker 3: like that's bad, but at least you're honest. Bill's response
Speaker 3: to this was like, it was great to experience that
Speaker 3: part of the world, to be part of the first
Speaker 3: comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia. The royals loved
Speaker 3: the show. Everybody one was happy. The people that were
Speaker 3: doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I've been
Speaker 3: talking to are saying, dude, you can feel that the
Speaker 3: audience wanted it. They wanted to see real stand up comedy.
Speaker 3: It was a mind blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences
Speaker 3: I've had. I think it's going to lead to a
Speaker 3: lot of positive things now. He did talk a little
Speaker 3: bit about like the rules that they had to bye bye,
Speaker 3: and said that like when they were first handing around contracts,
Speaker 3: he pushed back and was like or people pushed back,
Speaker 3: or like comedians didn't, were like, you can't have all
Speaker 3: these restrictions, and that they whittled them down to just
Speaker 3: a couple of things, which Bill sums up as don't
Speaker 3: make fun of Royal's religion right now, as pointed out
Speaker 3: by the fact that Tim Dillon got canceled for talking
Speaker 3: positively about slavery and the Kingdom, there were more restrictions
Speaker 3: than that. I do want to read from a Hollywood
Speaker 3: Reporter article talking about like Bill's response to this, because
Speaker 3: it gets even worse than what I've read already. Bill
Speaker 3: first described going to the island country of Bahrain, which
Speaker 3: is more socially liberal than Saudi Arabia, where a customs
Speaker 3: agent immediately clocked his anxiety about doing stand up in
Speaker 3: the region and gave him grief about it. When I
Speaker 3: was landing in Bahrain, like I'm fucking nervous, right, and
Speaker 3: then the agent says, you tell jokes about the Middle East,
Speaker 3: you think you're going to come over here and get beheaded.
Speaker 3: Right After a successful show in Bahrain, Burr was at
Speaker 3: a bar where he was watching interactions among locals and decided,
Speaker 3: I'm like, they're just like us. I don't speak the language,
Speaker 3: but I get it. When he flew to Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 3: Burr's nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the
Speaker 3: amount of local Western influence. You think everyone's going to
Speaker 3: be screaming death to America and they're going to have
Speaker 3: fucking machetes and want to chop my head off, right,
Speaker 3: because this is what I've been fed about that part
Speaker 3: of the world. I thought this place was going to
Speaker 3: be really tense, and I'm thinking, like, is that a
Speaker 3: Starbucks next to a Pieza Hut, next to a Burger
Speaker 3: King next to McDonald's.
Speaker 5: They've got a fucking.
Speaker 3: Chilis And yes, man, they have stores in the Middle
Speaker 3: East you can buy and have.
Speaker 8: Restaurants that specific combination of countries like the Saudis. The
Speaker 8: reason the current government of Raid is in power is
Speaker 8: because the Saudis rolled tanks across the border to cross
Speaker 8: the uprising. There were twenty eleven like hideous.
Speaker 3: There's so much that's fucked up just being like, well
Speaker 3: to prepare for abiding by the laws of the fucking
Speaker 3: royal family.
Speaker 5: Of Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 3: I went to Bahrain like like that, They're not.
Speaker 6: The same place, no, Like, yeah, I wanted to check
Speaker 6: out some brown Muslim people. Turns out that people like
Speaker 6: that seems to be the gist of what he's saying,
Speaker 6: and they like pizza too.
Speaker 4: Fuck me.
Speaker 3: You could go to again like Iraq and perform in
Speaker 3: fucking uh. You could go to an ideal and it's nice,
Speaker 3: and it's nice, and you're not going to be performing
Speaker 3: at the behest of the fucked up government. Right, You'll
Speaker 3: just be performing in a country with the fucked up government.
Speaker 3: And there is a difference. Right, I'm not angry at
Speaker 3: the idea that some rando might like perform at a
Speaker 3: nightclub in Saudi Arabia. The problem is that you're performing
Speaker 3: at the behest of the Saudi government, at the behest
Speaker 3: of the regime.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a different thing.
Speaker 3: I do think there's an argument for like, well, people
Speaker 3: in countries with fucked up governments deserve to laugh. That
Speaker 3: doesn't mean you have to take the money from their
Speaker 3: fucked up government and say nice things about their fucked
Speaker 3: up government like Kevin Hart just did. Because Kevin Hart
Speaker 3: was also a part of this show, and he posted
Speaker 3: a video on TikTok talking about how fucking awesome Saudi
Speaker 3: Royal Turkey Al Shake is and Turkey al Shak has
Speaker 3: now been sharing that video on all of his social
Speaker 3: media accounts, Like you're holding water for people for a
Speaker 3: guy he was a wing in a torture prison named
Speaker 3: after him, that crosses a line for me. You know,
Speaker 3: when we're talking about entertainment, we're talking about being ad
Speaker 3: support all this stuff. There's compromises that everyone makes in
Speaker 3: this business. There's compromises in what company you fucking work with,
Speaker 3: right Like, if you're talking about, you know, make it
Speaker 3: a TV show for Amazon's TV division or Disney's you
Speaker 3: know fucking streaming division, right, Well, there's there's a degree
Speaker 3: of moral compromise there. And I think, depending on what
Speaker 3: you're doing and whatnot, can be justified by the fact
Speaker 3: that number one, like that's just the way television works.
Speaker 3: There's no working with anyone completely clean in a company
Speaker 3: that has the ability to fund, you know, a production
Speaker 3: like that, but taking money directly from the hands of
Speaker 3: the guy with the torture prison, I think that crosses
Speaker 3: a line. I think that crosses the line for a
Speaker 3: free speech activist. It should across the line for Pete Davidson,
Speaker 3: who's dad died at nine.
Speaker 4: To eleven, but she's apparently not. That is a wild one.
Speaker 4: That's the craziest one to.
Speaker 3: Me, that Kate Davidson went over to Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 4: Oh man, are you gonna what? It's just mom sit
Speaker 4: on the scene.
Speaker 3: Oh man, she's probably getting a lot of money if
Speaker 3: she is, So it's fine.
Speaker 4: It's fine.
Speaker 5: I don't know like how much.
Speaker 3: And it is one of those things I get the
Speaker 3: people who are like, okay, but you know, the US
Speaker 3: is fucked up to and it is. And so if
Speaker 3: somebody is getting paid directly by the Trump regime to
Speaker 3: perform at the White House, I'd say, pretty fucked up.
Speaker 3: But like that doesn't mean it's immoral to perform at
Speaker 3: like a nightclub in fucking Chicago, you know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And none of us are going to Guantanamo Bay
Speaker 6: to like entertain the fucking prison guards, right, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, hopefully none of us will be going to
Speaker 2: Guantanamo Bay for any reason. As long as we keep
Speaker 2: playing these ads, we're back.
Speaker 8: I want to talk about this from the Saudi perspective,
Speaker 8: because they have been doing really for the last half
Speaker 8: a decade a fallout pr blitz. Right, We've seen this
Speaker 8: in WWE. We've seen this with a whole bunch of
Speaker 8: professional sports stuff, like most of the esports is run
Speaker 8: out of the Sports World Cup in Saudi Arabia. Now,
Speaker 8: like the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund just helped Jared Kushner
Speaker 8: buy EA, right, just like one of the largest video
Speaker 8: game companies in the world. Right, they've been you know,
Speaker 8: they've been doing this sort of whole sportswashing strategy of
Speaker 8: using these things to sort of normalize, normalize the regime.
Speaker 8: And I think the actual genius of this, right was
Speaker 8: not that you can buy legitimacy with like sports and
Speaker 8: with comedians. The genius of it was that they were
Speaker 8: able to control the backlash because they ensured the backlash
Speaker 8: to it would be done by sports journalists and entertainment
Speaker 8: journalists who don't know anything about the Saudis and thus
Speaker 8: assumed that the Saudis were attempting to whitewash their you know,
Speaker 8: horrific domestic human rights record, and they were to some extent,
Speaker 8: But even focusing on the Saudis domestic human rights record
Speaker 8: is a victory for the Saudist because it means that
Speaker 8: nobody's talking about the stuff people were talking about last
Speaker 8: decade when they talked about the Saudis, which was things like,
Speaker 8: for example, the Sudanese child soldiers that they were deploying
Speaker 8: in their warren Yemen, and these Sudanese child soldiers were
Speaker 8: drawn from their connections bolstered by the UAE to the
Speaker 8: Sudanese Appid Support Forces, a group that is almost entirely
Speaker 8: composed of the militias who did the genocide in Darfour.
Speaker 8: So these are the ground troops that they're deploying in Yemen.
Speaker 8: Are Assudanese child soldiers drawn from the people who did
Speaker 8: the genocide in Darfour in twenty eighteen, which was not
Speaker 8: that long ago, like I remember twenty eighteen. So do
Speaker 8: you statistically if you're listening to the show, they carried
Speaker 8: out an airstrike on a school bus that killed twenty
Speaker 8: six children, right, no one is talking about the air
Speaker 8: strikes on funerals that they absolutely love to do, like,
Speaker 8: for example, there was a huge one in twenty sixteen
Speaker 8: where they killed one hundred and forty people in one
Speaker 8: air strike, after which the area was described by a
Speaker 8: rescue worker as a quote lake of blood. And this
Speaker 8: has been the really successful thing about about the Saudi
Speaker 8: specifically targeting sports and specifically targeting entertainment, is that the
Speaker 8: people covering this do not know anything about Saudi Arabia, right.
Speaker 8: And this is also partially what was going on Bill Burv,
Speaker 8: because they're just racists or their attempt could do a backlash,
Speaker 8: and they're trying to do a backlash with things like Okay,
Speaker 8: they killed a journalist, which is really bad, right, But
Speaker 8: like Jamal Kashoggi was one guy out of thousands and
Speaker 8: thousands and thousands of people that they were killing and
Speaker 8: are continuing to kill to this day in Yemen.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 8: And this is one of the reasons people have been
Speaker 8: able to get away with this, right, is that no
Speaker 8: one has been walking up to them and going what
Speaker 8: do you think about the Sudanese child soldiers? Because nobody
Speaker 8: knows about any of that. And this is one of
Speaker 8: the thing that I want to just say at the
Speaker 8: end of this, which is I know for a fact
Speaker 8: that journalists and editors listen to this show, and please,
Speaker 8: for the love of God, find someone who knows literally
Speaker 8: anything about the Saudis war. And Yemen and have them
Speaker 8: write this piece on sportswashing for you, literally anyone. This
Speaker 8: is what this is what makes me insane about all
Speaker 8: this coverage is that like, if you even a little
Speaker 8: bit paid attention to what they were doing in the
Speaker 8: twenty tens and what they're continuing to do now in Yemen,
Speaker 8: you know about so many even I'm not even I'm
Speaker 8: not even talking about the starvation genocide here. There are
Speaker 8: so many things that they did, you know, And like
Speaker 8: one of the common defenses is like, oh, like you know,
Speaker 8: like we live in the US as a fucked up country, right,
Speaker 8: Like who cares about authoritarianism? Just like I don't know,
Speaker 8: it's hard to make that argument when it's about Sudanese
Speaker 8: child soldiers.
Speaker 3: Well, and it's just again, we're not pissed because some
Speaker 3: guy performed at a nightclub in Riyad. It's it's that
Speaker 3: you're taking money from the government to whitewash the government.
Speaker 8: No, it's because they took money for the governments. All
Speaker 8: of these, all of these things, all of these all
Speaker 8: of like wwe like all of these sports events, these
Speaker 8: are funded directly by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which
Speaker 8: is the Wealth Fund of the Saudi government, the people
Speaker 8: who were dropping bombs on school buses and sending child
Speaker 8: soldiers to fight their warren gemmen.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there has been some good reporting on sportswashing. I
Speaker 6: would say, like Ian Trello's done some excellent stuff.
Speaker 3: The Guardian has a good article on this where they
Speaker 3: really coalate some of like the very worst responses, written
Speaker 3: by Seth Simon. So I liked that this does seem
Speaker 3: to be blowing up. Hollywood Reporter's piece was pretty good too.
Speaker 6: Hollywood Report to my friend with the editor of that
Speaker 6: publication for years may have consistently done some stuff that
Speaker 6: you wouldn't expect looking at the title of publication.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not going to be silly enough to be like,
Speaker 3: I think this is going to cost any of these
Speaker 3: people their career because it's I don't think it is.
Speaker 3: But it does seem to be causing them some embarrassment,
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean they get called out on it, shamed
Speaker 6: like it's yeah, it's a pretty shameful thing to do.
Speaker 5: It's a shameful thing to do. It's a bummer.
Speaker 3: I wish people had not made these choices because man,
Speaker 3: it's depressing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, luckily I have some news to lift our
Speaker 2: moods after this depressing episode. I am pleased to report
Speaker 2: that cool Zone Media will be headlining at Victor Orbon's
Speaker 2: new comedy festival Hungry four Laughs. Yep, next year twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six. Market in your calendar, cool Zone Media presents
Speaker 2: with Victor Orbon Hungary for laughs. That's all for us
Speaker 2: today at it Could Happen Here, See you next year
Speaker 2: in Hungary.
Speaker 4: The vibe.
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