Bill Burr Defends Performing at Controversial Riyadh Comedy Festival: “They’re Just Like Us”
Bill Burr Defends Performing at Controversial Riyadh Comedy Festival: “They’re Just Like Us”
"The royals loved the show"
"And they just negotiated it all the way down to just a couple things, which were, basically: Don’t make fun of royals [and] religion.”
Bill Burr everybody!... What a tremendous disappointment.
He's trying very hard to frame this as a US versus Saudi Arabia cultural kind of thing. He's trying to pretend the problem people have with him performing there is that they don't like the audience. The regular people of Saudi Arabia. He's lying. He knows good and well the problem is with the people paying for it. The problem is the people putting it on as a propaganda display. It's a sad fucking thing for Bill Burr to do.
Honestly if he had just come out and said "They paid me an ungodly amount of money for this gig, I had to take it." I can understand that justification. Don't sit here and pee in my face and tell me it's raining.
I still wouldn't get it. He has a regular high income, great wife and family - and an estimated net wealth of $30mil.
Couldn't justify this gig unless it was literally billions that he immediately donated to worthy causes.
That's what I don't understand about people like this.
Why go through all this effort, all the stress, hearing everything people say about you being a sellout rat, for what? Is he sitting there going "I can afford a $300,000 car, but if I'm not able to get a $1 million dollar supercar I just don't know how I'm going to cope".
I swear it's a mental illness, like gambling addiction. Just an obsession with wanting a number to go up more and more.
very disappointed. greedy fuck. David Cross wrote an open letter about this and he is spot on. got no respect left for Burr after this. not surprised the rest of them took the money but I thought Burr was above that shit. guess not.
Ah! Yah can't do comedy for journalist-murdering, slave-owning Royal regimes anymarh!
Shame.
Ol billy red face.
Patrice was too genuine for the world.
Fucking sellout.
I usually like this dude, but he's a bitch on this one.
I belive him if he donates all the earnings to antifascist organisations.
This sounds like something for the comedians to work out among each other in the clubs. I'm curious to see what conclusions they reach.
Honestly, I 100% agree with Bill Burr and Sting.
Cultural exchange, especially comedy, is always destructive to authoritarian structures. It's like water leaking into a building. This isn't shipping them a bunch of weapons, or building a World Cup stadium there, or whatever the fuck. This is smuggling in an influence that will over time start to eat away at their power. It's the same reason I don't block lemmy.ml, it's the same reason Trump is going after comedians so hard now. Having people talking to each other and see new perspectives (both the Western comedians like Bill is talking about here and the people watching the shows), even in a restricted format at first, is a good thing.
When he flew into Saudi Arabia, Burr’s nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the amount of local Western influence. “You think everybody’s going to be screaming ‘death to America’ and they’re going to have like fucking machetes and want to like chop my head off, right?” Burr said. “Because this is what I’ve been fed about that part of the world. I thought this place was going to be really tense. And I’m thinking like: ‘Is that a Starbucks next to a Pizza Hut next to a Burger King next to McDonald’s …? They got a fucking Chili’s over here!”
Saudis already consume American comedy without the endorsement of the government, and that is subversive. Traveling to the middle east to learn that they also have American fast food chains is not 'cultural exchange.' Culture is only flowing in one direction. Bill Burr demonstrates that for some people the values that make good comedy possible have a price tag, and that is the opposite of subversive. Cultural flow does not require American comedians to collaborate with tyrants in an Entartete Kunst of comedy.
Traveling to the middle east to learn that they also have American fast food chains is not ‘cultural exchange.'
What?
What else would it be? What would cultural exchange look like then?
David Cross has a not particularly surprising but still damning take here:
https://officialdavidcross.com/blogs/press/my-thoughts-on-the-riyadh-comedy-festival
He nailed it. I can't take any of the celebrities appearing in this seriously again, and won't be watching them. It's tainted my enjoyment of anything they've done, and will do the same for future work.