October 7, 2025 • 20 mins
Robert, James, Mia, and Gare talk about the comedians who sold their soul to perform stand up for the royal family in Saudi Arabia.
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37598413
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/09/02/yemen-coalition-bus-bombing-apparent-war-crime
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37598413
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome to a very special episode of It Could Happen Here,
reporting live from the sunny beaches of Riad. I'm Garrison
Davis this episode joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and
presenting our special report, Robert Evans.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I am so happy to talk about our favorite time
of the year, which is of course the Riod Comedy Festival,
which occurs from September twenty sixth to October ninth.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
It's the highlight of my year each year.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Ye happy to say all of Cool Zone will be
there performing in Riod, immediately getting arrested. It's gonna be
really good, very much excited, like all of your comedy favorites.
Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, asas End. Sorry, we will be
getting paid hundreds of thousands or over a million dollars
(00:57):
to pretend that the Saudi regime does not execute dissidence reporters,
civil rights activists, whoever, and doesn't run a torture prison.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
So that that's what's happening this week. There's been a
big backlash against a bunch of very prominent comedians.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Louis c k. It looks like a mix of.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Guy Okay, not surprised David Chappelle. I'm surprised that old
David Chappelle would do this, but I'm not surprised that
current David Chappelle would do this.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Bilbert is disappointing. Bilbert is disappointing that one hurts.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Moe Amer, who is a Palestinian American comedian who lives
in Houston, has also agreed to go to Riad and
form not great.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Comrade Shane Gillis declined the offer.
Speaker 5 (01:45):
Yeah shee.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Gillis said yes and then said no. Let's be real
fucking clear on what Shane Gillis did. Okay, I believe
he's the one that said yes and then said no.
You get you get a variety of responses from people
who were invited to this fucking thing. And I'll make
it clear kind of where my moral line stands. I
don't actually believe it's inherently wrong to perform inside the
(02:07):
bounds of any country. It kind of depends on what
you're doing and how you do it, and this is
the wrong way to do it, because these are not
just people. If someone had just shown up at a
nightclub in Saudi Arabia to do a stand up set,
I don't particularly care about that, even though there are
lesma jest laws, Like I wouldn't care if someone did
a stand up comedy set that couldn't make fun of
the King of Thailand, right, which is a crime in Thailand.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
You know, people perform in parts of the world that
have different or bad laws. The US has bad laws.
We do bad things. I don't think it's inherently evil
to just perform at a random club there, which is
not what the people who are performing at the Odd
Comedy Festival are doing. This whole convention is being put
on by a guy named Turkey, I'll shake. Turkey is
the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority, which is a
(02:52):
Saudi government department. He grew up with Mohammad Ben Salmon
playing League of Legends, and it's kind of like key
to Ben Salmon's planned makes Saudi Arabia cool to like
bring it into the global entertainment and like social network
without modernizing its laws or allowing people to, you know,
make fun of Mohammed Ben Salmon or his friends. For
(03:12):
an idea of the kind of dude who hired Bill
Burr and all of these other guys and paid them
so much money. There is an entire wing of the
all Higher prison called the Tutu Wing, which references all
Shake's nickname Tutu, where prisoners that he specifically pointed out,
often people who made fun of him or made jokes
that he did not appreciate, are put in tortured. This
(03:33):
guy has an entire torture prison named after him. That
is who's writing checks to fucking Pete Davidson, whose dad
died in Night eleven. Ah fuck, it's fucking shocking the
fact that Pete Davidson is at this thing, and he
has been He's been like questioned about it, and his answer, basically,
I'll say this for Pete, was basically like, yeah, but
there's a lot of money, right. And I'm separating in
(03:56):
my head to a degree. I think it's bad to
take money from the Saudi government to do something like
this that is being used to like whitewash their human
rights record to make them look like a cool part
of global society, even as they this week executed another journalist.
I think that's bad. I think it's worse if you're
someone who stood for something. This doesn't change my opinion
(04:18):
about THEO Vaughn, who sucks and it's like, yeah, he'll
take money from Saudi Arabia. He's a huge asshole. I'm
not surprised, right, And there's some other guys in this
that I'm not necessarily like shocked about.
Speaker 6 (04:32):
Did you see Theovon's beef with Ice this week?
Speaker 5 (04:34):
Oh? Does theovon have beef with Ice this week?
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (04:37):
They use video of him without his consent in one
of their marketing videos.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah. Great so.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Jim Jeffries on August one on Theovon's podcast to talk
about agreeing to do this show, and he said one
reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a
fucking hill that I'm gonna die on, and argued that
freedom of speech machines like himself would do good by, like,
you know, making jokes in Saudi Arabia and key in
(05:04):
the men on the freedom of speech thing. Basically, it'll
be a net positive for freedom if I go speak
at this thing. And then the funniest possible follow up,
he was removed from the festival lineup because he acknowledged
that they killed a reporter and you can't even do
that on your own fucking podcast or fucking theo vod's
goddamn podcast. I want to play a video clip of
(05:27):
Tim Dillon, because Tim Dillon is another guy who agreed
to show up and perform at this this fucking nightmare event.
And Dylan is why we know kind of how much
money is on the table at this thing, because he
has said that he was paid three hundred and seventy
five thousand. He was offered three hundred and seventy five
thousand for one performance to be there. He said that
kind of the lowest number people were being offered was
(05:49):
about one hundred and fifty thousand, and the most like
highly paid people were being offered up to one point
six million dollars. So I mean it's possible see people
were geting more than that, but I'm guessing that's closer
to like where the Bill Burr's than the Dave Chappelle's
you are getting right like in the one point six million.
(06:11):
So these guys were offered an insane amount of money.
And Tim Dillon went on and like talked about this
on a podcast, talked about like why he agreed to
do it, and defended and it's very funny. He like
brought up like slavery in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia
has slaves, as a way to like to segue into
(06:31):
a defense of why it's fine for him to do this,
and this is just one of the funniest things I've
ever heard.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Well, they have slaves, then they kill everyone. Hey hey, hey, hey, heyy.
Speaker 7 (06:43):
Get over it. Get over it? So what, so what
they have slaves? So what.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
My friend, I not a friend, somebody I don't even know.
Speaker 7 (06:59):
I bumped them and Tribeca and he goes, I would
never do that because I don't want to interact with slaves.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
I'm like, well why not.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
They'd be deferential, right, I mean, I imagine the slaves
in those countries are good at what they do.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
Okay, so that's that's the clip I just wanted to.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
One of the most Yeah, and it got him fired
from the show. He's good bending them, he's big, like
slavery is not so bad, and he's still got fired.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
That's that's like, Yeah, it's nuts.
Speaker 8 (07:38):
Oh my god, Like.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
It's really bad.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
To cleanse our minds of whatever that was. Here's an
ad break. Okay, we're back, Robert.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
The degree to which everyone involved in that has just
nuked whatever credibility they had is shocking. I want to
read you a quote from Bill Burr in January of twenty.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Ten to make me sad.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
This is from a set he did at the time.
This him talking about Beyonce. She's out there singing about
girl power, telling you to put a ring on it,
all that crap.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
And then what she does.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
She takes a million bucks to go sing at some
private party for Kaddafi's kid, Momar Kadaffi, you know, the
guy who's been blowing stuff up and running a dictatorship forever. Like,
what the hell You're gonna jet off to Saint Bart
shake your ass for some terrorist dictator's family, pawking a million,
and then go back to preaching about empowerment. Come on, man,
that's the hypocrisy of this whole thing. These celebrities, they'll
take any gig if the check's big enough. It's like, Oh,
I'm all about the people, until some crazy dictator weaves
(08:39):
a stack of cash and then it's where's my private jet?
Speaker 5 (08:42):
It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
This nuts, Yes, Bill, it is. This sucks.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
This sucks to be a Bill Bard defender for you.
I notice, truly the first, the first, the first actual
stain on Bill Bear's legacy.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
It's a very good comedian, that's what her remarkable. Fucking
stain cold comedians are evil. It's just it's that easy.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
He addressed, it's you know, part of it is that
and if all. Unfortunately, I kind of think the response
of some of the scumbags in comedy has been fair
with it. Just like, man, it was too much money.
It's just a shitload of money. Like I'll do fucked
up shit for a crazy amount of money, and it's
like that's bad, but at least you're honest. Bill's response
to this was like, it was great to experience that
(09:20):
part of the world, to be part of the first
comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia. The royals loved
the show. Everybody one was happy. The people that were
doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I've been
talking to are saying, dude, you can feel that the
audience wanted it. They wanted to see real stand up comedy.
It was a mind blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences
I've had. I think it's going to lead to a
lot of positive things now. He did talk a little
(09:41):
bit about like the rules that they had to bye bye,
and said that like when they were first handing around contracts,
he pushed back and was like or people pushed back,
or like comedians didn't, were like, you can't have all
these restrictions, and that they whittled them down to just
a couple of things, which Bill sums up as don't
make fun of Royal's religion right now, as pointed out
(10:02):
by the fact that Tim Dillon got canceled for talking
positively about slavery and the Kingdom, there were more restrictions
than that. I do want to read from a Hollywood
Reporter article talking about like Bill's response to this, because
it gets even worse than what I've read already. Bill
first described going to the island country of Bahrain, which
is more socially liberal than Saudi Arabia, where a customs
agent immediately clocked his anxiety about doing stand up in
(10:23):
the region and gave him grief about it. When I
was landing in Bahrain, like I'm fucking nervous, right, and
then the agent says, you tell jokes about the Middle East,
you think you're going to come over here and get beheaded.
Right After a successful show in Bahrain, Burr was at
a bar where he was watching interactions among locals and decided,
I'm like, they're just like us. I don't speak the language,
but I get it. When he flew to Saudi Arabia,
Burr's nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the
(10:44):
amount of local Western influence. You think everyone's going to
be screaming death to America and they're going to have
fucking machetes and want to chop my head off, right,
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 Pieza Hut, next to a Burger
King next to McDonald's.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
They've got a fucking.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Chilis And yes, man, they have stores in the Middle
East you can buy and have.
Speaker 8 (11:04):
Restaurants that specific combination of countries like the Saudis. The
reason the current government of Raid is in power is
because the Saudis rolled tanks across the border to cross
the uprising. There were twenty eleven like hideous.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
There's so much that's fucked up just being like, well
to prepare for abiding by the laws of the fucking
royal family.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
Of Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I went to Bahrain like like that, They're not.
Speaker 6 (11:29):
The same place, no, Like, yeah, I wanted to check
out some brown Muslim people. Turns out that people like
that seems to be the gist of what he's saying,
and they like pizza too.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Fuck me.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
You could go to again like Iraq and perform in
fucking uh. You could go to an ideal and it's nice,
and it's nice, and you're not going to be performing
at the behest of the fucked up government. Right, You'll
just be performing in a country with the fucked up government.
And there is a difference. Right, I'm not angry at
the idea that some rando might like perform at a
nightclub in Saudi Arabia. The problem is that you're performing
(12:02):
at the behest of the Saudi government, at the behest
of the regime.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
Yeah, that's a different thing.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
I do think there's an argument for like, well, people
in countries with fucked up governments deserve to laugh. That
doesn't mean you have to take the money from their
fucked up government and say nice things about their fucked
up government like Kevin Hart just did. Because Kevin Hart
was also a part of this show, and he posted
a video on TikTok talking about how fucking awesome Saudi
Royal Turkey Al Shake is and Turkey al Shak has
(12:30):
now been sharing that video on all of his social
media accounts, Like you're holding water for people for a
guy he was a wing in a torture prison named
after him, that crosses a line for me. You know,
when we're talking about entertainment, we're talking about being ad
support all this stuff. There's compromises that everyone makes in
this business. There's compromises in what company you fucking work with,
(12:53):
right Like, if you're talking about, you know, make it
a TV show for Amazon's TV division or Disney's you
know fucking streaming division, right, Well, there's there's a degree
of moral compromise there. And I think, depending on what
you're doing and whatnot, can be justified by the fact
that number one, like that's just the way television works.
There's no working with anyone completely clean in a company
(13:15):
that has the ability to fund, you know, a production
like that, but taking money directly from the hands of
the guy with the torture prison, I think that crosses
a line. I think that crosses the line for a
free speech activist. It should across the line for Pete Davidson,
who's dad died at nine.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
To eleven, but she's apparently not. That is a wild one.
That's the craziest one to.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Me, that Kate Davidson went over to Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
Oh man, are you gonna what? It's just mom sit
on the scene.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Oh man, she's probably getting a lot of money if
she is, So it's fine.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
It's fine.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
I don't know like how much.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
And it is one of those things I get the
people who are like, okay, but you know, the US
is fucked up to and it is. And so if
somebody is getting paid directly by the Trump regime to
perform at the White House, I'd say, pretty fucked up.
But like that doesn't mean it's immoral to perform at
like a nightclub in fucking Chicago, you know.
Speaker 6 (14:11):
Yeah, And none of us are going to Guantanamo Bay
to like entertain the fucking prison guards, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, well, hopefully none of us will be going to
Guantanamo Bay for any reason. As long as we keep
playing these ads, we're back.
Speaker 8 (14:39):
I want to talk about this from the Saudi perspective,
because they have been doing really for the last half
a decade a fallout pr blitz. Right, We've seen this
in WWE. We've seen this with a whole bunch of
professional sports stuff, like most of the esports is run
out of the Sports World Cup in Saudi Arabia. Now,
like the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund just helped Jared Kushner
buy EA, right, just like one of the largest video
(15:02):
game companies in the world. Right, they've been you know,
they've been doing this sort of whole sportswashing strategy of
using these things to sort of normalize, normalize the regime.
And I think the actual genius of this, right was
not that you can buy legitimacy with like sports and
with comedians. The genius of it was that they were
(15:22):
able to control the backlash because they ensured the backlash
to it would be done by sports journalists and entertainment
journalists who don't know anything about the Saudis and thus
assumed that the Saudis were attempting to whitewash their you know,
horrific domestic human rights record, and they were to some extent,
But even focusing on the Saudis domestic human rights record
(15:42):
is a victory for the Saudist because it means that
nobody's talking about the stuff people were talking about last
decade when they talked about the Saudis, which was things like,
for example, the Sudanese child soldiers that they were deploying
in their warren Yemen, and these Sudanese child soldiers were
drawn from their connections bolstered by the UAE to the
Sudanese Appid Support Forces, a group that is almost entirely
composed of the militias who did the genocide in Darfour.
(16:06):
So these are the ground troops that they're deploying in Yemen.
Are Assudanese child soldiers drawn from the people who did
the genocide in Darfour in twenty eighteen, which was not
that long ago, like I remember twenty eighteen. So do
you statistically if you're listening to the show, they carried
out an airstrike on a school bus that killed twenty
six children, right, no one is talking about the air
(16:27):
strikes on funerals that they absolutely love to do, like,
for example, there was a huge one in twenty sixteen
where they killed one hundred and forty people in one
air strike, after which the area was described by a
rescue worker as a quote lake of blood. And this
has been the really successful thing about about the Saudi
specifically targeting sports and specifically targeting entertainment, is that the
people covering this do not know anything about Saudi Arabia, right.
(16:51):
And this is also partially what was going on Bill Burv,
because they're just racists or their attempt could do a backlash,
and they're trying to do a backlash with things like Okay,
they killed a journalist, which is really bad, right, But
like Jamal Kashoggi was one guy out of thousands and
thousands and thousands of people that they were killing and
are continuing to kill to this day in Yemen.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Right.
Speaker 8 (17:12):
And this is one of the reasons people have been
able to get away with this, right, is that no
one has been walking up to them and going what
do you think about the Sudanese child soldiers? Because nobody
knows about any of that. And this is one of
the thing that I want to just say at the
end of this, which is I know for a fact
that journalists and editors listen to this show, and please,
for the love of God, find someone who knows literally
(17:33):
anything about the Saudis war. And Yemen and have them
write this piece on sportswashing for you, literally anyone. This
is what this is what makes me insane about all
this coverage is that like, if you even a little
bit paid attention to what they were doing in the
twenty tens and what they're continuing to do now in Yemen,
you know about so many even I'm not even I'm
not even talking about the starvation genocide here. There are
(17:55):
so many things that they did, you know, And like
one of the common defenses is like, oh, like you know,
like we live in the US as a fucked up country, right,
Like who cares about authoritarianism? Just like I don't know,
it's hard to make that argument when it's about Sudanese
child soldiers.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Well, and it's just again, we're not pissed because some
guy performed at a nightclub in Riyad. It's it's that
you're taking money from the government to whitewash the government.
Speaker 8 (18:21):
No, it's because they took money for the governments. All
of these, all of these things, all of these all
of like wwe like all of these sports events, these
are funded directly by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which
is the Wealth Fund of the Saudi government, the people
who were dropping bombs on school buses and sending child
soldiers to fight their warren gemmen.
Speaker 6 (18:39):
Yeah, there has been some good reporting on sportswashing. I
would say, like Ian Trello's done some excellent stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
The Guardian has a good article on this where they
really coalate some of like the very worst responses, written
by Seth Simon. So I liked that this does seem
to be blowing up. Hollywood Reporter's piece was pretty good too.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
Hollywood Report to my friend with the editor of that
publication for years may have consistently done some stuff that
you wouldn't expect looking at the title of publication.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, I'm not going to be silly enough to be like,
I think this is going to cost any of these
people their career because it's I don't think it is.
But it does seem to be causing them some embarrassment,
So I don't know.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Yeah, I mean they get called out on it, shamed
like it's yeah, it's a pretty shameful thing to do.
Speaker 5 (19:21):
It's a shameful thing to do. It's a bummer.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
I wish people had not made these choices because man,
it's depressing.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah, Well, luckily I have some news to lift our
moods after this depressing episode. I am pleased to report
that cool Zone Media will be headlining at Victor Orbon's
new comedy festival Hungry four Laughs. Yep, next year twenty
twenty six. Market in your calendar, cool Zone Media presents
(19:50):
with Victor Orbon Hungary for laughs. That's all for us
today at it Could Happen Here, See you next year
in Hungary.
Speaker 4 (19:59):
The vibe.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it could Happen Here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome to a very special episode of It Could Happen Here,
reporting live from the sunny beaches of Riad. I'm Garrison
Davis this episode joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and
presenting our special report, Robert Evans.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I am so happy to talk about our favorite time
of the year, which is of course the Riod Comedy Festival,
which occurs from September twenty sixth to October ninth.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
It's the highlight of my year each year.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Ye happy to say all of Cool Zone will be
there performing in Riod, immediately getting arrested. It's gonna be
really good, very much excited, like all of your comedy favorites.
Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, asas End. Sorry, we will be
getting paid hundreds of thousands or over a million dollars
(00:57):
to pretend that the Saudi regime does not execute dissidence reporters,
civil rights activists, whoever, and doesn't run a torture prison.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
So that that's what's happening this week. There's been a
big backlash against a bunch of very prominent comedians.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Louis c k. It looks like a mix of.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Guy Okay, not surprised David Chappelle. I'm surprised that old
David Chappelle would do this, but I'm not surprised that
current David Chappelle would do this.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Bilbert is disappointing. Bilbert is disappointing that one hurts.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Moe Amer, who is a Palestinian American comedian who lives
in Houston, has also agreed to go to Riad and
form not great.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Comrade Shane Gillis declined the offer.
Speaker 5 (01:45):
Yeah shee.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Gillis said yes and then said no. Let's be real
fucking clear on what Shane Gillis did. Okay, I believe
he's the one that said yes and then said no.
You get you get a variety of responses from people
who were invited to this fucking thing. And I'll make
it clear kind of where my moral line stands. I
don't actually believe it's inherently wrong to perform inside the
(02:07):
bounds of any country. It kind of depends on what
you're doing and how you do it, and this is
the wrong way to do it, because these are not
just people. If someone had just shown up at a
nightclub in Saudi Arabia to do a stand up set,
I don't particularly care about that, even though there are
lesma jest laws, Like I wouldn't care if someone did
a stand up comedy set that couldn't make fun of
the King of Thailand, right, which is a crime in Thailand.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
You know, people perform in parts of the world that
have different or bad laws. The US has bad laws.
We do bad things. I don't think it's inherently evil
to just perform at a random club there, which is
not what the people who are performing at the Odd
Comedy Festival are doing. This whole convention is being put
on by a guy named Turkey, I'll shake. Turkey is
the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority, which is a
(02:52):
Saudi government department. He grew up with Mohammad Ben Salmon
playing League of Legends, and it's kind of like key
to Ben Salmon's planned makes Saudi Arabia cool to like
bring it into the global entertainment and like social network
without modernizing its laws or allowing people to, you know,
make fun of Mohammed Ben Salmon or his friends. For
(03:12):
an idea of the kind of dude who hired Bill
Burr and all of these other guys and paid them
so much money. There is an entire wing of the
all Higher prison called the Tutu Wing, which references all
Shake's nickname Tutu, where prisoners that he specifically pointed out,
often people who made fun of him or made jokes
that he did not appreciate, are put in tortured. This
(03:33):
guy has an entire torture prison named after him. That
is who's writing checks to fucking Pete Davidson, whose dad
died in Night eleven. Ah fuck, it's fucking shocking the
fact that Pete Davidson is at this thing, and he
has been He's been like questioned about it, and his answer, basically,
I'll say this for Pete, was basically like, yeah, but
there's a lot of money, right. And I'm separating in
(03:56):
my head to a degree. I think it's bad to
take money from the Saudi government to do something like
this that is being used to like whitewash their human
rights record to make them look like a cool part
of global society, even as they this week executed another journalist.
I think that's bad. I think it's worse if you're
someone who stood for something. This doesn't change my opinion
(04:18):
about THEO Vaughn, who sucks and it's like, yeah, he'll
take money from Saudi Arabia. He's a huge asshole. I'm
not surprised, right, And there's some other guys in this
that I'm not necessarily like shocked about.
Speaker 6 (04:32):
Did you see Theovon's beef with Ice this week?
Speaker 5 (04:34):
Oh? Does theovon have beef with Ice this week?
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (04:37):
They use video of him without his consent in one
of their marketing videos.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah. Great so.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Jim Jeffries on August one on Theovon's podcast to talk
about agreeing to do this show, and he said one
reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a
fucking hill that I'm gonna die on, and argued that
freedom of speech machines like himself would do good by, like,
you know, making jokes in Saudi Arabia and key in
(05:04):
the men on the freedom of speech thing. Basically, it'll
be a net positive for freedom if I go speak
at this thing. And then the funniest possible follow up,
he was removed from the festival lineup because he acknowledged
that they killed a reporter and you can't even do
that on your own fucking podcast or fucking theo vod's
goddamn podcast. I want to play a video clip of
(05:27):
Tim Dillon, because Tim Dillon is another guy who agreed
to show up and perform at this this fucking nightmare event.
And Dylan is why we know kind of how much
money is on the table at this thing, because he
has said that he was paid three hundred and seventy
five thousand. He was offered three hundred and seventy five
thousand for one performance to be there. He said that
kind of the lowest number people were being offered was
(05:49):
about one hundred and fifty thousand, and the most like
highly paid people were being offered up to one point
six million dollars. So I mean it's possible see people
were geting more than that, but I'm guessing that's closer
to like where the Bill Burr's than the Dave Chappelle's
you are getting right like in the one point six million.
(06:11):
So these guys were offered an insane amount of money.
And Tim Dillon went on and like talked about this
on a podcast, talked about like why he agreed to
do it, and defended and it's very funny. He like
brought up like slavery in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia
has slaves, as a way to like to segue into
(06:31):
a defense of why it's fine for him to do this,
and this is just one of the funniest things I've
ever heard.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Well, they have slaves, then they kill everyone. Hey hey, hey, hey, heyy.
Speaker 7 (06:43):
Get over it. Get over it? So what, so what
they have slaves? So what.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
My friend, I not a friend, somebody I don't even know.
Speaker 7 (06:59):
I bumped them and Tribeca and he goes, I would
never do that because I don't want to interact with slaves.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
I'm like, well why not.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
They'd be deferential, right, I mean, I imagine the slaves
in those countries are good at what they do.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
Okay, so that's that's the clip I just wanted to.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
One of the most Yeah, and it got him fired
from the show. He's good bending them, he's big, like
slavery is not so bad, and he's still got fired.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
That's that's like, Yeah, it's nuts.
Speaker 8 (07:38):
Oh my god, Like.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
It's really bad.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
To cleanse our minds of whatever that was. Here's an
ad break. Okay, we're back, Robert.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
The degree to which everyone involved in that has just
nuked whatever credibility they had is shocking. I want to
read you a quote from Bill Burr in January of twenty.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Ten to make me sad.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
This is from a set he did at the time.
This him talking about Beyonce. She's out there singing about
girl power, telling you to put a ring on it,
all that crap.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
And then what she does.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
She takes a million bucks to go sing at some
private party for Kaddafi's kid, Momar Kadaffi, you know, the
guy who's been blowing stuff up and running a dictatorship forever. Like,
what the hell You're gonna jet off to Saint Bart
shake your ass for some terrorist dictator's family, pawking a million,
and then go back to preaching about empowerment. Come on, man,
that's the hypocrisy of this whole thing. These celebrities, they'll
take any gig if the check's big enough. It's like, Oh,
I'm all about the people, until some crazy dictator weaves
(08:39):
a stack of cash and then it's where's my private jet?
Speaker 5 (08:42):
It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
This nuts, Yes, Bill, it is. This sucks.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
This sucks to be a Bill Bard defender for you.
I notice, truly the first, the first, the first actual
stain on Bill Bear's legacy.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
It's a very good comedian, that's what her remarkable. Fucking
stain cold comedians are evil. It's just it's that easy.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
He addressed, it's you know, part of it is that
and if all. Unfortunately, I kind of think the response
of some of the scumbags in comedy has been fair
with it. Just like, man, it was too much money.
It's just a shitload of money. Like I'll do fucked
up shit for a crazy amount of money, and it's
like that's bad, but at least you're honest. Bill's response
to this was like, it was great to experience that
(09:20):
part of the world, to be part of the first
comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia. The royals loved
the show. Everybody one was happy. The people that were
doing the festival were thrilled. The comedians that I've been
talking to are saying, dude, you can feel that the
audience wanted it. They wanted to see real stand up comedy.
It was a mind blowing experience. Definitely top three experiences
I've had. I think it's going to lead to a
lot of positive things now. He did talk a little
(09:41):
bit about like the rules that they had to bye bye,
and said that like when they were first handing around contracts,
he pushed back and was like or people pushed back,
or like comedians didn't, were like, you can't have all
these restrictions, and that they whittled them down to just
a couple of things, which Bill sums up as don't
make fun of Royal's religion right now, as pointed out
(10:02):
by the fact that Tim Dillon got canceled for talking
positively about slavery and the Kingdom, there were more restrictions
than that. I do want to read from a Hollywood
Reporter article talking about like Bill's response to this, because
it gets even worse than what I've read already. Bill
first described going to the island country of Bahrain, which
is more socially liberal than Saudi Arabia, where a customs
agent immediately clocked his anxiety about doing stand up in
(10:23):
the region and gave him grief about it. When I
was landing in Bahrain, like I'm fucking nervous, right, and
then the agent says, you tell jokes about the Middle East,
you think you're going to come over here and get beheaded.
Right After a successful show in Bahrain, Burr was at
a bar where he was watching interactions among locals and decided,
I'm like, they're just like us. I don't speak the language,
but I get it. When he flew to Saudi Arabia,
Burr's nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the
(10:44):
amount of local Western influence. You think everyone's going to
be screaming death to America and they're going to have
fucking machetes and want to chop my head off, right,
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 Pieza Hut, next to a Burger
King next to McDonald's.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
They've got a fucking.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Chilis And yes, man, they have stores in the Middle
East you can buy and have.
Speaker 8 (11:04):
Restaurants that specific combination of countries like the Saudis. The
reason the current government of Raid is in power is
because the Saudis rolled tanks across the border to cross
the uprising. There were twenty eleven like hideous.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
There's so much that's fucked up just being like, well
to prepare for abiding by the laws of the fucking
royal family.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
Of Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I went to Bahrain like like that, They're not.
Speaker 6 (11:29):
The same place, no, Like, yeah, I wanted to check
out some brown Muslim people. Turns out that people like
that seems to be the gist of what he's saying,
and they like pizza too.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Fuck me.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
You could go to again like Iraq and perform in
fucking uh. You could go to an ideal and it's nice,
and it's nice, and you're not going to be performing
at the behest of the fucked up government. Right, You'll
just be performing in a country with the fucked up government.
And there is a difference. Right, I'm not angry at
the idea that some rando might like perform at a
nightclub in Saudi Arabia. The problem is that you're performing
(12:02):
at the behest of the Saudi government, at the behest
of the regime.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
Yeah, that's a different thing.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
I do think there's an argument for like, well, people
in countries with fucked up governments deserve to laugh. That
doesn't mean you have to take the money from their
fucked up government and say nice things about their fucked
up government like Kevin Hart just did. Because Kevin Hart
was also a part of this show, and he posted
a video on TikTok talking about how fucking awesome Saudi
Royal Turkey Al Shake is and Turkey al Shak has
(12:30):
now been sharing that video on all of his social
media accounts, Like you're holding water for people for a
guy he was a wing in a torture prison named
after him, that crosses a line for me. You know,
when we're talking about entertainment, we're talking about being ad
support all this stuff. There's compromises that everyone makes in
this business. There's compromises in what company you fucking work with,
(12:53):
right Like, if you're talking about, you know, make it
a TV show for Amazon's TV division or Disney's you
know fucking streaming division, right, Well, there's there's a degree
of moral compromise there. And I think, depending on what
you're doing and whatnot, can be justified by the fact
that number one, like that's just the way television works.
There's no working with anyone completely clean in a company
(13:15):
that has the ability to fund, you know, a production
like that, but taking money directly from the hands of
the guy with the torture prison, I think that crosses
a line. I think that crosses the line for a
free speech activist. It should across the line for Pete Davidson,
who's dad died at nine.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
To eleven, but she's apparently not. That is a wild one.
That's the craziest one to.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Me, that Kate Davidson went over to Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
Oh man, are you gonna what? It's just mom sit
on the scene.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Oh man, she's probably getting a lot of money if
she is, So it's fine.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
It's fine.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
I don't know like how much.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
And it is one of those things I get the
people who are like, okay, but you know, the US
is fucked up to and it is. And so if
somebody is getting paid directly by the Trump regime to
perform at the White House, I'd say, pretty fucked up.
But like that doesn't mean it's immoral to perform at
like a nightclub in fucking Chicago, you know.
Speaker 6 (14:11):
Yeah, And none of us are going to Guantanamo Bay
to like entertain the fucking prison guards, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, well, hopefully none of us will be going to
Guantanamo Bay for any reason. As long as we keep
playing these ads, we're back.
Speaker 8 (14:39):
I want to talk about this from the Saudi perspective,
because they have been doing really for the last half
a decade a fallout pr blitz. Right, We've seen this
in WWE. We've seen this with a whole bunch of
professional sports stuff, like most of the esports is run
out of the Sports World Cup in Saudi Arabia. Now,
like the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund just helped Jared Kushner
buy EA, right, just like one of the largest video
(15:02):
game companies in the world. Right, they've been you know,
they've been doing this sort of whole sportswashing strategy of
using these things to sort of normalize, normalize the regime.
And I think the actual genius of this, right was
not that you can buy legitimacy with like sports and
with comedians. The genius of it was that they were
(15:22):
able to control the backlash because they ensured the backlash
to it would be done by sports journalists and entertainment
journalists who don't know anything about the Saudis and thus
assumed that the Saudis were attempting to whitewash their you know,
horrific domestic human rights record, and they were to some extent,
But even focusing on the Saudis domestic human rights record
(15:42):
is a victory for the Saudist because it means that
nobody's talking about the stuff people were talking about last
decade when they talked about the Saudis, which was things like,
for example, the Sudanese child soldiers that they were deploying
in their warren Yemen, and these Sudanese child soldiers were
drawn from their connections bolstered by the UAE to the
Sudanese Appid Support Forces, a group that is almost entirely
composed of the militias who did the genocide in Darfour.
(16:06):
So these are the ground troops that they're deploying in Yemen.
Are Assudanese child soldiers drawn from the people who did
the genocide in Darfour in twenty eighteen, which was not
that long ago, like I remember twenty eighteen. So do
you statistically if you're listening to the show, they carried
out an airstrike on a school bus that killed twenty
six children, right, no one is talking about the air
(16:27):
strikes on funerals that they absolutely love to do, like,
for example, there was a huge one in twenty sixteen
where they killed one hundred and forty people in one
air strike, after which the area was described by a
rescue worker as a quote lake of blood. And this
has been the really successful thing about about the Saudi
specifically targeting sports and specifically targeting entertainment, is that the
people covering this do not know anything about Saudi Arabia, right.
(16:51):
And this is also partially what was going on Bill Burv,
because they're just racists or their attempt could do a backlash,
and they're trying to do a backlash with things like Okay,
they killed a journalist, which is really bad, right, But
like Jamal Kashoggi was one guy out of thousands and
thousands and thousands of people that they were killing and
are continuing to kill to this day in Yemen.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Right.
Speaker 8 (17:12):
And this is one of the reasons people have been
able to get away with this, right, is that no
one has been walking up to them and going what
do you think about the Sudanese child soldiers? Because nobody
knows about any of that. And this is one of
the thing that I want to just say at the
end of this, which is I know for a fact
that journalists and editors listen to this show, and please,
for the love of God, find someone who knows literally
(17:33):
anything about the Saudis war. And Yemen and have them
write this piece on sportswashing for you, literally anyone. This
is what this is what makes me insane about all
this coverage is that like, if you even a little
bit paid attention to what they were doing in the
twenty tens and what they're continuing to do now in Yemen,
you know about so many even I'm not even I'm
not even talking about the starvation genocide here. There are
(17:55):
so many things that they did, you know, And like
one of the common defenses is like, oh, like you know,
like we live in the US as a fucked up country, right,
Like who cares about authoritarianism? Just like I don't know,
it's hard to make that argument when it's about Sudanese
child soldiers.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Well, and it's just again, we're not pissed because some
guy performed at a nightclub in Riyad. It's it's that
you're taking money from the government to whitewash the government.
Speaker 8 (18:21):
No, it's because they took money for the governments. All
of these, all of these things, all of these all
of like wwe like all of these sports events, these
are funded directly by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which
is the Wealth Fund of the Saudi government, the people
who were dropping bombs on school buses and sending child
soldiers to fight their warren gemmen.
Speaker 6 (18:39):
Yeah, there has been some good reporting on sportswashing. I
would say, like Ian Trello's done some excellent stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
The Guardian has a good article on this where they
really coalate some of like the very worst responses, written
by Seth Simon. So I liked that this does seem
to be blowing up. Hollywood Reporter's piece was pretty good too.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
Hollywood Report to my friend with the editor of that
publication for years may have consistently done some stuff that
you wouldn't expect looking at the title of publication.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, I'm not going to be silly enough to be like,
I think this is going to cost any of these
people their career because it's I don't think it is.
But it does seem to be causing them some embarrassment,
So I don't know.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Yeah, I mean they get called out on it, shamed
like it's yeah, it's a pretty shameful thing to do.
Speaker 5 (19:21):
It's a shameful thing to do. It's a bummer.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
I wish people had not made these choices because man,
it's depressing.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah, Well, luckily I have some news to lift our
moods after this depressing episode. I am pleased to report
that cool Zone Media will be headlining at Victor Orbon's
new comedy festival Hungry four Laughs. Yep, next year twenty
twenty six. Market in your calendar, cool Zone Media presents
(19:50):
with Victor Orbon Hungary for laughs. That's all for us
today at it Could Happen Here, See you next year
in Hungary.
Speaker 4 (19:59):
The vibe.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it could Happen Here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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