Bill Burr’s recent trip to the Riyadh Comedy Festival has set off yet another round of predictable outrage from the professional moralizers in show business, but the facts are what they are: Burr defended performing in Saudi Arabia on his podcast and said the crowds were welcoming and hungry for real stand-up. He described the experience as one of the best of his career and pushed back against the caricature of a nation full of machete-wielding fanatics.
If you listen to Burr’s comments, he wasn’t naive — he expected tension and was pleasantly surprised to find ordinary people enjoying ordinary pleasures, the same fast-food chains and cultural touchstones we’ve seen everywhere globalization travels. He even said organizers negotiated content restrictions down to a couple of common-sense limits, and that the audience wanted comedy, not political sermons. This isn’t spin; it’s what Burr actually reported about the trip.
Of course, that didn’t stop other comedians from performing their self-righteous piano recital of moral outrage, calling the festival a whitewash of Saudi abuses and accusing performers of selling out. The critics point to real and serious issues tied to the Saudi regime — concerns that deserve debate — but their performative fury smells more like virtue-signaling than principled consistency. Meanwhile, the facts about negotiated content rules and organizers trying to bring real entertainment to a new market have been widely reported.
Here’s the conservative take: defending free enterprise and cultural exchange doesn’t mean ignoring human-rights problems, but it does mean resisting the shrill cowardice of those who lecture while cashing the check. If American artists can go and expose new audiences to unfiltered comedy, that’s a better long-term lever for liberty than sitting on the sidelines yelling into the echo chamber. The left’s reflex to cancel anyone who engages with rivals or adversaries is a petty, moralizing impulse that does nothing to help the people on the receiving end of repression.
Engagement has always been a pragmatic tool of American policy and culture — whether it’s trade, travel, or entertainment. The Riyadh festival is part of Saudi Arabia’s push to modernize and open up under its economic plan, which creates openings for influence and human connection that isolation never will. We can and should hold regimes accountable, but we should also recognize when cultural contact may chip away at ignorance and create real openings for change.
So to hardworking Americans watching this circus unfold: don’t fall for the sanctimonious line that drawing a paycheck in a foreign country is betrayal. Stand for free speech, back engagement that spreads American values, and call out the hypocrites who only get loud when there’s a camera and a narrative to feed. We can demand accountability from regimes without surrendering the very freedoms that let comedians like Bill Burr speak their minds in the first place.
