The internet brigades and media commentators found ample reason to be concerned about Saudi Arabia and its growing influence earlier this month. Instead of the anodyne concerns of yesteryear about madrassas influenced by fundamentalist clerics, however, the issues, such as they were, had a more modern character.
The first issue revolved around the participation of stand-up comedy’s leading performers in the Riyadh Comedy Festival, including such stalwarts as Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, Jo Koy, Russell Peters and many others. The second issue, which was overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the first story, was that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund joined forces with an investment company led by Jared Kushner to take venerable video game publisher Electronic Arts private, in a deal worth $55 billion.
Some context: Saudi Arabia has invested billions of dollars in gaming companies through its Savvy Games Group, which is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is apparently also an avid gamer. Some of its investments and acquisitions, particularly in the mobile gaming space, have paid huge dividends, and it already had a stake in Electronic Arts, a major games publisher whose slate includes the FIFA franchise and many others, along with other major publishers and companies like Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, Capcom and Take Two Interactive. The comedy festival is another one of those initiatives, like big musical concerts and film festivals, that have multiple benefits — entertaining young men and women in the country who have been bereft of these options for many years under the domination of the clerical establishment, and reforming the kingdom’s archconservative, mirthless image abroad.
The condemnations were swift and furious, and to a certain extent understandable: The critics argued that these comics were taking money to whitewash the human rights abuses of the kingdom. Saudi Arabia continues to clamp down on dissent and has faced no long-term repercussions for its agents’ murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, let alone for the continued detention and torture of activists and journalists, and has carried out numerous executions this year. Many of the stand-up comedians in the lineup have fashioned themselves (or been fashioned by admirers) into free-speech heroes at a time of growing authoritarianism in America, but felt no compunction signing agreements for the festival that stipulated no mockery of the kingdom or its people. A former lead writer at BioWare, a video game developer that created hits like the Mass Effect series and Dragon Age, and which is known for featuring LGBTQ+ characters, worried that the Saudis would influence such narrative directions.
The general vibe of the critiques was that Saudi Arabia and its enablers, whether they are famous stand-up comedians or business executives at top Western game companies, are deep into whitewashing a legacy of totalitarianism and religious extremism. Comedian Pete Davidson was condemned for performing in a country that sired most of the 9/11 hijackers despite the fact that his father, a firefighter, died in the attack. They were all sellouts whitewashing the regime in Riyadh.
I’ve long despised the “whitewashing” argument for many reasons — partly because it is simplistic and one-dimensional in its view of the world, and partly because of its tendency to morph into a holier-than-thou, histrionic mode of speech that has little effect besides alienating people in today’s political environment. But it also harbors within it a superiority complex steeped in stereotypes about Arab societies and their political structures.
The 9/11 comparison is a case in point. It is true that most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and that the kingdom’s tolerance of religious fundamentalists in the clerical establishment and the export of its conservative brand of Islam contributed to the rise of jihadist movements like Osama bin Laden’s. But to argue that in 2025, performing in Riyadh was akin to betraying the legacy of a father who died in the attack isn’t very different from blaming all Palestinians in Gaza for Hamas winning an election in 2006, or condemning all Americans for the hundreds of thousands killed in the Iraq war.
The whitewashing argument also presumes that Arab countries in particular act primarily through the prism of trying to burnish their reputation vis-a-vis Western audiences, instead of also having more immediate, self-aggrandizing concerns like creating entertainment venues for their own populace and expatriate workers, who are predominantly young and online, and like other people everywhere want to listen to music, watch stand-up shows and enjoy themselves in a country that has the resources to provide for them. Another reason is creating a diversified income stream away from oil, which will eventually run out (isn’t that what the West has been asking them to do for so long?), through avenues like the behemoth that is the video games industry or tourism.
It is also difficult to contemplate the whitewashing argument and think that it matters at all to the powers that be. Saudi Arabia did not suffer any repercussions for Khashoggi’s murder or any of the past crackdowns on dissidents, and Western businesspeople are constantly seeking the good graces of its rulers. Donald Trump has repeatedly engaged Saudi rulers (his son-in-law is party to the EA deal after all), so perhaps the whitewashing argument is one that applies to him more than those patronizing a comedy festival in the Saudi capital. We live in a world in which the American president has a beef with late-night comedians and universities, settles defamation lawsuits for tens of millions of dollars, sends the military to American cities and is gleefully corrupt in both national and international dealings. Against this backdrop, for what audience are the Saudis trying to whitewash?
It is difficult to look at the whitewashing argument and not see behind it a superiority complex, one that presumes that the Arabs ought to work hard to aspire to the moral heights espoused by the more civilized West — a worldview that should not have survived through the two years of genocide in Gaza abetted by these same Western governments; or the Trump administration’s authoritarianism, cruelty and arrest and deportation of children and mothers at asylum hearings; or Germany arresting Holocaust survivors for chanting “free Palestine.”
Is the release of a new Marvel or DC Comics superhero film and watching it in an American theater an endorsement and whitewashing of America’s political and military misadventures around the world? And why is it whitewashing when Saudi Arabia hosts a comedy festival or buys a video game developer, but world leaders were happy to sit in the VIP box with Vladimir Putin during the World Cup in Russia in 2018, in the midst of an intense bombing campaign in Aleppo? Why are European powers not threatening to boycott European World Cup qualifiers over Israel’s crimes in Gaza, like Russia was sanctioned over the Ukraine invasion? Is every user of TikTok and Instagram whitewashing China’s crimes against the Uyghurs and the Meta app’s contribution to teen depression? Are you whitewashing America’s abortion record when you buy a Nike jersey? Or supporting Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert’s cancellations by having a subscription to The New York Times?
The comedians who took part in the festival had a variety of justifications for their participation, in response to critiques by industry figures like David Cross and Marc Maron. Some argued that the sheer amount of money they were offered was enough for them to wilfully turn a blind eye to things like Khashoggi’s cold-blooded murder or the criminalization of homosexuality. Others, like C.K., said the criticism gave them pause, but they went ahead with their performances anyway.
Burr was mocked for saying that he decided to go because the Saudis were people who were “just like us.” “It was necessary,” he said in a podcast afterward with former late-night host and podcaster Conan O’Brien, in which he described his critics as “sanctimonious.” “It felt right afterward. I vibed with them, and they were funny. Fuck, they were funny fucking people. I don’t know what to tell you. I had a good time.”
Burr’s comment about people “just like us” was mercilessly pilloried as a phony, kumbaya-type justification for taking a lot of money from the Saudis to perform at the festival. Ironically, though, I think of it as the best reason to be there. Ordinary Saudis, the ones buying a $30 comedy show ticket, not the elite political class ensconced in their palaces, are indeed “just like us,” whoever us happens to be. They aren’t better or worse than Americans, or Brits, or Canadians, or anyone else. They also deserve to laugh after suffering for decades under the rule of a puritanical clerical establishment that criminalized joy.
That shared humanity can coexist in one’s mind with opposition to the government’s liberal use of the death penalty and track record of imprisoning and torturing its opponents.
As someone who grew up in the Gulf, I’ve long struggled with parsing Saudi Arabia’s cultural legacy in the region. The Saudi strain of conservative Islam had an immense impact on generations of Arabs from Egypt, North Africa and the Levant, not to mention South Asia, who worked in the Gulf as expatriates and laborers and went back home with that version of the faith, transforming it into an orthodoxy whose influence would wax over time, taking the form of intolerance, the spread of the niqab face covering, the disappearance of mothers from photo albums and virulent evangelism in the public sphere.
Crown Prince Mohammed, the same crown prince who would be accused of being behind Khashoggi’s murder, was also responsible for defanging this clerical establishment and its hated enforcers. What critics of the Riyadh Comedy Festival, or of the kingdom’s music festivals or esports championships, often miss is that these events are as much about projecting that new image of a modern and nationalistic society at home as they are about purported whitewashing.
It is a struggle on an individual level to work out what to do with Saudi Arabia’s cultural and religious legacy. The clerics’ mea culpa about the extreme fatwas of yesteryear exposes how they were never otherworldly; they were just as susceptible to the whims of those in power as anyone else. There is something both disturbing and comforting in that. What is the orthodoxy? What is the, for lack of a better word, correct way to go about practicing one’s faith? Is it enough to make up for the lasting impact of their pronouncements on Arab and Muslim societies?
In the same vein, how do you weigh the kingdom’s legacy, a legacy that will be shaped by what are likely to be decades of rule by the current crown prince? How should one feel about this contrast of a transformative public and religious agenda measured against all the souls and individuals whose lives were trampled in its wake?
It’s a question many will continue to struggle with as they ponder the path of the behemoth that is Saudi Arabia, while it finds its way on the world stage in this new era. But as it does so, it’s probably time to retire antiquated notions like whitewashing that are relics of a Western elite establishment that thinks, all evidence to the contrary, that it is better than everyone else.
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