Saudi Arabia is no joke

Today, Explained

Vox

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Riyadh Comedy Festival was billed as “two weeks of laughs in the desert” but has comics asking, “At what cost?” This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Noel King. A poster for the The Riyadh Comedy Festival shared by the Visit Saudi social media feed. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	It's today explained, hey, what's Jimmy Kimmel been up to since he got back on the air?
0:04.0	Please welcome Aziz Ansari.
0:06.0	Look at you in a suit.
0:08.0	Wow, wow.
0:10.0	Oh, he got Aziz Ansari.
0:11.0	I haven't been here since all this ice stuff started happening.
0:14.0	I'm all nervous. I got friends.
0:16.0	They're like, we're hiding our nanny in the basement.
0:18.0	We might have to raise our kids. We don't know what we're going to do.
0:21.9	So fun.
0:27.3	I want to ask you about this comedy festival over in Saudi Arabia that you were part of because people, a lot of comedians especially, are very upset.
0:30.9	Oh.
0:31.3	It's a pretty brutal regime.
0:32.9	They've done a lot of horrible, horrible things.
0:35.7	And so people are questioning why you would go over there
0:39.6	and take their money to perform in front of these people.
0:45.0	And I'm just curious because you were there.
0:47.7	You made this decision.
0:48.7	I'm curious as to why you decided to do that.
0:51.4	Coming up, why they decided to do that. Coming up, why they decided to do that.
1:02.4	Support for today explained comes from Dell. Dell would like to introduce the new Dell AI PC powered by the Intel Core Ultra
1:08.5	processor.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vox, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Vox and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.