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Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco show.

You daily dive into the news.

And with it being Monday, there is a lot we have to talk about today, starting with this.. Mark Marin, Shane Gillis, and Zach Woods are slamming this comedy festival in Saudi Arabia that a bunch of their fellow stand-ups are participating in, and we should talk about it. Or because it's called the Riyadh Comedy Festival. It kicked off on Friday. It lasts through October 9th. And it has a massive liner. You've got Pete Davidson, Bill Burrd, Dave Chappelle, Whitney Cummings, Andrew

Schultz, and Flagrin, Kevin Hart, Tom Segura, and the list just goes on and on. You know, some have already gone on stage, some they still have sets up coming, but they're all facing some backlash right now. Because Saudi Arabia, as you hopefully know, for quite a while, has been criticized for its human rights abuses, like arresting journalists, exploited labor, executions for crimes like drug offenses and way more.

Like it's literally about to be the anniversary of when Muhammad Bonesaw is believed to have killed Jamal Khashoggi. And in fact, just earlier this year, the nation's top court there executed a journalist who had been behind bars for over seven years. And so with all this, last week, you had Human Rights Watch issuing a statement, arguing that the Saudi government is the festival, quote, to deflect detention from its brutal repression of free speech and other pervasive human rights violations. And you had them been urging the performers to use their time at the festival to urge Saudi leaders to free, unjustly detained journalists and activists, though, they're not laundering the government's reputation. Right, but also, it's not just activists and nonprofits who are slamming the comedians. I mean, you have tons of other comedians also speaking out. You recently had comedian Mark Maren speaking on this. I mean, the same guy that's gonna pay them is the same guy that paid that guy to Bonesaw Jamal Khashoggi and put him in a fucking suitcase. But don't let that stop the yucks it's going to be a good time full disclosure

I was not asked to perform

at the Riyadh comedy festival

so it's kind of easy for me to take

the high road on this one

and actually this whole thing goes back to July

when you had comedian Shane Gillis saying he was

offered the chance to perform in Saudi Arabia

but I think I'm going to pass. Yeah. For the troops? Is it for the troops? Not for the troops. That's for the Saudis. For the Saudi princes? Yeah, and everyone's like, yeah, you should do it. Everyone's doing it. It's like, for Saudis? Yeah. Weren't those the 9-11 guys? Nengelis later said that organizers doubled his payoffer, but he refused this significant amount of money so he could take a principled stand. Also as far as like how much people were actually making for this, you had comedian Tim Dylan previously saying that he was going to do the fest because he was going to get $375,000 for doing one show. He also claimed that some performers were offered as much as 1.6 million dollars. But then Saudi Arabia apparently fired him from the gig over jokes that he made about forced labor in the country. And on that note, you had comedian Atsko Okatska saying that she was offered the festival, but turned it down and claimed that the gig came with a bunch of content restrictions. And with that sharing a screenshot showing that artists aren't allowed to prepare a material critical of Saudi Arabia, its royal family, or its government.

Whether they're then adding a lot of the, you can't say anything anymore, comedians are doing the festival. They had to adhere to censorship rules. You know, as all of this is playing out, we've seen some of the performers from the line of defending their choice to go. Rapid Davidson recently went on Theo Vaughn's podcast and you said, I've been getting a little bit of a flack just because like my dad died 9-11, so they're like, how could you possibly go there? I just, you know, I get the routing and then I see the number and I go, I'll go. Right, and so with all this, it's not surprising that the general backlash that we've seen are people calling them sellouts. Rissam saying they think it's ironic that some of the sort of free speech warriors are among the comedians performing in a country slamp or oppressing free speech. You know, if you go to the comments of the top performers, Instagram, you can see their fans calling them out. And then, you know, with this, as far as my opinion on the matter, I'm conflicted, because there's a number of people involved in this that I'm like, okay, I'm not surprised. A number of them are bag chaser, bullshit

artists that I was like, yeah, okay. And then also, whether you love them or hate them, you could look to people like Kevin Hart and you're like, oh, that motherfucker never saw a check that he didn't want to cash. Like, Kevin Hart would MC judicial amputations as long as it had enough zeros. And so I found myself more surprised and I hate using the word disappointed because it's not like I'm his fucking daddy, but seeing Bill Burr there.

And so overall with this, I end up just kind of wanting to know like what were any of the people involved here as well as, you know, what were any of the people that were involved in the whitewashing that we've seen of Saudi Arabia and other aspects thinking. And I think the closest thing that we've gotten to that was Nemesh Patel was previously involved in this and he ended up dropping out.

He also then put out a very what felt like a passive aggressive TikTok where he seemed to feel like he was the victim of this situation. Right as he was also then trying to like make this false equivalency comparison to the United States and Saudi Arabia. Arabia and then in a follow-up video we made after that it was even that was

fucked up because he said if he had gone it would have been essentially like 20% of the

money that he would have made that in Saudi Arabia. And then in a follow-up video we made after that, it was, even that was fucked up.

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