Jason Bailey, Guest Columnist

Will Anti-Woke Comedy Recover From the Riyadh Festival?

October 9, 2025 at 12:00 PM UTC

Jason Bailey is a film critic and historian. He is the author, most recently, of "Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend."

The jokes write themselves.
Photographer: Stacy Revere/Getty Images North America

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Any event that includes comedy’s biggest names is going to attract attention — but the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which kicked off on Sept. 26 and continued through Thursday, is disproving the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Organized by the Saudi government, the festival is widely viewed as an effort to whitewash the kingdom’s human rights abuses.