During a stand-up set at the Comedy Cellar in New York City this week, former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah called out Americans’ hypocritical criticisms of the comedians who performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia, joking that Free Speech censorship “would never happen here.”
“When you know what Saudi Arabia is all about, it’s weird to go to a comedy festival that is paid for by Saudi Arabia,” Noah conceded at the top of his set, while noting that he does not judge the comedians who did, nor is he generally opposed to performing anywhere. “But when the government is paying you to come, that’s like a direct relationship. That’s different,” he noted. The comedian went on to list some of the humanitarian issues plaguing Saudi Arabian citizens.
“You say the wrong thing, you get disappeared in a moment. One minute your family knows where you are and then they don’t. Women don’t have control over their own bodies. Free speech is limited. Violence is the order of the day,” Noah observed in the below video, which was shared online on Wednesday. “I don’t know, man. I don’t think I’d ever perform in Saudi Arabia … I would only perform in the United States because that would never happen here.”
“It’s almost perfect comedy timing that this happened now, because had this comedy festival happened at any other time, I think America as an idea would have had more of a leg to stand on as a moral authority,” he added. “But this is the same country where, a few weeks ago, Jimmy Kimmel gets kicked off his show.”
Noah continued to tie in his commentary on the Riyadh Comedy Festival to America’s crackdown on Free Speech and the “bad taste” jokes in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. “[This is the] same country where hundreds of people have been fired for saying anything about Charlie Kirk,” Noah said. “This is the same country where people make jokes about Abraham Lincoln being shot, which I think, like, ranks higher.”
“Comedians are s–tting themselves,” Noah remarked, pushing back on certain Kirk supporters’ insistence that “nothing funny” can ever be said about his murder. “There’s nothing funny about most things in our lives. Nothing funny about death, nothing funny about life, nothing funny about struggling. The whole point of it is to find a moment of solace.”
“Comedians don’t have the latitude that leaders have. I’ve seen these comedians that will tell a joke and people are like, ‘Don’t you dare,’ and then the President of the United States literally said, ‘Maybe I’ll go for a third term,’” Noah continued, expressing his confusion over how the Trump administration was allowed to brush off the comment in question as nothing more than a joke: “Oh, so he can? ‘President jokes? Yeah! Comedian? No?’”
“I would hope that we just learn to focus not on the thing that everyone’s showing us, but the thing that’s actually happening,” the comedian concluded. “Comedians are not going to make or break Saudi [Arabia] and what’s happening [there]. But the thing that’s making or breaking what comedians can or cannot say in America … that’s a real thing that’s happening.”
