{"id":42512,"date":"2025-09-25T11:29:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T11:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/42512\/"},"modified":"2025-09-25T11:29:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T11:29:08","slug":"marc-maron-releases-clip-slamming-star-studded-riyadh-comedy-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/42512\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Maron releases clip slamming star-studded Riyadh Comedy Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Friday marks the kick-off of the first Riyadh Comedy Festival, a pretty concerted effort by the government of Saudi Arabia to rebrand the capital city as an international comedy destination. To that end, organizers from the Saudi General Entertainment Authority have reportedly thrown around quite a bit of cash to bring in some of the biggest names in the comedy world to perform at the festival, including Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Bill Burr, Aziz Ansari, Gabriel Iglesias, Louis CK, and several more. It has also, correspondingly, brought some critique: Most notably from comedian Marc Maron, who posted a stand-up clip to his social media this week blasting comics for signing on for a festival being put on by a government with a pretty lengthy list of human rights abuses detailed by Amnesty International<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the clip (posted to the\u00a0WTF\u00a0comics\u2019 Facebook page<\/a>), Maron opens by asking his audience \u201cHow do you even promote that?\u201d Referencing both 9\/11 and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Maron pulled no punches: \u201cBut don\u2019t let that stop the yuks, it\u2019s gonna be a good time.\u201d (True to form, Maron also did a bit of self-deprecation, noting that he wasn\u2019t personally invited to the festival: \u201cEasy to maintain your integrity when no one\u2019s offering to buy it out.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Maron isn\u2019t the only comic who\u2019s spoken out about the Riyadh Festival: Shane Gillis has made comments on various podcast appearances, stating that he turned down a reportedly large amount of money to perform at the fest due to his discomfort with Saudi politics. Comedian Tim Dillon was also reportedly fired from the festival this week<\/a>, allegedly over jokes he made about his decision to sign on for it in the first place, claiming at the time \u201cThey\u2019re paying enough money to look the other way.\u201d (He also joked, \u201cGet over it, so what they have slaves,\u201d referencing a long litany of allegations of forced labor imposed on migrant workers in the country.) Dillon said on a more recent episode of his show that his management told him \u201cThey heard what you said about them having slaves. They didn\u2019t like that.\u201d Dillon said on the earlier podcast that he was being paid $375,000 for the single show, and that some comics were getting more than a million, it\u2019s worth noting that those numbers haven\u2019t been confirmed by any other sources.<\/p>\n

Marc Maron thinks things were better in podcasting “before everyone had a voice”<\/a>Podcast retiree Marc Maron hits HBO for the second time this August<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This Friday marks the kick-off of the first Riyadh Comedy Festival, a pretty concerted effort by the government…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-42512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}