Years before the Riyadh Comedy Festival became a lightning rod for ethical debates in the comedy world, Shane Gillis and his co-host Matt McCusker were already skewering the very idea of performing in Saudi Arabia.
In a 2017 episode of their podcast, the duo engaged in an extended satirical routine imagining what would happen if a comedian attempted to perform stand-up in the kingdom. The bit, dripping with dark humor, painted a vivid picture of cultural clash and inevitable disaster.
“You could do it in Saudi Arabia,” McCusker suggested during the conversation, sparking a rapid-fire exchange that quickly escalated into absurdist territory.
Gillis ran with the premise, describing a scenario where a performer would “set up a mic” at one of the prayer towers and attempt a set. “Just try to do a set of stand up as long as you can until you get beheaded,” he joked, adding that the comedian would need an exit strategy involving a cyanide pill.
The pair then launched into a mock comedy routine filled with deliberately offensive material that would supposedly be performed in this hypothetical Saudi show.
Their imagined set included questions about relationships and birthdays, punctuated with Gillis declaring: “No, you don’t know how old you are? All right, that’s what happens when you live out in a f**king field.”
The routine continued with increasingly provocative material, with the hosts riffing on everything from infrastructure to local customs. “See lots of mud huts out here,” Gillis continued in his fictional set, before adding, “Damn, dude, it smells like s**t out here.”
McCusker painted the likely response: “They’d have to climb up that tower like Assassin’s Creed to get you. There’d be like 30 of those guys flying up that tower.”
The conversation then veered into hypothetical combat scenarios, with Gillis expressing confidence he could defend his position. “Those are little guys, dude,” he claimed, suggesting he’d train extensively beforehand. “I would Joe Rogan train for like a year. I’d be f**king pure jujitsu.”
McCusker countered with practical observations about the challenges such a defender would face, noting that footwear “is not exactly conducive for climbing up.” He added a comedic detail: “It would just be like the squeak of Birkenstocks sliding down this fucking pole.”
The bit concluded with increasingly absurd imagery, including McCusker’s suggestion that hypothetical pursuers might “ram their Ferraris” into the structure or “open the suicide doors and slice the pole over, dude, and send you down.”
The savage 2017 comedy bit stands in stark contrast to the current situation, where major comedians are actually accepting substantial payments to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Tim Dillon recently revealed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that performers are being offered between $150,000 and $1.6 million, with Dillon himself initially set to receive $375,000 before being removed from the lineup.
The contrast becomes particularly pointed given that Gillis himself reportedly turned down a “significant bag” to perform at the festival, which was later doubled by organizers. His reason for declining? “I took a principled stand. You don’t 9/11 your friends.”
The leaked festival contracts reveal extensive censorship requirements that bear an eerie resemblance to what Gillis and McCusker were mocking years earlier. Performers must agree not to present material that could “degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute” Saudi Arabia, its leadership, the royal family, or “any religion, religious tradition, religious figure, or religious practice.”