Bill Burr has found himself in hot water recently for performing at a controversial comedy festival in the Middle East but he defended his decision on the latest episode of Conan O’Brien’s podcast, saying the crowd “needed it.”
“What was so great about it was that it was the people there. You could feel it. Like they needed it,” the Canton native said on the Oct. 15 episode of “Conan Needs a Friend.”
“They wanted it and they wanted you to push. And that’s what the comics did,” he said of the crowd at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.
Burr was among several comedians who performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival that ran from Sept. 26 to Oct. 9 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The festival was the first event of its kind to be hosted in Saudi Arabia and was meant to depict Riyadh as a hub for international cultural and artistic events, the Los Angeles Times reported. It was also aimed at improve Saudi Arabia’s global image, according to Vox.
However multiple comedians, include Burr, were criticized for participating in the festival, given Saudi Arabia’s history of oppression and human rights abuses.
While Burr admitted to O’Brien on the podcast that he “had the same idea of that part of the world as everybody else,” he said his experience of actually going there changed his whole perspective on the nation. He said if people were really concerned about the condition of the people there and not just caught up in viral social media posts, they would understand you need to expose people to things beyond their region, which the festival accomplished.
“I thought I was going to go there [and] there was going to be a bunch of people dressed like Yasser Arafat shooting machine guns in the air going ‘Death to America,’” he told the Brookline native.
Burr said that even travel authorities played into this bit when he arrived in Bahrain.
“I’m going through customs and the dude standing there, he goes, ‘What are you doing over here?’ I go, I’m a comedian … I’m a comedian from America.’”
Burr continued, “He goes, ‘Oh yeah.’ He goes, ‘You think we’re all over here waiting to cut your head off.’ He literally said that and I had to be like, ‘No, no, no, no, I didn’t.’”
Despite this first encounter, the rest of Burr’s interactions were pretty normal. When it came time for the show, Burr and the rest of the comedians had pretty free range with what jokes they could make.
“The people that put it together, when they first said that they wanted a comedy festival over there, they said, ‘OK, what is your restrictions with speech?,’” Burr said. “And they basically whittled it all the way down to you couldn’t talk about any religion — theres, yours, anybody else’s — and you couldn’t make fun of the royals. That was it.”
The royals were in attendance, as well as diplomats occupying the front row. Other than that, Burr said “everybody else was, like, regular.”
The comedian even got some love from a fan as he was walking onto the stage.
“Right before I went on, this guy yells out, dressed in that whole dishdash thing, he goes, ‘Hey Bill Burr, I love you. Kick ass, man.’ And I was just like, ‘What? I can’t believe this guy knows who I am.’”
Burr then did his set and got huge laughs from jokes about relationships and poking fun at attractive women who “wear the veil a little bit lower.”
The comedian even decided to break out his “gay gym joke” to see how the audience would react. It went over well, despite a technical difficulty that Burr thought meant he was in trouble.
“So I get halfway through it and the monitor goes out. And I’m like, ‘Oh [expletive] am I going to get arrested?’ And it ended up coming back on,” he said, telling O’Brien that he did not think it was an intentional effort to stop him.
Despite the malfunction, Burr praised the Saudi Arabian audience for their reception, and voiced how that part of the world is often wrongly perceived.
“It’s like, well, they just progressed the ball like 10 yards, and it was amazing,” Burr said.
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