Tim Dillon will not be traveling to the Riyadh Comedy Festival next month. The California comedian and host of The Tim Dillon Show podcast says he was fired from the Oct. 8 Saudi Arabia festival for comments he made about the country on Joe Rogan‘s podcast.
Besides losing a $375,000 payday (an amount Dillon confirmed to Rogan), he also lost a nearby warm-up gig in Dubai two nights before his Riyadh appearance after mixing up the Arab emirate with Abu Dhabi (the rival cities are both part of the United Arab Emirates).
“I mixed them up — apparently this is a big deal over there. This is a real problem,” he said on a recent episode of his podcast. “This is not a malicious slander. It’s a mistake.”
The Riyadh Comedy Festival — which mostly takes place at the Bakr Al-Sheddi Theatre and ANB Arena from Sept. 25 to Oct. 9, features a number of top tier comedians including Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Gabriel Iglesias, Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart, Jeff Ross, Chris Distefano, Tom Segura, Jo Koy, Sam Morril, Hannibal Buress, Andrew Schultz, Sebastian Maniscalco, Whitney Cummings, Jimmy Carr, Louis CK, Pete Davidson, Russell Peters and Chris Tucker.
“Supposedly, MBS is a fan of mine,” Dillon said two weeks ago on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, referring to Saudi head of state Mohammed Bin Salman.
Dillon was reportedly fired from the festival for claiming that Saudi Arabia relies on slave labor — a controversial take on the country’s foreign laborers laws that some groups, including Human Rights Watch, have criticized as “slavery-like.” Legally, slavery was abolished in the Kingdom in the 1960s.
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Dillon said the slavery jokes were a misunderstanding with his Saudi hosts, saying on his podcast, “I was defending them for having slaves. I literally said, ‘Slaves are hard workers and for the most part agreeable.’ But they didn’t like that.”
“You can literally support somebody too much,” he added. “In life, this happens. Too many compliments; too much support — and then they turn on you.”
He clarified his comments further, noting, “If i was a slave — not that I want to be one, but if I was and I built this really nice thing, I might say to my slave children, ‘Daddy built that,’” concluding, “Apparently this got to the people in Saudi Arabia and they were unhappy about it.”
The Riyadh Comedy Festival opens Sept. 25 with performances by Burr, Maz Jobrani and Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee from the Bad Friends podcast. More here.
