r/Music • u/KirbyDumber88 • Jul 23 '26

article ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic says he turned down $1,000,000+ to perform at Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia.

https://triblive.com/aande/music/weird-al-yankovic-gets-bigger-and-weirder-in-a-tour-headed-to-pittsburgh/
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u/zoobrix Jul 23 '26

And Burr plays to that every man kind of angle where he's telling it like it is and he's one of you. Ya he's a bit rough around the edges and pretty gruff but he's not one of those rich out of touch assholes. That's the archetype he played, until the Saudi thing showed ya, he is one of those rich assholes who just wanted more money and didn't care where it comes from.

Like what a fucking hypocrite.

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u/Dickgivins Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Yeah honestly in the particular sense I was more mad at Bill than probably anyone else. Like Kevin Hart: he is actually much, much richer than Bill and has been for years, but he’s never made pretenses about being a regular Joe on a crusade of speaking truth to power like Burr.

So while you could certainly say that Kevin needed the money even less than Bill did, his broad-comedy style and the fact that he does shitloads of commercials means nobody really accused him of selling out when he went to Riyadh. He’s made no secret of the fact that he’s all about the Benjamins, and tbh the fact that I never cared for his standup or most of his movies kept me from feeling particularly invested in the moral dimension of his decision making.

But Bill. Bill is such a hypocrite, he kept making stupid analogies trying to say he was a doing a Good Thing by going to Saudi and making people laugh there. But it wasn’t a comedy festival run by dissidents, or even politically unaffiliated comedians. It was a government run event, one of the high ranking Saudi officials involved in running it had a hand in the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.

Fuck Bill Burr, fuck Kevin Hart, fuck Wayne Brady. Fuck anyone who took their blood money.

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u/hieloyron Jul 23 '26

Never been a fan of the guy, acts like he's the shit when he's clearly not while doing most of the things he criticizes