After facing enormous backlash for performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia, several notable comedians, including Bill Burr and Aziz Ansari, have shown just how tone-deaf they are by defending their performances in bafflingly out-of-touch statements that deflect any serious criticism.

Ansari and Burr defended their comments in interviews with Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien, respectively, touting the event as a progressive step in the right direction by exposing the Saudi people to more Western culture and ideas. Of course, these interviews were done with talk show hosts and not journalists who may actually push back and ask real questions.

Kimmel did grill Ansari slightly more than O’Brien did Burr, specifically discussing the massive payout Ansari likely received as one of the more well-known comics performing. O’Brien, however, didn’t really ask much at all, resulting in a confusing, incoherent rant from Burr.

“If you actually give a fuck about those people and how they’re living over there, there’s gonna have to be these types of things to pull them in. And I will tell you, the Cheesecake Factory in Riyadh, it’s incredible,” Burr said on O’Brien’s podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.”

The sentiment shared by these comedians seems to be a ridiculous notion that this festival was somehow a step towards actually causing positive change in Saudi Arabia, a country with a horrific human rights abuse record. The Saudi government has imprisoned several human rights defenders for criticizing them, such as Manahel al-Otaibi and Waleed Abulkhair. 

While Ansari did point out that it is wrong to ascribe the actions of a nation’s government to all of the people living there, this specific event was put on by the government. This wasn’t organized by the people of Saudi Arabia as a celebration of free speech. It’s a glorified PR campaign for their government in an attempt to make the world ignore the horrible abuses of power they regularly commit. 

Dave Chappelle, seemingly making a career out of swallowing his feet whole, said in his performance at the festival that people in the U.S. lose jobs for speaking about Charlie Kirk and that “it’s easier to talk here than it is in America.” Yet ironically, the festival also required comedians to adhere to a list of “censorship rules” full of topics they were banned from discussing. If there’s one thing that screams “freedom,” it’s censorship, right Dave?

The truly damning common factor among these elevated circus clowns is a real reluctance to face any criticism head-on. They all received enormous payouts that were too tempting to refuse, and now, out of desperation to save face, are claiming altruism as their true motivation while severely underplaying the money they’re sure to hoard. Anyone can see right through them, so they only do safe interviews with their talk show host buddies, where every topic is planned out ahead of time. 

Burr’s interview on O’Brien’s podcast was especially disappointing, because he’s normally proved to be a very thoughtful person. Now he’s essentially been reduced to being a spokesperson for Saudi Arabia.

Burr’s comments on his expectations when going to Saudi Arabia were more revealing about his own thought process than the country itself. “I thought I was going to go there, there was going to be a bunch of people dressed like Yasser Arafat shooting machine guns in the air going, ‘Death to America,’” Burr said on O’Brien’s podcast.

Burr seemed mostly surprised that he was able to relate to anyone over there, noting that the people attending a comedy show actually had a sense of humor. The people who attended this comedy show are surely representative of the entire population and prove that everyone in Saudi Arabia is living wonderfully, at least according to Burr’s incredible intuition. Maybe they’ll send him to Tel Aviv next, and he’ll convince himself everything is normal and cool there too.

Many of these comedians claim to be huge proponents of free expression, yet instantly agreed to censor themselves as long as the check had enough zeros.

While they couldn’t criticize the government, religion, or royal family, the performers were able to joke about sex, according to the BBC. This miniscule amount of free expression doesn’t make up for all of the promotion these comics have given Saudi Arabia that grossly diminishes and distracts from their proclivity to silence any critics.

There’s a joke the late Norm MacDonald made in his final comedy special where he says, “Nowadays, like I’ve heard they go ‘a comedian is a modern day philosopher.’ Which, first of all, it always makes me feel sad for the actual modern day philosophers.” 

These comedians aren’t philosophers and the idea that their spineless jokes are somehow going to lead to greater change within the Saudi government, is the funniest thing about this whole debacle.