Saudi Arabia wants to be cool so badly you can smell the desperation from orbit. Vision 2030 — the kingdom’s masterplan to reinvent itself as a cultural hub — reads less like strategy and more like a teenager’s fantasy shopping list. Formula One races? Check. Music festivals the size of small cities? Check. Cristiano Ronaldo sweating in the desert for a payday larger than the GDP of some nations? Double check.
Now they’re importing America’s sharpest comedians this fall to Boulevard City, a theme park stitched together to resemble Las Vegas — if Vegas swapped neon for sand, showgirls for censorship, and jackpots for justice delivered by blade. The lineup is formidable: Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, and Bill Burr. Three of America’s finest comics in a generation, flown halfway around the world to entertain princes and passing crowds.
There’s just one problem, and it’s a major one. Cool can’t be purchased. You can’t commission it, can’t legislate it, can’t outsource it to McKinsey consultants. Cool doesn’t submit to five-year plans. It’s organic. It’s unpredictable. And most of all, it never begs for approval.
New York earned its cool because misfits and dreamers poured in, drawn by cheap rents and the freedom to start over. Painters turned empty lofts into studios. Writers hammered novels into diner napkins. Kids spray-painted subway cars until the city itself became their gallery. It wasn’t curated. It was all-out chaos — and that was the point.
London’s scene exploded out of scarcity. Working-class kids boxed in by grey estates and dead-end jobs didn’t wait for permission. They grabbed guitars and fired back with a few chords and choruses that turned boredom into rebellion.
Hollywood didn’t sprout from billion-dollar subsidies or state decrees. It grew because early filmmakers fled Thomas Edison’s stranglehold on movie patents in New Jersey, heading west in search of freedom, cheap land, and endless sunshine.
Saudi Arabia is trying to distill coolness like crude oil. Import celebrities, erect venues, flood social media with coverage — out will come cultural legitimacy. But culture isn’t chemistry. You can’t combine the right ingredients and expect authentic art to appear. What you get is imitation without risk, creation without life.
Authoritarian states excel at bulldozers and border walls. They fail at culture because culture can’t be engineered.
That is the trap authoritarian regimes always fall into. China has spent decades trying to engineer soft power. Confucius Institutes by the dozen, Olympic ceremonies choreographed to the second, blockbuster films that cost fortunes yet vanish outside their borders. They can copy Parisian boulevards and fake Apple stores, but they can’t export pop songs anyone actually wants to hear. Authoritarian states excel at bulldozers and border walls. They fail at culture because culture can’t be engineered. (RELATED: ‘All Under Heaven’: The CCP’s Distortion of Chinese Philosophy)
Comedy makes this contradiction brutally clear. The great comics — the likes of Pryor, Carlin, and Hicks — aren’t entertainers so much as jesters with knives. They cut power down to size. They mock authority, ridicule hypocrisy, and say what no one else dares to. The best material doesn’t just make people laugh; it makes them squirm. It is, by definition, dangerous.
How do you pull that off in Riyadh, where mocking rulers isn’t edgy, it’s treason; where questioning faith isn’t taboo, it’s blasphemy; where satire doesn’t earn heckles, it earns prison? You don’t. You perform the safe stuff, the international material. You avoid the razor wire because the razor wire is real. Chappelle will deliver the same riffs that electrify crowds in Washington or New York, but they will land differently in a hall where everyone knows what cannot be said.
The Saudis understand this, which is why they aren’t even pretending to cultivate homegrown comics or local countercultures. They’re simply purchasing the facade of cultural relevance. Buy Ronaldo, buy Formula One, buy Chappelle. If you can’t create cool, rent it by the weekend.
This model has short-term benefits. It gets press coverage. It draws tourists. It entertains a restless young population craving connection to global culture. It even bolsters diversification efforts beyond oil. But these are transactions, not transformations. Flying in comedians doesn’t make Riyadh a cradle of comedy any more than signing a few soccer stars makes the desert a football capital.
Real cultural influence comes from export, not import. America conquered the world with Hollywood, jazz, and hip-hop. France built its prestige through art, philosophy, and fashion that flowed from cafés and ateliers into the bloodstream of the West. Camus’ writing of revolt and exile. Chanel sketching in Paris. Vincent Cassel swaggering across the screen. All of this bubbled from below. Saudi Arabia is trying the opposite, importing authenticity as if it were a commodity, hoping hired talent can substitute for lived culture.
Coolness thrives on friction. It thrives on the freedom to fail and the license to offend. It is born in basements and back alleys, not royal courts. Saudi Arabia wants to market itself as modern and progressive while keeping authority beyond question, as though you can host a revolution on stage without ever loosening the grip backstage. It wants comedy festivals without dissent, artists without art that criticizes the hand that feeds — and the hand that cuts them off. What results is an uncanny valley of culture: technically dazzling but spiritually vacant, like robots flawlessly reciting Shakespeare.
The Riyadh Comedy Festival will no doubt be slick. The crowds will laugh. The lights will dazzle. But when the stage empties and the stars fly home, Saudi Arabia will remain what it was before: an authoritarian kingdom trying to buy its way into a cultural club that can’t be bribed. Money can buy the artists. It can even buy the art. But it can’t spark a movement. That’s the difference between having bags of cash and buckets of cool.
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