Kevin Bridges has told how he turned down the controversial Riyadh comedy festival – while revealing that he played Saudi Arabia as long ago as 2008.

The Glaswegian stand-up rejected the lucrative booking at this year’s event on moral grounds. But he joked that when he’d previously played the kingdom he was just paid £200 and 'went for the love of the game, fuck the money’.

Currently on his first US tour, Bridges told comedian Greg Fitzsimmons on his Fitzdog Radio podcast that he didn't judge acts who appeared at the polarising Middle East festival last month, where the line-up included Jimmy Carr, Jack Whitehall, Omid Djalili, Bill Burr and Louis CK.

Campaigners such as Human Rights Watch have protested that the regime used the event to whitewash its human rights and freedom of speech abuses – as it has similarly done by backing major sporting events – while a number of the comedians taking part said they welcomed the chance to bring at least some flavour of Western cultural values to the state.

Bridges said that the backlash against the comedians was 'over the top', even though he turned down the festival because it was directly funded by the Saudi government. He cited Blood And Oil, journalists Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck's 2020 account of Crown Prince  Mohammed bin Salman's ruthless rise on the global stage, as influencing his decision.

However in 2008 he became one of the very few Western comics to have played Saudi before the recent festival.

Bridges and musical comic Steve Gribbin had been performing in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in shows arranged by the London Comedy Store. 

He was then approached by a third party asking them to also play Riyadh and Jeddah, though the Jeddah gig was subsequently cancelled.

'This is way before Mohammed bin Salman, he was just in his bedroom playing FIFA and eating Cheetos or whatever' Bridges told Fitzsimmons. Even so, the Riyadh show was 'proper strict', with the audience drinking energy drinks rather than alcohol.

'The gig was good, man. Because the audiences, it was very new to them, and it did feel edgy, as if "I don't know if this should be happening?"'

He was not told to censor any of his material, as the performers at the recent festival had been asked to do, because 'the government were not involved, I think the [organiser] was just a British guy who thought, "I'm going to try and run a comedy night". So I don't even know if it was above board. Who knows?

'I opened up, I done fairly well. And then in the middle they had three local comics … two of them did their sets in English and one of them did his set in Arabic.'

In a show where the women in the audience were in full hijabs, one of the local acts 'removed the elephant from the room' by remarking upon 'all the girls in the front row, [saying] your dads think you're studying tonight.

'And it got the biggest laugh of the night.' He remembered thinking: 'Fair play mate, that's quite edgy shit.'

Bridges also recalled fearing that he would be imprisoned or worse if the authorities mistook his acne medication for drugs in his luggage. But after a brief airport inspection they waved him through. And 'I've never been so grateful to have a fucking spotty face'.

Acknowledging Saudi's reputation for 'whitewashing' its human rights record and the 2018 assassination of the regime-critical journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Scottish comic joked that he could still see the appeal of the Riyadh Comedy Festival for stand-ups.

'You're not gonna get a bad review … if a reviewer's in, anything less than four stars, the guy's getting chopped up!’

Elsewhere in the interview, Bridges spoke about Barack Obama effectively being his support act at a philanthropic event in Edinburgh, about modifying his accent when he's performing outside Scotland, and how his audiences aren't interested in merchandise, 'just booze’.

'They don't want to go and buy T-shirts. They go into the venue and just go straight to the bar, right? I don't think they're going to give a fuck about buying a keyring.’

He also recalled a warm-up gig when an audience member threatened to attack him.

The situation at Arbroath's Webster Memorial Theatre in 2021 was only defused when another punter stepped in to confront the aggressive heckler.

'I have had a couple of people threaten me' told Fitzsimmons. 'I had a guy in Arbroath, a place just outside Dundee, who stood up during the set and shouted at me. I don’t know what I said or if I said anything or the guy was just nuts.

'The guy started coming towards the stage. Everybody else was horrified. It was quite an elevated stage so at least I had height on my side, he would have needed to climb up.

'It was in one of these small theatres so it was just ushers, there was no security. Another guy in the audience who was a lot bigger started shouting at the heckler and it just defused.

'It was quite a tough one to come back from. The guy just went genuinely mad.’

In a separate interview with the Houston Press in Texas this weekend he spoke about trying to knock the edges off his Glaswegian accent for American audiences, saying: ‘I’ve tried to soften it a little bit, but not be a fraud. The Scottish people are probably like, "why is he talking like that – is he taking elocution lessons?"’

He also said he was enjoying playing smaller venues in America as he does back home as theatres with a capacity for 1,000 to 2,000 were the ‘sweet spot’ for the best stand-up gigs. However, he didn’t enjoy playing spaces of that size spaces when he was on the way up in his career as he felt under too much pressure as a relatively inexperienced act.

- by Jay Richardson