Separate the work of the artist and the dictator who pays him | Television

We had already become accustomed to separating the artist’s work, as is done with the yolks and clear. Now it’s something much more difficult: separate the satrap artist. The dictators stick to them with the same cement with which the pits of their dissidents seal. It would be necessary to drill both to rescue a gram of the admiration they inspired before becoming jesters of the tyrants that are not worth it.

I speak of American comedians. Of some stars fallen and returned to lift, of figurines of the stand-upheirs of the best comic tradition. Types that suffered total or partial cancellations, rehabilitated some and lost others, have found refuge in the kingdom of freedom and joy: Saudi Arabia. It is the comic world’s soil: Louis CK, Dave Chapelle, Aziz Ansari and other champions of free expression adorn the poster of the Riad Comedy Festival that is celebrated until October 9 and premiered by Chapelle with a monologue in which he said: “Here it is easier to speak than in the United States.” And it wasn’t a joke. If it were, at this time Chapelle would be being mutually dismembered in a police station.

These gentlemen (all men, of course: Prince Salam will not invite Sarah Silverman to joke about his menopause) are discredited without further comment. The disturbing thing is the maneuver of the Saudi prince with his vision 2030 program, which some illusions perceive as a Glasnost Islamic So Putin does and a little China: they buy Western culture, but misleading of democracy. They pay for comic monologues or Woody Allen’s films, who offered Moscow as a double agent. They pay for art, football, show and even porn, to give a modern and sophisticated air to their dungeons.

As the citizen Kane in Xanadú, they can buy the entire Western culture, but they will get dead and sterile. Those comedians are exposed in Riyadh as remains of a lost civilization. Because all his humor, such as literature, cinema and art, are decantations of democracy. They cannot flourish in a satrapia, by many petrodollars that are thrown as a fertilizer. Without a free society, every expression is a drill. Woody Allen can go to Russia, like whales to a deserted beach, but in the Putin Moscow there is no oxygen so that a genius like him is born.