That’s a game you play with your friends. You know something makes your friend’s skin crawl. You ask them how much money would it take for them to participate in that skin crawling activity. The answers vary from “just no”, to “maybe I’ll do it for $1,000,” to “I’d do it for $5”. Then there’s the friend that cements their reputation as a nut, or shows off their nutty side, by just doing it. We got a glimpse of that recently with the Saudi comedy festival.

I don’t put comedians on a pedestal. I don’t think Bill Burr has any special insight into economics, politics, or society. But sometimes the best comedy is pointing out the world as it actually is. And you get a reminder that something we all tiptoe around as oversized, dangerous, and deep is actually small, harmless, and stupid. Even if media, culture, celebrities, and politicians are telling you it’s a great idea, or it’s a sacred cow, or it’s “dangerous,” for a minute you see it’s stupid and we were silly for thinking otherwise. I don’t mean in the “do your own research,” vaccine denying, tin-foil hat way. I mean in the way that we have sacred cows we tacitly or explicitly refuse to question, but should.

Three comedians walk into a racist, brutal, autocratic, fundamentalist regime that doesn’t respect human rights: Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, and Pete Davidson. Pete Davidson is the easiest one to analyze. I don’t really think there’s a huge moral compass there. He seems like the kind of guy who just picks up on the vibe around him. He’s the friend that says “$20 – okay,” because he wants the $20 bucks. He has plenty of cash, but $20 more would be better. Do I care he went to Riyadh? Not really. It just cements my opinion of him as the gross kid.

Whitney Cummings is the queen of bad decisions. She can say, after the fact, that everyone around her made it seem like such a good idea, and the money was amazing, and that she made another bad decision. It’s one of a long line of bad decisions. It would make me wonder if she’d gained any insight about making bad decisions, or avoiding bad decisions, but it would track. She’d have a good five minutes in her next show about what a bad decision she made, and how bad she felt, as she enjoyed the really nice car she bought from said paycheck.

Bill Burr is the tough one. Because Bill Burr really doesn’t need the money. If it were revealed that Pete Davidson was declaring bankruptcy – that would track. Bill Burr is a smart guy. If not smart, insightful at the very least. He’s called out greed, evil, and hypocrisy on many occasions. Every once and a while an excerpt from his pod-cast pops up and he calls folks out for being the worst people. I think he’s also aware that condemning rape victims to be punished, or beating women for not wearing head-dresses, or treating foreign workers like slaves is bad. Pete and Whitney might not think about the fancy hotel they’re in as the product of slave labor. I’m not saying Bill wouldn’t stay there. I’m just saying I imagine his conscience would at least twitch.

And despite the assurances from people like Bill, that the Saudis are just funny people (as if we have no understanding of Saudis), and he could say what he thought, it doesn’t track. This isn’t like going to the Soviet Union and playing a show for a repressive regime, because it’s a closed society with little cultural exchange. Plenty of Saudis travel and live outside Saudi Arabia and plenty of Americans have lived in Saudi Arabia. It’s impossible to say he was ‘freer to speak his mind there,’ because the contract stipulations leaked and included specific topics there were off-limits. Other comics had their invitations rescinded for jokes. We know they were censored. I’m hoping Bill Burr pulled back because he was being censored. Otherwise, that would mean…

But this is where we are. Top, head-line comics, with plenty of money, will gladly play for a few dollars more to legitimize a country that is the embodiment of the backward stupidity they would otherwise ridicule. Or maybe it was always just a bit, like Michael Jackson using a falsetto when out in public, to make us think there was something there. Maybe they didn’t care what they said, or who they said it to, as long as the checks keep coming. If it means making fun of racists, bigots, and (Christian) fundamentalists, that’s fine. If tomorrow making fun of people of color, punching down on gays, Muslims, Jews, or free-thinking people makes more money, well, they can do those bits, too.

And to a larger degree we see companies, especially media companies, caving to pressure because already absurdly wealthy people could make more money “settling” with Donal Trump. We see colleges willing to give up intellectual freedom to preserve their jobs and money. These are institutions that should have a very real, necessary, and strong allergy to authoritarians. Media companies need that allergy because they need creative independence. Universities because they need freedom to think and explore ideas. Have they had to compromise in the past? Yes, and almost always those two industries have regretted it. It’s always a shameful part of their history they never hope to repeat again.

But that’s the beauty of Trump’s America and, in a smaller way, the Riyadh comedy festival. It lays bare the fact that the moral compass of people with money bends towards more money. Movie studios, TV networks, and publishers were always businesses first. But they couldn’t stop the editorial message coming from the creative people they needed to have a product to sell. Universities always needed to bend to their alumni, donors, and grantors, but couldn’t serve their purpose without giving academics broad liberty of opinion. And comedians have always had to put food on the table, pay the rent, and make a buck.

But the institutions, people, and companies with the greatest ability to do the right thing, to fight the right fight, and to stay on the right side of history, have shown they would rather just have the money. Even at the expense of what makes them valuable, hoping that it will all blow over as something else happens. And the next time Bill Burr is making fun of Donald Trump being an autocratic bigot you’ll forget he helped legitimize the kind of autocracy Donald wishes he had.

Maybe Whitney or Bill will do Trump’s next birthday gig, if the money’s right, and they’ll be free to speak their truth in any way that’s not prohibited in the contract.