Rare is the auteur who manages to pave a singular path through multiple decades, constantly reinventing themselves while achieving household name status across multiple generations with work that presciently critiques society—and manages to have fun while doing so. Truly, we are lucky to be alive in the same era as Weird Al Yankovic. And I guess Hideo Kojima is also, you know, around.
I put these two titans in conversation not to argue the merits of their respective work (Weird Al’s is better), but because Weird Al passed a test that Kojima failed spectacularly. Weird Al recently revealed that he was offered seven figures to participate in last year’s Riyadh Comedy Festival, which attracted a whole raft of comedians who decided their principles very much had a price tag. Here’s what ended up happening, as revealed by Weird Al in an interview with TribLive:
I was invited to the Riyadh Comedy Festival (in Saudi Arabia), which is something that I obviously did not want to do. They offered me, I’m not going to say how much, but it was seven figures to do one show, which is way more than I’ve ever been offered in my life to do a show. But I just couldn’t be part of that. I’m not dissing anybody that took the money because I’m sure everybody that went there got a lot of money. I’m sure they had their own reasons and justifications for doing it. But I’m doing enough that I don’t need to take any amount of money if it makes me feel icky, and that kind of did.
I respect Weird Al’s restraint here, but also those people deserve to be dissed! They took money from a government with numerous human rights abuses on its record that relies on popular entertainers (and athletes) specifically to cover up those abuses.
Which brings us to Kojima, who—alongside other video game bigwigs like Activision COO Joshua Taub, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, Sega president Shuji Utsumi, and former Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada—was a speaker at the 2025 Esports World Cup’s New Global Sport Conference, another Riyadh-based, Saudi-government-backed act of reputational whitewashing. He did not need to! None of those executives did. They chose to. It’s unclear whether or not money changed hands, but that’s kind of beside the point. (Let’s be real, though: Considering that Saudi Arabia is about to fork over billions to complete its purchase of EA, it probably did.)
Weird Al, if you’re wondering, is also “not down” with AI. As for Kojima, well….
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Nathan Grayson
