Weird Al Yankovic Turned Down Over $1 Million To Perform
Weird Al Yankovic already walked away from a lucrative AI commercial this month after discovering he had been misled about the product. Speaking to the Pittsburgh-area outlet TribLive while on his Bigger and Weirder tour, the five-time Grammy winner revealed a second story of a life-changing sum he turned down: a seven-figure offer to perform a single show at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia last year. It would have been the largest single-show payday of his career. He turned it down without real deliberation. "I wish people would offer me things that I didn't feel bad about accepting," Yankovic said. "I was invited to the Riyadh Comedy Festival, 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." His explanation boiled down to two words: it was "icky." "I don't need to take any amount of money if it makes me feel icky," he said. "I'm not dissing anybody that took the money," he added. "I'm sure everybody that went there got a lot of money."
The Riyadh Comedy Festival drew Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Pete Davidson, and Aziz Ansari. Shane Gillis and Atsuko Okatsuka publicly declined. For Yankovic, the Saudi Arabia story adds to a portrait of an artist who, at 66, is completely at peace with the financial consequences of his convictions. Two opportunities this month, two very large sums of money, two no's. Weird Al is having a moment, and the people love him for it.
