Revolution for Dummies

by Bassem Youssef

  So our days went like this: demonstrations ending in sit-ins, days and days of blocked streets, and, occasionally, a violent confrontation that would trigger a complete blowup.

  This time the trigger came in the form of a protestor at a sit-in who was kidnapped by the soldiers standing guard around the cabinet building. He was beaten up so badly, he nearly died. The next thing you know there was another shit-fan roller coaster. Now it was not just people versus security forces but a direct confrontation with the army forces. This time, they were not a Christian minority, either. They were people known to be in the square from day one. It would be hard to use sectarian excuses here.

  It started the usual way. Angry protestors threw stones and some Molotov cocktails. Then the army forces used rubber bullets, real bullets, and tear gas, which was “normal” for them. But then the scene turned surreal. A bunch of soldiers stood on top of the cabinet building and threw chairs, drawers, unidentified pieces of furniture, and toilet seats. And to complete the picture, one soldier lowered his zipper and started urinating on the protestors. All we needed were some exposed boobs and a dragon, and we’d be on the set of a live taping of Game of Thrones.

  Whereas the army used to try and apologize or cover up events, they didn’t care anymore. What made the clash even worse was when more people joined the protests, many of them young women.

  A young woman who wore a long black traditional dress and covered her head and face was struck and dragged to the ground. A couple of soldiers pulled back her dress while she was unconscious, and her body was exposed, revealing her underwear. One of the soldiers stomped on her, driving his military boot into her stomach. Every TV channel caught this on tape.

  But, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, the scumbags in the media rushed to the defense of the army. First they proclaimed that this was a computer-generated image, a photoshopped scene. They even got movie experts to say that the international television stations had hired experts to fool the Egyptian people and make them turn against their beloved army. When that didn’t work, they did what a good right-wing asshole would do: they blamed the assault on what the young woman was wearing. “She was wearing nothing under that black dress but a blue bra. Who does that?” they cried. Before you knew it, the official story was that she was planted in the scene to “embarrass the army.”

  Sure, the American standard for going easy on a rapist is checking if he is a white swimmer, but in Egypt all you needed was a military uniform to get a free pass.

  Society bought into it. The misogynist, sexist society in its ugliest form materialized through these sorry excuses for human beings. The young woman was known as the “woman with the blue bra.” No one ever saw her face, knew her name, or understood what happened to her after this incident.

  I went into my office that day and told my team I would write this episode alone. You would think I had a lot of material to go on, and I did. But every time I played the videos where they were talking about the young woman, I broke down in tears. She might have been assaulted by the soldiers just once, but she was violated again and again by Egyptian television networks. I was fighting my tears while writing the script. I can’t remember if what I was writing was funny or not, but I remember that I wanted to go after all those assholes with a vengeance. I got hold of a video from one of the most watched religious channels that showed the scumbags making fun of her. As we re-aired it I pretended to eat sunflower seeds and spit the shells out as I watched their hate speech. It gave the message that I was literally spitting on the “holy sheikhs” and their behavior. In the Arab world this is a major insult to direct at a religious authority. And for once I didn’t care. I was proud of my defiance.

  This episode earned the hate of both Islamists and blind military supporters. Luckily, at that time, the military was quickly losing points because of the repeated violence, arrests, and transgressions against the young people who once led the revolution, and because of the country’s worsening economy. So the real attack came from the Islamists. They got private photos of me on the beach with my female friends, dancing the tango (yeah, I dance tango too, what about it?), and posted them on social media. They were trying to portray me as a deranged, dancing, half-naked, anti-Islamic dog. They didn’t stop at anything, including openly praying for me and my family’s destruction.

  Every member in my household was harassed, their private lives splattered all over their screens (thankfully my nude photos weren’t hacked into, like poor Jennifer Lawrence’s, and included in the famous Fappening scandal of 2014).

  My life had already been turned upside down, but I couldn’t foresee what was to come: my contract was about to end, I was about to ask for the most ridiculous thing in the history of Arab television, I was about to meet my hero, and I was about to find myself in the middle of the biggest attack on the American embassy in Cairo. Fun times ahead!

  AN IMPOSSIBLE PROPOSAL

  Albernameg reached the end of the first season as the highest-rated program on the ONTV channel. The channel now regretted only signing the show to one season. We had to negotiate the second season from scratch. Sucked to be them!

  The channel execs wanted to negotiate a longer contract, but by this time I had other dreams in mind. I didn’t just want to do a prerecorded program in an empty studio anymore. I wanted to go live.

  “I want a theater with a live audience,” I told them.

  They didn’t expect that because until then, such programming was totally unheard of in Egyptian television. Years of socialism and government control hadn’t pushed people to be very creative, and like I said before, media were stuck in the 1980s.

  However, things were slowly changing in the Middle East. The rich Saudi channels had started to buy the expensive American Idol, The Voice, Got Talent, and The X Factor franchises. The idea of having a local, small-size program that started out on the Internet to face those behemoth franchises was insane.

  The station asked us for the expected budget and logistics, and we came up with a budget that was eight times what was spent on any other show. The channel thought we were delusional. Actually, every single person in the industry thought we were out of our minds.

  Besides their balking at the money, the idea of bringing in a live audience was alien to the Arab world. People in charge of the industry didn’t want to worry about audience reaction. They would just bring in two hundred warm bodies to cheer and clap for stupid content and then pay them with a little money and a hot meal. I refused to be part of a fake program where everyone applauds, even if you do a shitty job.

  I remember while I was recruiting writers one candidate asked me, “So are you really going to get a real audience?”

  “Yes, definitely,” I answered.

  “You are not going to use applause signs or have a dude cue them when to laugh?”

  “No, that would be fake, we will have real laughter,” I said.

  “But what if they don’t laugh?”

  “Well, I guess we should just write better jokes.”

  He was too scared to come on board.

  When we finally got an offer for our show it was from a new channel, CBC, that had been around for only a year. There were many questions surrounding this channel: they were spending a shit-ton of money and in no time were a top-rated channel; the owner supposedly made his money working in Kuwait, but he came from nowhere in the media world. There were other rumors that the channel’s money came from certain “authorities” in the government, and whenever the word authorities is mentioned, it means the intelligence service, which had many of the old faces of the old media who supported Mubarak in its pocket, as well as many of the respected revolutionary faces sugarcoating CBC’s image.

  When we first got an offer from them to sit down and speak, I was hesitant. But they were the only channel in the market willing to entertain the idea of financing the show.

  I told them straightaway that I would not accept any interference in the content, and that the moment
they tried to interfere I’d walk away. I was worried about their agenda and it seemed that they were worried about mine.

  “My job is to be a watchdog on media and authority,” I told them. “I will make fun of whoever is going to be in power. The Islamists came to power and I will be against them head-on, the same for anyone else.”

  They were extremely shaky when I said that; everyone wanted to play nice since the Brotherhood was gaining more power in the country.

  The negotiations were tough and Tarek, I, and the rest of the original production team of Abernameg ended up having to borrow money to pay for the deficit in the budget. They needed to see if the show was a success or not before they committed completely. We were thinking big, even though none of us had any experience or knew if this half-baked experiment was going to work.

  One man knew how it worked. I had to go to him.

  ENTER THE STEWART

  Since those early days when I made videos in the laundry room in my apartment, I playfully imagined being a guest on Jon Stewart’s show. I just didn’t know how I would ever get there.

  Within three weeks of starting my online show I had offers to speak to the local media. But by the fourth week some journalist from the Daily Beast wanted to interview me. It was the first time I talked to a foreign journalist about my work. I was excited, and I had one goal in mind: Stewart has to read this. He has to find out what I’m attempting to do.

  So in the interview I simply inserted Jon Stewart’s name in every other sentence: “Who was your inspiration?” . . . “Jon Stewart” . . . “What is your biggest dream?” . . . “To have a show like Jon Stewart’s” . . . “How often do you have bowel movements?” . . . “Well, three times a day after watching reruns of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

  My little subliminal trick worked and the first English article ever written about me was titled “Jon Stewart of the Nile.” Heck! I added some Middle Eastern flavor to the man!

  It wasn’t long before more foreign news agencies were asking for interviews. I continued with the same strategy of dropping Jon Stewart’s name in every single interview, until, one day, it worked! After a year and a half I was interviewed by someone who was the ex-girlfriend of a senior writer and producer on The Daily Show.

  This was in the summer of 2012, when my contract had just ended and we were having trouble getting the money for our crazy idea of a live audience show.

  As I was going through the endless negotiations of our second season, I worked in the interim on a travel show called America in Arabic. It was a reality show about Arabs who live in America—basically Keeping up with the Kardashians without the boobs, gossip, breakups, drama, and someone’s father turning into a woman. Instead it was thoughtful, objective, and very boring.

  One of the cities we shot in was New York. I got ahold of that Daily Show producer and asked him if I could shadow the team to understand how they put together their show. He was amazingly helpful and actually invited me to come to the writers’ room and the production meetings in addition to getting a good look at the stage. He even allowed me to shoot inside their building and include it as a part of my reality show.

  This might have been the coolest day in my life. I was inside the freaking Daily Show and geeking out hard.

  The most I had hoped for that day was to get a selfie with Jon Stewart and make it my Facebook profile picture. But shit just kept getting better and better . . . Jon Stewart invited me into his office for a chat.

  I went in expecting it to last for maybe ten minutes, but it went on for an hour. We talked about the Middle East, world religions, politics, and how it’s difficult to potty-train toddlers. When we compared the politics of hate and xenophobia in both of our countries we found things to be sadly similar. I discovered that I wasn’t actually imitating him on my show; it was the same stupidity in both nations that was encouraging similar forms of satire. We were merely seizing the moment. I told him about my plans to have a theater, a live show, and that one day I would pay back the favor of his talking to me by inviting him as a guest on my show. Then I squealed like a fan girl after he shook my hand good-bye, and told him that I would never wash my hand again (I kid, I kid).

  I WENT BACK TO MY AMERICA IN ARABIC TEAM AND LOOKED EMBARRASSINGLY happy. My day was made, I couldn’t ask for anything more. And yet, “more” was asked of me; Jon’s assistant came looking for me to invite me to be on the show!!!

  One year earlier, when a journalist had asked me what I’d do if I ever met Jon, I replied that I would try to impress him so completely that he would bring me on as a guest. Well, apparently it worked!

  I came on his show and managed to hold my ground while not messing up. I got a few laughs from the audience too. I did it!

  Later in the green room, he met with me and said, “You are a natural. I know you might find this weird, and that you made a leap of faith switching your career to be a satirist, but you will soon discover that you are made for this. You are not just another guest, you are a friend and a colleague.”

  As I write this now, I’m watching the last episode of Jon’s Daily Show on my DVR. I miss that man like crazy.

  WELL . . . ISLAM CAME AFTER ALL

  As I was living in my own utopian state of mind from meeting, bonding, and appearing with Jon Stewart—another utopia was in the making back home.

  The summer of 2012 was the one in which Egypt would, for the first time in history, truly elect a president.

  You might ask, Well, didn’t you guys have presidential elections before?

  And I would answer, Sure, but it was that kind of election, you know, the one where you already know who will win? It was Egypt’s legacy to create pharaohs and vote for them for life, and the afterlife . . .

  Egypt had always been occupied by someone else throughout its history. The pharaohs built the pyramids and thought, Eh, we can’t top that, got bored, and just gave up. Which paved the way for the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Muslims, then different sectarian factions of Muslims, all the way to the French, the Ottoman Empire, and of course the British Empire, to make their mark on Egypt.

  In Egypt we were always told that our country is the graveyard of invaders, a slogan that was ingrained in our heads at a very early age. It is even written on big banners greeting tourists just in case they have second thoughts! We grew up thinking that our country is invincible and that no invader would succeed in overcoming it. But as we grew older and looked back to our history we realized that our country was indeed just a graveyard for all invaders who stayed long enough to die there and hand it over to yet another invader.

  Until 2005, we didn’t have elections. As mentioned before, we had referendums with yes-or-no votes where there was only one candidate. During Nasser, the results of these referendums were 99.5 percent yes. I kid you not. There was one human being who said no to Nasser. That was the reason he was split in half.

  Across the Arab world the Nasser voting phenomenon spread. Military coups were the new trend. The Saddams, the Ghaddafis, and the Assads of the Arab world were all inspired by Egypt’s 1952 “revolution” (wink, wink, nod, nod).

  There is a famous joke that comes from Syria, while under the rule of their dictator Assad senior (father of the current president). It goes something like this: A Syrian immigrant in London heads to the Syrian embassy to vote in the presidential elections (not really, it was a referendum of yes or no to the president). He decides that this time he will finally say no to Assad. After he casts his vote and begins to head home, he is suddenly struck with terror over what he has done. He decides to quickly return to the embassy, ask the officers for forgiveness, and change his vote to yes. When he arrives, he pleads with the officers to hand his ballot back to him so he can correct his grave mistake. The head officer approaches him and states, “Well, luckily, we had already changed it for you; don’t do that again!”

  Since the military took over in 1952 presidential referendums in Egypt all ended in a yes vote, ranging from
99.5 percent to 99.99 percent. With percentages like that, a president could have won three consecutive races without even trying.

  Getting a little cocky, Mubarak decided to have “real” elections in 2005, in which he allowed other candidates to run against him. Given this new appearance of choice it was obvious that Mubarak’s popularity had taken a sharp dip. After decades of enjoying 99 percent of votes it was sad to see the guy winning by only 88 percent! If only his ego had taken an 11 percent drop too.

  So in 2012, a year after Mubarak stepped down, we had what we could call a real presidential election. The Muslim Brotherhood a year earlier had said that for the sake of the revolution they would not put up a candidate. So of course when the elections came, for the sake of the revolution they pushed two candidates.

  The first candidate was Khairat al-Shater, a real strongman of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, he was quickly rejected due to his prison history, not for his scatological surname. He was the brains, the money, and had all the Islamic swag. When he was rejected, Mohamed Morsi, a mere employee in the Brotherhood, was pushed to run. Everyone knew who really called the shots, though. Through the Brotherhood, al-Shater launched what was called the “Renaissance Project,” a huge PR campaign that glorified their master plan for the future of Egypt.

  At that time I was between seasons and was still negotiating the nitty-gritty terms with CBC. All I had back then to voice my opinions was my Twitter account. With 140 characters at a time I was driving the Brotherhood crazy, making fun of their every move. Through their newspapers and television channels they launched a full-on public attack against me.

  That’s why it seemed odd when out of nowhere I received an invitation to meet with Mr. al-Shater himself. His people told me that he wanted to speak to me about the Renaissance Project and give me better insight into what was going on. It was the same policy of “hear from us, not about us” that they had started their campaign with a year earlier.