The theater was literally under siege; we had to go in and out using a back door. These “protestors” were the same thugs we had seen since the beginning of the revolution. They were known to be “rented heads” by the intelligence service, to give a false sense that this mentality was the will of the people. We had seen these thugs in videos supporting the army on many occasions.
There were people outside the theater threatening to kill me. They had posters of me with a large X on my face, calling me a Zionist dog. (Why does it always have to be someone’s dog?) They were harassing anyone coming in or out of the theater. Some of them were talking to the media outside, saying that they wouldn’t mind killing me and sticking a knife in my heart if they saw me because “the army was above all.”
We were supposed to somehow write comedy under these conditions.
Some of my young researchers and producers were getting calls from their parents, who were pleading with them to leave the theater and come back home. Some of them had daily fights with their parents over the next few weeks as they tried to leave home to go to work.
As we sat down to write the next episode I insisted that we should start it by making fun of the statement the channel had issued. It was easy since the same channel who was now saying they cared about protecting the foundations and the manners of the “Egyptian Family,” and couldn’t tolerate anything that might offend the beliefs and traditions of the Egyptian people, had broadcast a Ramadan series that was full of profanity during the holiest month of the year.
We taped the episode as usual. I traveled to Dubai right after that to catch up with Tarek, who was scared to go back home after the arrest of his dad. We were out having dinner as the time came for the episode to air. My brother called me and was flipping out on the phone. The channel had issued another statement saying that it had suspended the program for the time being. My phone was ringing off the hook, with many of my friends and even celebrities asking what was going on.
This was a shock to everyone. Ours was the most successful show in the history of Arabic television. There was no way this suspension was a business decision; this came from high up the food chain.
We didn’t know what to do. I returned to Egypt and set a meeting with the owner. When I met him and his lawyers, he told me that he had suspended the show to respect the will of the people.
We both knew the “people” were a handful of thugs, a bunch of expired old men and women, and the assholes in the media who prostituted themselves to any kind of authority. Will of the people, my ass!
“The country is in a critical condition now and I can’t allow my channel to be part of this,” the owner told me. “We are thankful for what you have done in the past; your contribution to enlighten people against Islamic fascism will not be forgotten. But Egypt doesn’t need you now.”
I told him I was not doing this because of a political agenda. I was doing it because it was the right thing. I couldn’t be a puppet in the hands of authority to mislead the people. We were living in strange times. The people of Egypt thought they had gotten rid of fascism, but they were in denial; they had only replaced religious fascism with military fascism.
The owner tried to offer more money and better conditions under the contract to convince me to agree to his agenda. “Why not change the show a bit? Why not adopt a late-night-show format where you play games with celebrities, you know, like Jimmy Fallon? People are tired of politics now.”
What he was really saying was that they didn’t want anyone to question politics now.
Instead of me making jokes that really mattered to the people, they wanted me to become a big joke. A glorified, highly paid court jester.
I couldn’t do it.
I left the meeting with the owner’s words echoing in my head: “Egypt doesn’t need you anymore.”
BETWEEN TWO NETWORKS
For the following four months I was unemployed while my team and I took our case to arbitration against the channel.
We were already drowning in legal and financial problems. We were renting the theater out of our own pockets and still had to pay salaries for the researchers, writers, and employees.
We had to find a new channel, and fast.
In the meanwhile I was chosen to receive an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), one of the most prestigious awards given to journalists all around the world. The only problem was I was not a journalist. I thought I should just go to New York and get the award before anyone would notice.
The beautiful surprise was that Jon Stewart would be the one handing me the award. Big brother, always there for me.
I traveled to New York with my dad. We both needed this after my mother’s death. And since my show was off the air and I didn’t have free tickets to give him, I offered him tickets to New York instead! My dad didn’t speak English too well. He didn’t even try to speak it because he was too proud to show that he was not fluent. But on that night of the awards ceremony, he was happy and very proud of me; his smile spoke louder than words.
Jon Stewart gave a moving speech: “Me and Bassem have the same job, but Bassem works under a totally different set of circumstances.” He went on to describe what I had to go through to just say a joke. Then he delivered his best lines. “Bassem was loved and adored, millions of people followed him each night. It was amazing, there was nothing like it. When Morsi wore a hat, Bassem wore a funnier hat.” He then went on to describe the new situation after the Muslim Brotherhood were toppled. “Bassem could have stopped at this moment; he was a hero. He had his name chanted to him in the streets, by all the people who called for Morsi’s ouster. He could have quit right now and remain a hero, or he could stand for a higher principle; which was not that his satire was not purposeful for regime change but that his satire was purposeful for expression. So Bassem Youssef stood up and did his show and made fun of the new regime and their funny hats. And that lasted a day. So it turned out that the new regime has less of a sense of humor than the Muslim Brotherhood.”
I can’t even remember what I said after that in my acceptance speech. It was too touching. That son of a bitch Stewart manages to just amaze me every time.
But my speech was okay too!
I went back to Egypt to discover that finding another channel was not as easy as I thought. We were the hottest ticket in media and yet many were scared to deal with such a “toxic” brand. We were loved by the people, at least many of them, but not by the authorities. And in a country like ours, usually what the authorities want is much more important.
MBC, the biggest network in the region, pursued us. It was in seventh place overall in the ratings while CBC (the one that shut us down) was in first place. So I went ahead and signed with them. But what was interesting was that they added a clause in the article that would protect them in case the show was abruptly stopped for reasons “out of their hands.” In other words, they wouldn’t have to pay a huge amount of money to me if they canceled the show because they were told to do so. Everyone was aware of the risks and expected the worst. I couldn’t be very picky, though.
But now things were different. One of the first laws that was enforced by the interim government was to ban demonstrations and protests. It was weird, considering that the people in power now had come to power on the back of massive demonstrations and protests.
Droves of people, including some of my friends, were arrested for the most trivial reasons. You didn’t have to go out and demonstrate; police officers were stopping people randomly in the streets, checking their cell phones to see if they had shared Facebook statuses that opposed Sissi.
Sissi’s popularity was scary. He was loved, feared, revered, and coveted. Whenever you have a discussion with a person blinded by his unconditional support of the military, he will state that Sissi being popular is proof that he is the best option. The same supporter would be pissed if you mentioned other “popular” leaders. What an interesting “cool kid” lunch table that’d be: Hitler, Musso
lini, Mugabe, Putin, Castro, and Kim Jong-un.
I was doing the television interview rounds to promote my long-awaited return. It had been four months since they banned me. The hosts who conducted the interviews told me, behind the scenes, how terrified they were, that they couldn’t operate under the pressure, and admitted that they were hosting me because they could safely be vocal through me.
When I was asked if Sissi should be president, I said no. That was enough for them to launch a huge campaign against me in the media, calling me all kinds of names. Only a few months earlier I was the guy who’d toppled the Islamists with his jokes. Now I was accused of being not just an American operative, as I was accused during the Islamists’ time, but also a covert Islamist!!! When the people making these allegations were faced with the fact that I was spearheading the attack against the Islamists making fun of them, on my show all the time, they simply stated that this was all part of a deal to vent people’s anger through satire. Once you adopt a conspiracy, you can find all kinds of ways to justify anything.
These accusations were made by anchors, TV personalities, actors, and journalists who were lining up to get a statement from me and who had celebrated me when I was included in Time’s list of “100 Most Influential People” only a year earlier. I remember my late mother being at the Time party, looking at those celebrities and telling me, “The moment you say something they don’t like they will turn against you.” Mothers know best.
I was afraid of the influence the Saudi government would have on MBC. The idea of a totally free media in our region was now a distant memory. Now we were not debating what we would write for our next episode, but how many episodes we would last on-air.
Days before the comeback, I received an offer from 60 Minutes, which wanted to come to Egypt to cover this period of my life. The great Bob Simon arrived to do that interview with me. I was about to get my own fifteen minutes of American fame. Meanwhile, I was getting “defamed” in my own country.
Seriously, how do you make comedy in the middle of all of this? Well, very carefully.
SHITTING MY PANTS WITH BOB SIMON
Bob Simon and the 60 Minutes crew accompanied me while I prepared for the debut, or in this case, re-debut of the show. His questions were nothing but trouble, and I answered in a way that gave no real substance. He would ask me about military takeover, about the “coup,” about the people detained, and about the people behind the scenes trying to cancel my show. I knew that if I answered those questions honestly, I would end up losing the show before it even started. When he asked me about the deterioration of human rights and the decline of democracy in Egypt, I answered, “What are you talking about? We are enjoying a great deal of freedom.” The satirical tone was too obvious. When he asked about me giving up the “American dream” to become a surgeon for a TV show in Egypt, I told him that I was living the Egyptian dream every day.
“And what is that dream?” he asked me.
“Well, the dream of doing comedy and being called a traitor every day. You can’t beat that!”
Bob interviewed me on the streets of Cairo. He was surprised when dozens of people stopped me to ask when I would be back on TV.
“I thought you were hated,” he told me.
“Only if you follow the media and hang out with older people,” I said. “The younger generation is more difficult to control. They don’t have the power but they don’t like what is happening. The older people can attack me twenty-four hours a day but Albernameg was still the most watched show in history and they can’t change that. Young people don’t fall for propaganda as their parents did during the Nasser era. There is Internet, YouTube, and a million other sources of information. They can’t block them forever.”
THE COMEBACK EPISODE ON MBC EGYPT WAS YET ANOTHER MASSIVE hit. We scored 34 rating points, which was the highest for a television episode in the history of Egyptian television. Just to give you a reference, talk shows and comedy shows would average 3 to 4 points. The highest would be 7 to 9 points, for expensive franchises like The Voice, Idol, and X Factor. We averaged 28 to 30 points during the Islamists’ reign and continued to shatter those numbers despite the vicious attacks on us. But people who chose denial didn’t see that. They were under the impression that the show was no longer watched because their fellow retired friends whom they played golf with had all chosen to boycott the show. For them facts and statistics didn’t matter (sound familiar?).
This first episode was all about me trying to find another job—as maybe a football commentator, a fashion designer, a TV chef. In a satirical way I pretended to try other options besides political commentary to avoid talking about Sissi. After all, we just came back from a ban, so I had to play the part of the scared TV host. The joke was simply: Sissi was just everywhere. The videos we got from the networks were talking about Sissi every two minutes. He was on cooking shows, medical shows, at football games, and even had food products named after him. These funny videos gave the audience a taste of what it felt like under that new regime. We showed them that you can’t ignore the elephant in the room forever. With Sissi, he was not the elephant in the room, he was the elephant and the room.
As I’m sure you could predict, more protests erupted outside my theater. My pictures were burned (again) and banners calling for my death were paraded (again). Interestingly enough, the new laws banning street protests never applied to those people outside my theater. I wonder why?
Bob Simon couldn’t believe what he saw, and considering he’d covered every major war zone for the previous forty years, that’s saying something. He told me if he didn’t know better he would think that someone had created a time machine and shot me back to the McCarthy era. “Hell, even then there were rights,” he said. “I would think I woke up in Nazi Germany.”
THE PUPPET THAT ROCKED THE WORLD
You can exaggerate as much as you want about how a country goes crazy. You can use poetic references from 1984 or real examples from North Korea to show how a country can turn into a zombie state manipulated by media. But nothing can prepare you for what happened in Egypt in the winter of 2014.
By that time the talk shows were all about who wants to destroy Egypt. There were “experts” who would rotate around the different channels and talk about the different kinds of plots being planned against us.
You know those Internet freaks, right? Those who see illuminati signs in Obama scratching his nose with his middle finger? Or those who believe that Madonna climbed thirteen stairs in her VMA awards performance as a sign of Freemasonry? We have the same type of crazy people too, and Madonna is a hot topic for them because after they share the videos of her worshiping Satan they jerk off to the same videos you do. We get it, you are into weird shit.
I understand there are all kinds of crazy Facebook pages that share stupid stories and there are many who believe that kind of shit. But when that goes mainstream and the media start reporting it as fact, know you are in trouble.
So the story goes like this: After we started our show on YouTube, there was an explosion of talent on the Internet. Everyone seemed to become an Internet celebrity overnight. We had Internet-based comedy shows, singing, music, parody, and our own show hosted many of these talented people as guests.
During the Islamist era we brought on a YouTube sensation called Auntie Fajita. She was a puppet and everybody loved her. Her character was a widow from the Egyptian middle class who had her opinion about everything—love, politics, and even the American elections. The language she used was a play on how some like-minded woman would talk. Think of her as a mixture of the “Church Lady” from SNL and Miss Piggy. She was hilarious and extremely popular. She was even starring in commercials for the telecommunications giant Vodafone. The creators of the puppet were friends of mine who worked in an advertising agency.
All of that was working well until the usual dickheads came and spoiled it for everybody.
Auntie Fajita had a Twitter account where she posted her opinions, whic
h were written in the tone of a misinformed middle-class bourgeoise woman.
So, some of those people who have those batshit-crazy Facebook pages started to analyze her tweets and her videos. They postulated that she was speaking in code, that those tweets and her Vodafone commercials were messages to terrorists, who became active in Egypt and started bombing everything.
So far this sounds okay. Every country has its own crazy people. But when the media began using those people’s Facebook statuses and quoted them as reliable sources of information, that’s when it became disturbing. Many of those crazy people didn’t just spring out from nowhere. They were there from the first day of the revolution. You may recall when I told you that these channels that came out of nowhere were probably funded by the intelligence service? They were always producing these crazy conspiracy theories that “proved” that the whole Arab Spring was an American plan to destroy the Middle East. Many of the owners of those channels and even some of the people who spread those rumors on those channels posed in photos with the highest-ranking generals in the army. You might think that rolling with this story of the puppet was just a media stunt to increase ratings, but when the legal system gets involved, that is when you begin to worry.
The general prosecutor summoned the creators of the Auntie Fajita puppet, and Vodafone found itself in hot water. The prosecutor accused Vodafone of being an accomplice of the puppet, to send hidden messages to the enemies of the nation. It begs the question of who had whose hand up the other’s ass?
One of the anchors known to be the mouthpiece of the regime got ahold of the lawyer representing Vodafone and asked him to clarify the position of the company on these allegations. The lawyer laughed. He could not believe that this could be taken seriously. The anchor shouted, “You should not ridicule the Egyptian people. Those are serious charges and we need answers.”
Revolution for Dummies Page 17
