The army could not have been happier. The result of the referendum was a repeated slap to the faces of those liberal powers who thought they could change the country. The army never wanted change, not with so many interests, businesses, and powerful people involved. It was a system sixty years in the making. Removing Mubarak didn’t even touch the deep state that he was a disposable face of. The Muslim Brotherhood were never serious about the revolution either. They used it simply to come into power. They had no problem with the old regime as long as they were on top of it.
One of their most famous Salafi sheikhs, who pushed the narrative of “this is our country, not yours anymore,” was Hussein Yacoub. He was an elderly man with bright blue eyes and a white beard like Santa Claus. One of his favorite pastimes was to marry four teenage girls at a time. Prior to the 1990s, when sheikhs like this guy rose to fame, the Salafis told their followers that television was haram. Most modern technology was haram—such as taking a photograph of yourself or owning a satellite dish, a “portal for Satan” to enter our houses. The idea was that if it didn’t exist in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, then it was a novelty that we should not accept.
In the 2000s religious television was a huge business, and large sums of money were pushed into these channels. Not surprisingly, Salafi sheikhs were invited to host religious programs on television, which was supposed to be haram. But who cares when the money comes flowing in?
Yacoub was a perfect example of those scumbag sheikhs. He shifted from “TV is haram” to being the highest-paid Islamic televangelist. He was one of the people who pushed for a yes vote everywhere, and when he got it he said, “If you don’t like the result, you should just leave the country and emigrate to Canada.”
Canada had always been a destination for Egyptian Christians, or Copts, as they are called. He and many others insinuated that this vote was a victory over the Coptic Church and over the sinful liberals. Canada seems to be a refuge destination for everyone who gets screwed in elections, aka losers. I don’t know how long Canada can keep taking people in. Whether from our part of the world or from you, America.
My seventh YouTube episode about the referendum was a no-brainer; it was, after all, the talk of the whole nation. I just had one problem. I wanted to make fun of one of the sheikhs, but how? Those people were essentially considered saints. Over the centuries, Muslims had raised these sheikhs to a level that if you dared talk against them or ridicule their opinion, you would be considered an Islam hater or, even worse, an “apostate.”
Until then, many people suspected I was secretly Christian. Probably because I don’t have three Mohameds in my name. And yes, in a country infested with radical Islamic views, being Christian could be considered very wrong by the general public. People who doubted my Muslim identity had their suspicions confirmed when I continued going after fanatic religious idiots.
Then, one day, a Christian church was burned down because word got out that a Muslim girl had converted to Christianity and went into hiding there. A lesser-known sheikh instigated hate against the “dirty Christians” who “take our daughters and fool them into Christianity.”
I made fun of and ridiculed this asshole who was behind burning the church. I also made fun of some other sheikhs who were instigating hate.
According to them, I was clearly taking the side of the Christians, which means I had sinned. As my fans grew in number so did the number of people who hated me. But all of these YouTube videos were essentially the little leagues. There was nothing that would have prepared me for my next step: network television.
That’s where the real hate begins.
HI, MOM! I’M ON TV!
The unexpected and unprecedented popularity of my YouTube show had made me the hottest ticket in town. Six different television channels called, wanting to sign me on. This was a nice change of pace from the calls I used to get when people were going into cardiac arrest. Most of those channels just wanted to buy me out cheaply. They thought, Well, here’s an unknown from the Internet, surely he will just be happy to be on television. I saw through their front and refused to be made host of some slap-dicked-together dog and pony show. As an avid follower of Arab television and as someone who knew the horrible quality it presented, I couldn’t see myself repeating the same mistakes I’d seen others make. The channels thought that I was arrogant when I didn’t accept their offers, but I decided that if I was going to do this, I would do it right and with a decent budget. In other words, if I was going to sell my soul, the price better be right.
I didn’t know what was going on in the media business. The only people I knew from the media field were the people who started this with me from day one in the laundry room: Tarek (the guy who came up with the Internet production concept), Amr (my executive producer and a friend of Tarek), and Khalifa (my director and a friend of Amr). But they were basically nobodies in the world of media. They had no track record except for sporadic work here and there. Tarek just wanted to sell the idea and go on to find another YouTube sensation. Despite all of this, we were telling big-time channels that the only way to sign us on was if we were given the power to produce the show and manage the budget. Channel after channel walked away.
One day we got a call from the manager of a relatively new channel called ONTV, an independent station that was one of the best covering the events of the revolution. They offered a decent budget that was good for an unknown, but was not enough to do a decent show. We asked for triple the original number, which upset the manager of the channel enough to almost make him cancel the deal. But then the owner of the channel, one of the richest men in Egypt, called. We were invited to his office for a brief meeting.
“I like you and I like what you do,” he told me. “I don’t think we will get any profit out of you. But I think it is an experiment we should support.”
He told the channel manager to make it happen. The manager thought that the owner was forced into the deal, so he changed the contract from a two-year to a one-year contract. I am proud to say that in one year’s time he would come to greatly regret that decision.
So here I was in May 2011, just three months after I accidentally landed on YouTube, standing in the conference room of the channel with a contract in my hand. At that exact moment, my wife called. “The papers from Cleveland arrived!” she exclaimed. It was the opportunity I had been chasing for the past couple of years. I realized that my fate could literally be held in my two hands: a contract for a TV show in one and the papers to continue my medical career overseas in the other. It was a simple choice between a life of empty stardom, fame, and money . . . or saving lives. Of course I chose the money! It was a pretty okay price to sell my soul for.
You would think that my parents would’ve been heartbroken to watch me put medicine aside and choose media. But my mom was a typical Arab woman who would’ve hated seeing me cross the Atlantic Ocean and leave her. And by typical I don’t mean the exhausted stereotypes of women wearing black potato sacks from foreheads to pinkie toes depicted in Indiana Jones movies. She was a strong, powerful university professor who incited fear in both her students and her family, if we ever made her angry. She was the most loving and dedicated person I have ever known and yet she was the person you didn’t dare cross. She, like any other Middle Eastern woman, had only two tasks in life: one, to spend most of her life trying to get her kids married, and two, spend the rest of her life worrying about them. For her it was preferable that I stay in Egypt and pursue the television career, so long as I continued on as a faculty member at the medical school and she could still say “my son, the doctor (who just happens to do a little TV show on the side).”
THE FANS OF MY YOUTUBE SHOW HAD MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT MY move to television. Many thought my five-minute episodes were some sort of a statement against media corporations, a rebellious act against the establishment. I was the revolution hippie figure, a Guy Fawkes type taking on the Man, but without a mask.
Loyal fans started posting “How
could you betray us?” comments on my YouTube and Facebook pages. To some, my going mainstream was a controversial and unexpected move. People who watched me on YouTube wanted to maintain ownership of the product they helped to succeed. They wanted me to continue doing YouTube videos, no matter how much it was costing, without providing any income for me or my team.
Many, however, were happy that I would be a regular on television.
But there will always be the haters. Not to mention one tiny detail that created a bit of an uproar: the owner of the channel was a Christian.
The fact I was going to a channel with a Christian owner was enough to “crucify” me (pun intended) all over Islamic social media. Skeptics were now dead sure that I was a Christian operative or a Muslim apostate who was financed by the anti-Islamic powers in order to ridicule Islam and Muslims. The more “reasonable” dissenters assumed that my hiring was a reward for my last two videos, where I made fun of their asshole sheikhs. Reasonable, right?
What made this situation worse was the way the billionaire station owner, Naguib Sawiris, behaved. Sawiris had a tendency to speak off the cuff during interviews. Many of his remarks would be taken out of context, allowing the media to play over and over again what appeared to be clips of him insulting Islam. If you can imagine a Christian pimp speaking through his diamond-encrusted grill while donning giant gold crucifixes and a puffy fur coat—that’s what my employer looked like in the eyes of many Islamists.
Another issue that wasn’t helping was Sawiris’s political stance. You have to remember that Mubarak was president for thirty years. Under a dictatorship like that, you had to play nice and give compliments to the president every now and then. What made Sawiris different was that when the revolution started, his channel was one of the few that was balanced in its coverage and showed images of what was really occurring in the square.
Even I thought he was walking on thin ice at the time, and had the revolution failed to oust Mubarak he very well could have been one of the first to be executed.
Given his public persona it was difficult for me to know how to respect him as my employer without giving the Islamists more fuel for their fires. The Islamist social media had actively succeeded in creating this general theme of “Sawiris, the Antichrist,” or in our case, “the anti-Muhammad”—and even if he was fairly open-minded, his image was already predetermined.
So I did what any good satirist would do and made fun of him. It was the first time that someone openly made fun of his boss like that on television. I know you guys in America think, Okay, what’s the big deal? Well, here, where we have an authoritarian, patriarchal society, it was a huge deal. Sawiris was such a good sport about it, which put him in positive light for many. But as we all know, assholes will be assholes. The only way I could have satisfied those assholes’ kind of hate would have been to physically cut Sawiris’s throat right there in the studio.
Now that I was in the big leagues, I had to find myself a new team. Essentially, I wanted a simpler version of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. When I tried to explain to my then small staff the type of show I wanted to create, they looked at me like I was crazy because no Egyptian show of that kind had ever been produced before.
I needed someone to help me make my ideal show come true, a sort of head captain. That’s when my producer, Hend, arrived—or “Mama Hend,” as I would later call her. Make no mistake, she was actually ten years younger than me. The reason I called her that was because she was like a mother to the team we assembled. She was short, with long black hair that reached to her waist—a kind of Egyptian Pocahontas. She had been on maternity leave for two years but was eager to get back to work. Given how she was sick and tired of the same routine and how the Egyptian media were locked in the 1980s, I knew she was a good fit for my team. As well, Khalifa, my director, had worked with her before and said that she was the best producer around.
The first time we met, I could see that Hend didn’t really think I was TV material, which was the same impression Khalifa had when he started directing me. Actually, many were betting that this was the first and last season of TV for me. They thought I would burn out quickly. I mean, it isn’t really a high vote of confidence when your first contract gets shortened from two years to one.
The first order of business was to come up with a name. We tried a lot of catchy titles, but ultimately I decided to call the show Albernameg, which simply means: The Show.
The name was purposefully mundane. I told my team that all of those TV shows with catchy names were of low quality and that they all produced the same shitty shit. So why not make satirizing the name of the show the first order of business? We didn’t need a flashy name to distract the viewer; our content would do the real work. It’s like how the Zuckerbergs and the Jobses of the tech business operate—they wear the same fucking shirt every day, disregard the haters, and focus on content.
Once we got the name out of the way, we had a bigger problem. I was no comedian with absolutely no experience in acting or standup comedy. Remember, only a couple of weeks before I was making videos in the same room I washed my underwear. So there we were, a team led by a cardiac surgeon, with a director and producer who really didn’t see me surviving, all attempting to make a television show. It sounded just like what failures are made of . . .
DRESSED FOR SUCCESS
JUNE 2011
Even though we had no idea what to expect, my television program finally debuted.
Let’s just say it did pretty well for itself. After the first month we came in second only to the most popular and expensive show the channel aired. I was brought in as a guest on talk shows, gave interviews, and began to see my face pop up on posters in the streets announcing my program. Politicians and influential figures in society were glad to come to the show to be interviewed. This wasn’t a hastily put together YouTube webisode program anymore; it was a full half-hour show, with a variety of segments and guests. It wasn’t quite my dream of The Daily Show, but we were getting closer to its essence. In appearance we had graduated from the shitty version of an eighties TV show in Egypt to a crappy American version of a bad eighties MTV show. In Egypt this was something new and refreshing.
But we were still a high-flying trapeze act over hungry crocodiles. Our Christian network owner still proved to be a liability, and every time I made fun of an Islamist politician, both Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood accused me of being a Christian hit man. It was as if they thought Sawiris was behind the scenes, saying, You wanna play rough. Okay. Say hello to my little friend . . . Bassem Youssef.
I didn’t think much about it until we decided to make an episode about how different political powers view democracy. I made fun of everyone, but I have to be honest: the Islamist clips were way funnier than the non-Islamists ones. We got ahold of a clip from an interview between a sheikh and an Islamist sympathizer anchor who opened with the line, “You have a great quote saying that democracy is filth and we as Muslims should be avoiding it.”
The sheikh went on to argue that democracy leads to freedom and this is why liberals seek it out. He proffered that freedom devoid of religious control would inevitably lead to sexual freedom and orgies happening in the streets (which sounds like heaven on earth to me). But this was what democracy reeked of in Islamists’ eyes: horny people having sex in public, women losing their virginity, and sinful liberals imbibing everywhere. Brings back those sweet, sweet memories of people having “complete sexual relations” in Tahrir Square, right?
The videos we were finding were really good, and we thought we had done a good job of organizing and editing them before putting them on-air. But then I received a call from the manager of the channel.
“Bassem, we need to talk.” It sounded like he wanted to break up with me.
He told me he saw the episode and that it was very good and all, but that maybe we should reconsider airing it. This was the only time the channel interfered with my content. By this point I had made fun of the channel,
of the owner, and of everything else and no one had objected. What was different now?
“You know that we’ve never stopped you from saying whatever you wanted, right?” he said. “But we are facing quite a sensitive situation.”
“And what situation is that?” I asked.
“Well, Sawiris, the owner of the channel, has been receiving serious death threats. He has even sent his children away from Egypt.”
The Islamists had upped their game. Banners were hung in the streets asking people to boycott Sawiris, his channels, and his entire telecommunications company. I thought it was merely propaganda, but it actually led to angry Muslims attacking some of his offices and telecommunications outlets in defense of their religion.
I ultimately had to agree to what the manager asked for and canceled an episode that was particularly harsh in its ridiculing of the Islamists.
I had a love-hate relationship with the Islamists, though. Despite the propaganda against me and the attacks coming from their media hawks, most Islamists I met were really quite nice. They followed my show and watched it regularly. They were still skeptical about many things. Why does he work for a Christian? Why is he so hard on Islamists? Does he pray five times a day? Boxers or briefs? I explained to them that the satire was nothing personal, and if you are someone who wants to hold public office, you should be able to accept criticism and sarcasm. But as this was a totally new approach to our culture, the conversation usually ended with them praying for Allah to show me the right path.
Another odd occurrence from the debut of my show was that I started to get invited to many political events. Being popular because of comedy made several political bodies seek me out for appearances at their meetings and rallies. Politicians, whether they liked me or not, wanted to associate themselves with my notability, if you can believe that. I was invited to speak and people would listen. Most of the time I had absolutely no idea what the hell I was talking about, but it was an easy job, really. Just mention the words freedom and revolution a lot and all the liberals will cheer for you. Do that with a couple of recycled jokes from your videos and you are gold!
Revolution for Dummies Page 5