American spins Egyptian comic

Sara Taksler’s documentary Tickling Giants — available on demand June 13 — tells the story of Dr. Bassem Youssef, the “Egyptian Jon Stewart,” a cardiologist who left his job as a heart surgeon to become a late-night comedian and find creative, nonviolent ways to protect free speech and fight a president.
Sara Taksler’s documentary Tickling Giants — available on demand June 13 — tells the story of Dr. Bassem Youssef, the “Egyptian Jon Stewart,” a cardiologist who left his job as a heart surgeon to become a late-night comedian and find creative, nonviolent ways to protect free speech and fight a president.

"Satire is not just fun and games," says Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef. He amused and incensed his country's audiences as host of Al-Bernameg (The Show), which ran weekly from 2011 to 2013.

An estimated 30 million viewers watched him poke fun at the fall of longtime president Hosni Mubarak's regime and the reigns of his replacements: democratically elected Mohammed Morsi and Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who took over the country in a coup.

The audience for Al-Bernameg was just shy of a third of the country's population. He's been dubbed "Egypt's Jon Stewart," but Stewart's nightly fan base on The Daily Show was a tenth of Youssef's.

Thanks to the new documentary Tickling Giants from Sara Taksler, a senior producer at The Daily Show, and Youssef's new book Revolution for Dummies: Laughing Through the Arab Spring, U.S. audiences can now finally see what kept Egyptian audiences glued to their TVs.

The Al-Bernameg sequences sampled in Tickling Giants are surprisingly adaptable to the American funny bone. In one sequence, Youssef sports an enormous graduation cap that looks suspiciously like an exaggeration of the one Morsi wore after receiving an honorary degree in Pakistan.

In another sequence, Youssef and his fellow cast members sing "Old McDonald Had a Farm" as they mock how the social climate changed after Morsi's overthrow. The latter is funnier and more disturbing than the description implies.

When asked how such humor traveled with relative ease, Youssef replies, "Actually, Sara Taksler, the American director who did it, she wanted that to be relatable for Americans. She found the stuff that she could understand, and she used it in the movie.

"It's the same thing with the book. I'm writing this book for a western audience. I would either use the stuff that would more easily be translated, or I would use something that I would explain it in a way that a western audience would understand. Humor is very difficult to translate sometimes, and if you translate it, the joke would be lost. I think it was due more to the selective process more than the nature of the joke itself between English and Arabic."

Serious Medicine

Stewart used his show to decry injustices like the lack of support for 9/11 first responders or to lambaste the obsequious way financial journalists covered tycoons whose fortunes later turned out to come from Ponzi schemes. Similarly, Youssef gained an audience from people who wanted more than a simple laugh.

Youssef and Al-Bernamag called out Egyptian Army doctor Gen. Abdel Atti, who saturated the airwaves with his new invention the CCD (Complete Cure Device), which he claimed could remedy hepatitis C and AIDS.

Youssef knew better.

Before his Stewart-inspired YouTube videos caught the attention of Egyptian television executives, Youssef made his living as a cardiologist and had planned to practice his trade in Ohio until the Arab Spring hit the streets of Cairo. Youssef faced risks in taking on Atti that Stewart didn't have to face in confronting CNBC stock expert Jim Cramer.

"The army lumped the 'scientific discovery' with itself with the invention. If you attack the invention or the cure, you're attacking the army. And this is how people are blackmailed into not speaking because you're not allowed to speak about religion or national security or the army. And this is an indirect way to stifle opposition and to stifle freedom of speech. And they were afraid that if they were to speak, they would be attacking the army, which is more sacred than religion itself," he says.

"The idea of someone in authority actually as a public servant does not really exist [in Egypt]. If you are in authority or a leader, you are someone who's in charge, you are infallible. While here, in the States, from the very early beginning, the president is a representative of the people who have elected him, and he should serve them, and he's accountable for what he's doing in front of his constituents. That is not the case in the Arab world."

His voluminous hat (which would fit better on an elephant) wound up getting Youssef arrested, and facing off against generals and radical sheiks generated death threats and even got his broadcasts jammed. Apparently people who couldn't tell or take jokes felt threatened by Youssef.

"You can curse and shout as much as you want, but satire or a joke can go a much longer way, much further, and people responded to that much better than another angry rant on television against authority. This is why I was considered very dangerous, and that's why I was fired," he recalls.

That said, he warns that others who satirize what's wrong wherever they live can't get by with jokes alone.

"You have to be an informed satirist because if you make fun of everything, you're just throwing jokes around. But in order to satirize something, you have to have the facts to inform that kind of satire, so that it will give you the power to call them out."

He adds, "That is why fact checking is important when we do the news. This is also something that I learned from visiting the Jon Stewart and The Daily Show premise, how they use fact checkers and people who would fact check everything that was said on the show because if you say a joke without being fact checked, your joke will self-destruct and it will fire back, so that's why it's important."

Brave New World

With his show canceled and family members of Al-Bernameg staff members facing arrest, Youssef fled to America and has applied his observations here. With The Daily Show veterans like Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee and John Oliver hosting shows of their own, Youssef says his new market has challenges to rival his previous one.

"It is harder because I am a stranger in a strange country, and I'm somewhat like an outsider, trying to find my voice and trying to find my audience, with different cultural references and a different language. It's a hard market to penetrate. It's a cutthroat market, and people who have already been there before me, sometimes, they're struggling. It is a very fierce competition, and it's not that easy to stay relevant in a very saturated market. It's a challenge, and it's interesting and terrifying at the same time," he says.

"My prayer is that I'll find a kind of foothold in American media. And that one day I'll be accepted by the regular, everyday viewer as someone who can influence and connect with you and [bring about] change and change the stereotypes about people from my region. I hope so."

His unique perspective on the Middle East makes him a frequent talk show guest. With Revolution for Dummies, Youssef explains why the Arab Spring failed to bring about the changes he and fellow Egyptians hoped for.

If the events around Tahrir Square seemed confusing to outsiders, the former doctor explains how the large crowds included different factions. You can't understand why Morsi's elected government flopped without knowing the differences between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists.

"You have Muslims who have different opinions, different ways for how they express their opinions, and the people like that are a minority. If you are not a fair-skinned man, a Sunni Egyptian, you pretty much have a problem," he says.

He also knows how to make the examination funny. Referring to the inexplicably popular Kardashians helps.

"It helps make people relatable to that. When you mention the Kardashians, the pop culture that people can relate to, when I tell people the Sunni and the Shia are like the Red Sox and the Yankees if they were given guns. This all helps, or else it's just going to be a dry, political science book that just gives you dry information. So I try to be relevant and have people be interested in what you write."

MovieStyle on 05/26/2017

Upcoming Events