For weeks, while rebuilding a theater out of scratch, tech rehearsals continued for hours each day. We were struggling with everything, from playing videos in real time to queuing photos and graphics over my shoulder. Nothing was working. I was losing my head every time something went wrong. Eventually we started incorporating and practicing the script. Because of the incessant production interruptions we didn’t even know if we had a comedic show anymore.
Funny or not, the big day was here. When I had attended Jon’s show, they had a comedian who would warm the audience up beforehand. He would tell the audience to cheer and laugh and clap so the people at home would feel energized. But you couldn’t do that here. If you tell Egyptians to laugh or clap they do the opposite . . . because we are just too cool for that! I had to hope that we had created an entertaining show.
I stood backstage waiting for my cue to enter the stage. I didn’t want to mess up or do retakes. Khalifa, the director, spoke in my earpiece to give me the countdown.
Then . . . showtime!
The lights, the applause, the excitement: What the hell was I doing all that time taping boring pre-recorded shows?
I took my seat. Here I was a doctor, a surgeon, whose only theater before now was an operating theater where I used to cut people open. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this. I never received any formal comedic training, or any training in improv or acting—nothing. In my earpiece I could hear Khalifa and Hend giving final orders. Tarek was in the front row. All of those people who, months earlier, doubted I’d ever make it past the first week of the first season of a small show with a limited budget were watching, judging.
I MADE MY FIRST QUIP ABOUT TRYING TO JUSTIFY HOW I ENDED up on this channel, which I admitted was for one reason and one reason alone: money. I went on to tear down every single person working for the network, including the owner. The theater erupted in laughter. They couldn’t believe I was going there, and I couldn’t believe that my jokes were landing. I continued on a more treacherous path, deciding to go after the almighty Muslim Brotherhood. I dissected their rhetoric and destroyed their beloved Renaissance Project, and I showed people how they were using religion to manipulate the masses. What I was hearing in that theater was not laughter; it was catharsis.
One joke after the other, one video after another, I was killing it out there. That first episode lasted more than ninety minutes, which I had never thought I could pull off. It was amazing.
When the show ended I went offstage where everyone jumped on me and hugged me: Amr, Khalifa, Hend, Tarek, every single one of the crew who attended the boring rehearsals and doubted this would ever take off. I was drenched in sweat and out of breath as if I’d run a race. What the hell just happened?
The history of Egyptian television was changed forever. In the next few months everyone in the media wanted to do a “Bassem Youssef–type show.” Live-audience shows started emerging out of nowhere. But our audience came of their own free will; they were never paid and their reactions were unrehearsed. Our weekly show became a regional phenomenon.
As expected, the Muslim Brotherhood lashed out against me. They didn’t care about the daily demonstrations against them, or journalists and TV hosts criticizing them. They were worried about me more than anything. Authoritarian regimes, whether military or religious, are not worried about vicious criticism. They are worried that the masses lose respect for them. You can’t really respect or fear something you are laughing at.
But the greatest attack came from within the channel itself. The oldest, most veteran TV anchor was upset because I had made fun of him. He represented a form of neoliberal authoritarianism, an older generation that wasn’t used to being criticized. He went on his show and attacked me, but made the fatal mistake of trying to be funny. After belittling me, calling me all kinds of derogatory names, he threatened that he would shut down my show. Well, two could play this game, and I had the upper comedic hand. So I decided to go after him in my next episode. It was nothing personal, but if I didn’t respond it meant that anyone could bash me into silence and I didn’t want to set that precedent. This was me getting my TV cred! This was me going after that old mentality that built its glory on faux respect. The channel executives didn’t want to piss off their oldest and most famous TV host. He was a media dinosaur but his name was still a big deal, so they asked me to let it go. I said I just couldn’t do that.
My next episode was all about how Morsi was turning into a dictator. I told the network that I found it weird that they were more worried about the feelings of their anchor than they were about me going after the president. They suggested that we visit the anchor in his house and ask for his permission to be mentioned in the next episode. I was furious. I told them I would do no such thing. Tarek urged me to play along. “We have only broadcast a pilot, we can’t afford to stop the show now,” he said. “I beg you, be nice and be polite and I promise you that you will get to do what you want.”
The deal was that everyone would be there and that the owner of the channel would be the one who broke the news about me joking back. The owner promised me that whatever the outcome I could broadcast the episode as I wanted, but still asked me to do this “courtesy visit” to the anchor first.
We went to his stupid house. He represented everything that I hated about our culture: the patriarchical mentality, the entitlement, the arrogance that came from the fact that he had wasted more years on this planet than the rest of us. He gave me a “lesson” on respecting my elders and how it was not acceptable to make fun of them. Just to give you an idea, this man was supposed to be the “Godfather” of the new Arab media. He was the one who bragged about how he was more knowledgeable about Western media than anyone else. He owned the first private radio station and entertainment website in Egypt. He was also a close friend of Mubarak, which partly explains why he was given the privilege to spew all of his “knowledge.”
I reminded him that in the “Western media” there is no person above satire and sarcasm. He didn’t accept any of this and continued to give me a lesson about respect and morality (three years later, this guy would escape from Egypt after allegedly amassing millions of dollars through bribes and shady deals with the media outlets he worked for—respect and morality, my ass!).
I sat there waiting for the owner of the channel to speak about the next episode. Of course, he pussied out. No one else spoke. So now it was up to me to tell him what I intended to do in that episode. The brontosaurus lost his shit! He told me that if I ever mentioned his name, let alone made fun of him, he would personally see to it that my career was ruined. He added, in English, “Mark my words, I will personally fuck you!” Ooo kinky!
We left the house. And right there in the street I told the owner in a calm voice that I would do this episode the way I wanted, and that if he didn’t like it he could terminate my contract. Tarek was not amused.
The next day I went to the office and finalized a special script about my dear stegosaurus friend, which became the second segment of the episode. The first was dedicated to my other good buddies, the Muslim Brotherhood.
They were using the Salafis to reshape the constitution to make it more Islamic. Morsi had prevented the Supreme Court from putting obstacles in the way of the new constitution. What was worse was how the Muslim Brotherhood had ordered its people to surround the Supreme Court building. They camped around it for weeks and prevented the judges from going in. This was a full-militia exploit. Since the police wouldn’t help him, he had his faithful soldiers do the dirty work.
The pilot of our show was a revolution that rippled throughout the television world. But the second episode was a revolutionary wave that railed against everything authoritarian. I crushed that veteran anchor, I personally went after Morsi, and I spared no sarcasm when skewering the Muslim Brotherhood and their militias.
I did that at the risk of the channel terminating my contract and also at the risk of going to jail. An article of Egyptian law that still existed from the Mubarak days stated you could go to jail for “insulting the president.” This is how Egyptian laws are: subjective, extremely ambiguous, and innovative in the ways in which they can lock you up and lose the key.
The channel didn’t air the episode, to avoid upsetting their anchor. Their explanation for the cancellation was because of “live coverage of street clashes.” People didn’t buy it. We went ahead and put it on YouTube as a little virtual fuck you. The views of this episode were in the millions. It was a lesson for the channel that censorship wouldn’t work with me. Under pressure from the audience, the channel backpedaled. They saw the viewership on YouTube going through the roof and everyone talking about this new show, and couldn’t afford not to air us.
That day, the establishment bowed its head to the will of the people. No more “moral police” dictating what people should watch anymore.
The show was now too powerful to be stopped. People gathered to watch it in cafés, like Super Bowl games. They didn’t watch us simply because we were funny, though. They watched us because they saw hope in the show—hope to challenge long-standing taboos and authority, whether that authority came in the form of a beard, or a tank, or a codger demanding, “Respect your elders.”