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, Mussolini, 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.