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.”