Bassem Youssef discusses conservative culture, toxic fame and why it’s not up to him, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert to clean up the mess in the Middle East

Call it comic timing: a Daily Show-style fake news show, shot in a laundry room, posted online in January 2011, days after surging protests had unseated Egypt’s regime.



“It just exploded. Exploded everywhere. Everyone was watching it,” recalls Bassem Youssef, the Cairo surgeon turned satirist who helmed the show. “I thought I’d have maybe 10,000 views. I ended up having 5 million.”



By episode three, Youssef had scored a TV show, where he would eventually be watched by up to 30 million people as he sent up the country’s media and its new Islamist, and then military leaders.

The 41-year-old is in Sydney this week to deliver the Chaser lecture. Youssef has been doing lots of travelling since he left Egypt last year. If his TV run was unexpected, its end was less so: Youssef quit the program in June 2014, worried about his family, saying the political climate in Egypt was no longer “suitable for political satire”.

Now an evangelist for the power of satire – it is the subject of Monday’s lecture – Youssef puts a surprising emphasis on its limits. “A lot of people tend to glorify the role of satire and comedians. They put them up as role models, as fighters for the truth and against tyranny, and I think that’s overrated,” he tells Guardian Australia.

Laughing in the face of danger: the state of satire in the Muslim world Read more

“The importance of satire is bringing more people to the table. There are a lot of average citizens who aren’t interested in politics, and would be more interested if it’s brought to them in a comedic, funny, satirical way.”

His three-year run was pioneering, especially in the Middle East, where Youssef says cultures are “rooted in patriarchal authority, like I’m the father, the leader, and you can’t make fun of me”.

“In these cultures ridicule is very dangerous,” he says.

He was briefly arrested in April 2013, accused of insulting Islam and Egypt’s then-president, Mohamed Morsi. (Youssef did not miss the opportunity, showing up to the prosecutor’s office in an oversized model of a cap Morsi had recently worn when awarded an honorary doctorate.)



Rania Berro (@Ayonadre) satirist Bassem Youssef arrives at High Court wearing outsized version of hat worn by President Morsi in Pakistan pic.twitter.com/cZCMvvSwIh

But he gives the impression his struggle was as much against Egypt’s cloying, conservative culture, as its repressive leaders. “We didn’t have a space for satire in Egypt. We carved out our own space. We had to fight for it,” he says.

We didn’t have a space for satire in Egypt. We carved out our own space

“And because there’s no platform, no space or infrastructure for that kind of satire to be accepted, we were basically pushed out ... We are up against generations of people who don’t have this kind of mindset. That’s why it was an uphill battle for us.”

Youssef and his writers lampooned Morsi mercilessly, but were always conscious of the culture’s red lines, he says. “We need to do our job at satirists but at the same time we don’t want to alienate people. So for example, when we had a religious fascist government, we had to make fun of them, but not to cross the line and make people think we were making fun of religion.”

A July 2013 coup by the country’s strongman army chief, now president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, brought what he carefully calls “the second kind of government”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Ridicule is very dangerous’: Bassem Youssef. Photograph: Alia " Coucla" Refaat/HWP

“[Now] we had to make fun, but at the same time we didn’t want to insult the army, because the army is even more sacred than religion. And sometimes you would do a joke and even the joke would be too pervasive – not for the censors, but for the culture,” he says.



Political satire has enjoyed a cultural resurgence these past 15 years, as derision became an appealing way to process a tumultuous era rife with political blunders from the 2003 invasion of Iraq on. But the brand of political comedy embodied by Jon Stewart – and drawn on heavily by Youssef – is not without its critics.

Steve Almond wrote in the Baffler in 2012 that Stewart’s schtick was evidence of an audience “gone to lard morally”, and a betrayal of comedy’s radical impulses. He argued Stewart’s nightly mockery of the war in “Mess O’Potamia” made a sitcom of Bush’s misadventures, acting as a pressure valve for frustrated Americans, who might otherwise have taken action.

“Why take to the streets when Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert are on the case? It’s a lot easier, and more fun, to experience the war as a passive form of entertainment than as a source of moral distress requiring citizen activism,” Almond wrote.

Youssef’s blue eyes flash at this suggestion. “At least Colbert and Stewart have done their part. They’ve shown the defects, they’ve made fun, shown you what’s really going on.

“The fact people don’t then go out, it’s really not [Stewart’s] fault. This is too much pressure, too much burden on the satirist. He has a job, a timeslot, and he explains it to people in his way, and it’s up to the people to do it. The fact that the people didn’t do it, you need to blame the people,” he says.

It’s a quietly rumbling fault line between high profile political satirists and their audiences, who can look to the comedians for answers, or to lead. It’s a pressure that builds with success, Youssef says.

“The bigger you become of a celebrity the bigger the expectations, the pressure on you – to make change, to say what people want, to target the people they want to target.

“Fame is toxic, it is quite toxic,” he says.

Today Youssef is stationed in Dubai, and recently finished a stint as a fellow at Harvard. No satirists have sprung up in Egypt in his place. But he says the forces that toppled Mubarak, and propelled him to fame, cannot be resisted for long.

Fame is toxic, it is quite toxic

“This is the conundrum of the present regimes in the Arab world. They still want to control youth, they want to be in control as they did in the 1950s and 60s. But that doesn’t work anymore,” he says.

“Now with just a Wi-Fi link, you can understand what’s happening in the world. And this is why there’s a totally different reality from the mindset of authorities. For them, Facebook is the biggest threat ever. They would love to close down Twitter and Facebook tomorrow. And I’m sure, if they weren’t afraid of a total economic meltdown, they would have closed the internet totally.”

• The 16th inaugural Chaser Lecture is at Sydney Town Hall on 9 November