Banished from Egypt, comedian Bassem Youssef brings biting humour to JFL Vancouver
The “Jon Stewart of the Arab World” is a former heart surgeon now based in L.A.
Bassem Youssef.
Just For Laughs Vancouver (running February 16 to 25) presents Bassem Youssef on February 22 at 7 pm and February 23 at 9:30 pm at the Rio
EGYPTIAN-BORN, LOS ANGELES-based comedian Bassem Youssef comes up with material for his shows by mining his own life story—and what a story it is.
Long before the vegan Muslim funnyman became known as “the Jon Stewart of the Arab world”, Youssef spent many years working as a cardiothoracic surgeon in Cairo. After the Arab Spring erupted, he took to YouTube and, in 2011, began satirizing political leaders and other powerful people and critiquing the misinformation coming from mainstream media. The first of its kind in the Middle East, the program blew up, with millions of people tuning in. AlBernameg (“The Show”) became the region’s first online-to-TV conversion and continued attracting new viewers—some 30 million each week. (It’s still accessible on YouTube, Youssef’s channel having amassed close to 362 million views to date.)
The show also got Youssef into a lot of trouble.
“Because we were trying to crack jokes in a very difficult political climate, I ended up being arrested and having to be questioned about my jokes for six hours in an interrogation room, which at the time… It wasn’t that great,” Youssef says on the line from the California home he shares with his wife and two school-aged kids. “The regime changed, the show got cancelled a couple of times, and I went from being a public hero to public enemy number one, and I had to escape Egypt. And then I came to America to find Donald Trump becoming president.
“I don’t need to invent or make up anything for my material,” he adds.
Making his Just for Laughs Vancouver debut this month, Youssef gave up his career as a highly respected heart surgeon about a year after trying his hand at comedy full-time. (“I’m happy people come to me at their best times, not at their worst,” he says.) International recognition followed. He appeared opposite his idol on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2012 and 2013. The year 2013 turned out to be a big one for other reasons: Youssef hosted Stewart on AlBernameg in Cairo; was included on Time magazine’s most influential list under the “Pioneers” category; received the International Press Freedom Award from Citizens for Public Justice; and was named a global thinker by Foreign Policy magazine. He left Egypt in 2014.
While his journey has been nothing if not remarkable, Youssef says that his show is, in fact, one that people can relate to.
“It’s a very personal story, but it’s also very relatable,” Youssef says. “It’s relatable to people who may find themselves in very difficult situations, especially if they are always required to hold certain expectations when they want to do their own thing. So for the show, it doesn’t matter what they do or what their ethnicity or nationality is, because at the end of the day, we’re all travellers. We’re all immigrants. We all came from somewhere.”
Over the last several years in his adopted country, Youssef has served as a resident fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F Kennedy School of Government, appeared as a Senior Middle East Correspondent on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and hosted the 2015 International Emmy Awards gala. On Fusion Networks’ F-Comedy digital platform, he has hosted a series called The Democracy Handbook. (Check out his mock commercial below on “Breathe Easy”, a Breathalyzer-type device that allows Americans to determine how radical their Muslim neighbours are, on a scale from “likes hummus” to “supporter of ISIS”.) Youssef is a published author, Revolution for Dummies: Laughing Through the Arab Spring having come out in 2017. His story is the subject of the 2017 documentary Tickling Giants. And he has filmed a show called Ask Bassem, focusing on his passion for veganism and nutrition, for Saudi-owned television station Asharq.
Youssef, who says he loves living in L.A. (“the weather!”), is especially excited about his inaugural JFL performance taking place in Vancouver, his favourite Canadian city. (“The first thing I do when I get there is rent a bike and go around Stanley Park,” he says. “It’s my favourite thing to do. You can never beat that.”) His current one-man show, Late for Democracy, will see him travel to 10 European cities and several across the U.S. Even in the reddest of states, Youssef isn’t afraid to take on hot-button topics like gun violence. The point of his act isn’t to create any more divisions in society than there already are.
“I have been in places like, in the deepest South, places like Trumpland,” he says. “I make jokes about Trump or gun violence, and you would think people would react badly, but I’ve only had one or two bad hecklers. When I start doing my bit, they start to laugh, because here’s the thing: I think there is always a way to talk to people about something, even if they're uncomfortable, even if they’re protective. If you do it in a way to bring them in on the joke, to make them part of the joke, instead of making them the subject of the joke, they will laugh with you.
“People get in on the joke and become part of it, because they know that I don’t do this in a way that is mean or demeaning,” he says. “It’s basically, ‘We are on this ride together, and we are just having fun together.’ So usually, there is always a way. You’re not there to hurt anybody; you’re going there to give them a good time and to give them something to think about. It’s so much fun to make people laugh. It is such a blessing to have this opportunity. The live reaction in the theatre—there’s nothing that can top this.”
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