| The heart surgeon behind the nation’s hit YouTube show is taking his satire to the TV studio By Farida Helmy |
| The media is constantly changing in Mubarak-free Egypt. The January 25 Revolution has not only brought out newfound freedoms and responsibilities for the local media, it has finally opened the door for some much-needed humor. Not the mindless humor we’ve become accustomed to over the years, but sharp witty humor that lampoons the hypocrisy of the government, the celebrities we blindly worship and the media industry as a whole.This raw and satire-ridden humor comes in the form of The Bassem Youssef Show aka The B+ Show, due to hit your television screens two days a week, every month, for the next year starting mid June. Modeled after The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The B+ Show has gained instant recognition and popularity post revolution for tackling issues that dumbfounded most of us during the 18 days of revolt. To quote Youssef’s inspiration Jon Stewart: “The press can bring its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire.” Bassem Youssef and his crew are opting to be that magnifying glass by adopting a comedy format unique to Egypt and raising the bar of accountability in the media. Overnight Sensation I met Bassem Youssef and his crew on location: In his apartment’s spare room, which Youssef’s wife Hala charitably agreed for them to use. The 37-year-old heart surgeon and his wife are warm hosts. In between takes, we finished off numerous platters of sushi they had ordered, and Youssef offered me a delicious cappuccino made in his brand-new coffee machine that he wanted to show off. “Now that you’ve had sushi and a cappuccino, I’ll keep reminding you of it if you don’t do us justice in your interview,” says Youssef teasingly, as he sets up the living room for our interview. Within two weeks of debuting online, The B+ Show has received nearly half a million hits and has already become one of the most-subscribed YouTube channels in Egypt. “Bassem was not a coincidence. The show isn’t just a group of friends posting videos online,” says Tarek Al Qazzaz, general manager at Baraka One Web and managing director of QSoft, the production company behind the show. The company posts original content on their allocated YouTube channels and creates profit by being a hub for creativity and ideas online. “The B+ show was planned,” says Al Qazzaz. “The idea was not to get a well-known presenter and team. I wanted to get a talented young director that had a new vision as opposed to business as usual. And with the nature of internet content, it had to very personal. It’s not one of those things that requires a lot of theatrics. Online you want someone that you can relate to, so if someone is successful with a crowd of five people in real life then, they’re internet material. Because at the end of the day, it’s one or two people in front of the computer screen.” The show is a collective effort by a small, dedicated group of people: executive producer Amr Ismail, cinematographer Tarek Abdel Hameed, director Mohammed Khalifa and, of course, the talent and mastermind behind the show, Bassem Youssef. With eight internet episodes to date, Youssef, who attended to the wounded in Tahrir Square during the revolution, has cemented his media future with a TV deal with ONTV. Several other satellite TV stations are waiting in the wings to scoop up the show if anything goes wrong. That shouldn’t be a surprise to fans: Youssef has the right balance between snarky and sincere to make it big on TV, and become every sarcastic woman’s secret crush. “The television format will be different than our previous short five- to eight-minute episodes, it will be a half-hour show,” Youssef says. “We will have others appearing on the show as well. It won’t just be me and clips I find on the internet anymore, which is great because it will be open to anyone with talent. But we will still be closely connected with the internet — it’s where we started.” “We will also have slots for field reports, fake correspondents and interesting guests and celebrities. I know it pretty much resembles the Jon Stewart format,” adds Youssef with a smile. “I like Jon Stewart’s show a lot, I’m inspired by [it]. When I went to the States, and even when I came back to Egypt, the one thing I would never miss was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Show and The Colbert Report.” At that moment, Hala gets up and pulls a Jon Stewart book from their library. “That’s how much he really loves him,” she tells me. After some playful banter between husband and wife, Youssef puts on his serious face to discuss the lightest of subjects — humor. “I always thought we lacked these sorts of shows in Egyptian media, those that make fun of people,” he says. “We all have egos, but we need to accept that people can make fun of us. But, unfortunately, we have this problem here, which is funny considering that laughter and humor are a big part of who we are as Egyptians.” Come Together (Right Now) Over Me Landing a TV deal is an achievement for Youssef and his crew, and all of them are jittery with excitement about going nationwide. Youssef, however, is scared, admitting: “It’s a huge responsibility, and I hope I can pull it off.” Al Qazzaz thinks Youssef really has nothing to worry about. “The B+ Show was made for internet TV at first, but we soon realized the show was TV material. We had planned for the show to be TV material within three months of it coming out, but it only took three weeks,” says Al Qazzaz. “All the TV channels were calling us to get Bassem to appear on TV. It was one of those very unexpected success stories in terms of timing. The investment really is in the brand: Bassem Youssef. We want this brand to spread across all possible mediums. In media, content is king, and Bassem’s content, writing and performance really is king.” Khalifa, the young director of the show, was introduced to Youssef and the rest of the crew when producer Ismail called him about a show they wanted him to shoot. With more than five years directing TV shows under his belt, Khalifa was excited at the chance to work on a new show, especially after the red lines and censorship Egyptian media was accustomed to was in a serious state of flux. “Everything being said on the show is the truth, and Bassem is very good at that,” Khalifa says. “With such a show, you can’t give the host a script to read from. It won’t feel real to the audience. Bassem was ready with everything when I came onboard; the show was built around his vision of it.” Blue-eyed Beginner Youssef has no previous experience in media, but after the revolution he felt there was much that needed to be said. “The revolution was one of those things that was extremely shocking in so many ways,” he says. “To see the media being [prostituted] in that way was phenomenal.” “I know Tarek says that this show was a planned and well-thought-out one, but it wasn’t like that for me. I thought it was going to be a fluke. He had a vision that we would make it big in three months; to me it was purely a coincidence. I was just trying my luck,” says Youssef. “I was a doctor with not much time on my hands, but my friends would always tell me that when I sat with a group of people they liked to listen to what I had to say.” An old friend of Youssef’s, Al Qazzaz already knew that and wanted to capitalize on it. He asked Youssef to write something for a show he wanted to create online, and that was how The B+ Show came to life. “All I had to do was sit on YouTube and gather video clips of the media coverage during the revolution that I felt I had to make fun of,” Youssef says. “I wrote the script at first in an unprofessional way and Khalifa [because he’s a great director] helped me to [revamp] it for the screen. The first day of shooting was a disaster. We had no script; all I had were handwritten scribbles. Thankfully, the effort we put into the show paid off, and resonated with the audience.” When Youssef and the crew went to shoot an episode in Tahrir Square, though, they felt that popularity in full force when fans from different socio-economic backgrounds started running after Youssef to take pictures of him or with him. But the biggest surprise for the crew was the religiously conservative fans praising Youssef for the controversial “Episode 7,” which addressed sectarian issues, as well as focusing on how people judged each other according to their differences. “They told us that they were used to liberals on TV attacking Islamists, and that they would never differentiate between Salafis, Ikhawanis, moderates and Sufis. There are liberal religious conservatives. There are fundamental Christians. There are also fundamental liberals. And what we tried to tackle in the episode was positively transformed to the masses,” says Ismail. “People came up to us and thanked us because they felt that they had been stereotyped for so long. The American media portrays them as terrorists and the local media doesn’t cover them correctly. And that was the point of ‘Episode 7,’ which has become one of our most popular episodes,” says Youssef. “Yes, it broke most of our norms: It was long, it wasn’t as funny and it ended on a very serious and dramatic note. It was also really emotional. We criticized everybody, and then we made everybody feel good about themselves. What we tried to do was highlight a feeling of togetherness between the Egyptian people.” The reaction from the people in Tahrir Square proves our society is thirsty for this sort of media, a media that can be both critical and entertaining — they can coexist. |
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