The Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef grudgingly ended his popular show Al Bernameg in the wake of increasing political pressure last year, but the Middle East's leading political comedian-cum-commentator is not giving up his soapbox just yet.
In addition to a recent appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – not as a guest being interviewed, but as a commentator – it appears that the close ties Youssef has built with the programme in recent years are paying big dividends.
The National has learned that the show's senior producer, Sara Taksler, has been in Egypt secretly filming a documentary called Tickling Giants, about Youssef and his popular show.
Having finished the clandestine filming in Egypt, Taksler is now ready to go public with news of her project, and has announced an attempt to fund part of the budget through the crowd-sourcing website Indiegogo.
“Until we recently finished filming we were not discussing the film at all on social media, because of safety concerns for the crew,” she says on the site. “Because the government of Egypt had begun checking hard drives, to get our last drive out of Egypt, we had someone unrelated to the film fly our footage out of the country so it could be downloaded.”
Taksler, who is hoping to raise US$150,000 (Dh550,954) of the film’s $400,000 budget through the crowdfunding campaign, explains that the project is a feature-length, exclusive, independent documentary about Youssef, “the so-called ‘Egyptian Jon Stewart’”.
"Tickling Giants is about one man standing up to an entire regime with no weapon but his biting wit," she says. "Facing great opposition, Bassem and his staff risk their safety to tell jokes. I was drawn to this story because this is a group of people who do the same sorts of things I do as a senior producer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but with much higher stakes.
“As we’ve seen in recent events, it is horrifying to see how dangerous it can be to tell a joke.”
In The Daily Show episode broadcast on Monday last week, Youssef appeared alongside Stewart to hilariously discuss what the US could do to help the situation in the Middle East (in a nutshell: go away, but keep giving us money).
Youssef has yet to comment on the film, but he told The National at last December's Dubai International Film Festival he is now based in Dubai.
This month he announced on Twitter that he is to join the The Institute of Politics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a resident fellow for the spring term, meaning that he’ll be close enough to Stewart and the Daily Show team in New York to potentially become a regular contributor.
Youssef is a long-standing fan of the host, and vice-versa. In April 2013 Stewart devoted 11 minutes of his half-hour show to the news that a warrant had been issued for Youssef’s arrest in Egypt.
The former heart surgeon, who is often referred to as “the Egyptian Jon Stewart”, readily admits that both his show and his comedy persona are heavily influenced on the American host.
At the height of Al Bernameg's popularity, Youssef was pulling in 30 million viewers an episode, compared with The Daily Show's two million.
cnewbould@thenational.ae
