Bassem Youssef
speaker
1,048 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard 5 Jun
Bassem Youssef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then the central, oh, you left. You gave up. You were a sellout. You were a coward. Why don't you speak from abroad? You're safe now. I already spoke. I don't want to be, because I don't want to be an activist. I was doing that for comedy when it was good for everybody. But now they want me to go into YouTube and just like throw rocks from outside. I was like, you know what, I understand.
I have family there. And it was this kind of like thing like that I am being... like attacked for not doing what I should do in their face and attacked for not being funny and not doing good.
And now I'm feeling like maybe it was wrong and I was, I didn't know, I really, it was so traumatic that I don't know actually how I went through these years and I blocked so many details from my brain because I have been using this technique for a while now that I have been erasing a lot of my, there is a lot of memory gaps in my brain.
And I'm trying to suppress it because it was very, very, very traumatic. And a lot of people told me you have to go to therapy, but I don't, I can't, I don't know. I'm worried to open the floodgates. And I'm thinking as if I'm functional and I'm not killing anybody, I'm okay.
Imagine when you're 45, 46, and then people are like, is this his midlife crisis? What is this? I went through a lot of pain and a lot of, like, the doubts, and it was terrible.
Because I started that. And the only reason that I could is to continue. I don't know what else to do. I don't want to go back to medicine. I don't want to do that. And I don't know. And bit by bit, bit by bit, I started to kind of like be better, be better, be better.
And I was at a certain time a year ago, a year ago, this is where I started to kind of like hone the craft and kind of sell more tickets and sometimes even sell out some shows and sometimes sell a theater. So like it was going and the money was flowing and it was good. And then I was like, why didn't, I wanted faster, I wanted more, I wanted now, I want Netflix deal or whatever.
And then the Piers Morgan thing happened and then I blew up. And then suddenly I'm selling out everywhere. And it's like, ah, if those people came, if the war happened two years ago, I will not be ready. So now they come to the show, and by the way, my show had nothing to do with the October 7th. My show is my thing that I've been crafting and working on.
You know how difficult it is to do the first hour the hour that I've been working on for five years. And it's all my personal story, all about what happened to me in Egypt, me as an immigrant coming here to the United States, finding Trump as a president, finding myself in the middle of a gun rally, finding myself in the middle of a bombing, kind of like talking about how I got my citizenship.
It's all like funny stories, like my origin story. So they come in and they expect October 7th and all this is my personal story, but it's good and it kills and they love it. It's like if that kind of like blew up in America happened to me two, three years ago,
I'm telling you, one of the funniest thing, a guy, I was in Dubai, and like a TV anchor came to me, Basim Youssef, he flourishes during revolutions and wars.
So when I was doing the English first, I was, I actually had good jokes, but I was missing the delivery because the cadence and the music and the rhythm is different. The way that an English speaking American member of audience will receive it, it will be different than how I receive it. The energy, everything's different. So when I kind of like got it, I didn't know how to switch back to Arabic.
Because here's the thing, with English stand-up comedy, you have a huge library. You have like a legacy. You have like years and years and years of people doing comedy. But in Arabic, it's very new to us. And most of the Arabic stand-up comedy, especially in Egypt, is very tamed. This is kind of like, imagine the stand-up comedy scene in American 1960s before Lenny Bruce.
No swearing, nothing conservative, everything. It's kind of like very... So... I didn't know what to do with Arabic. So I broke the barriers. I became Danny Bruce, I became George Collins.
For me, 15 words. Arabic is a very rich language. So when I did, here's the difference between the Arabic and the English show. The English show, surprise, surprise, is a unifying language. even for a group of Arabs.
So if I give the same exact show to the same 1,000 audience members in the same theater, and they're the same people, same makeup of like Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, Saudis, English will be a unifying language. Arabic is a dividing language because you have 22 dialects and the dialects are vastly different. And like maybe Egyptians understand a little bit of Lebanese, but not that much.
But the references, Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, totally different animal. That's like a totally different language. Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti, totally different. People understand the Egyptian dialect because it's the dialect of most of the artwork and the movies, but the reference in the everyday street talk might not be understood by them. So now I have to go in
and talk to all of these dialects together. So I formed my, big part of my show is like, what are you guys expecting of this? This is what, this is, we gonna, when I go do profanity and you're gonna like it? This is the problem with the show as a dialect, and I construct all of these sentences formed of so different, different words. For example, an iron. In any Arabic dialect, it's an iron.
In Saudi Arabia, it means ass. That's one example. That's one example. So imagine if you can actually construct sentences having all of these things in one sentence. So I would construct a whole section of my show about that.
And the limits of language. And I tell them, part of the show is like, I know what's the problem with me doing Arabic. It's like, if this was an English show and I was telling you fucking shit, I bet you'll be, ha, ha, ha. But if I do one swear word, all of you will scream shit. It's like, why? Is it because we are ashamed of our own language?
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