Satire Is Deadly to Toxic Regimes | Bassem Youssef

Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef has known two kinds of fear - one good and one bad. Youssef's new show is "Democracy Handbook" ().
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Transcript - There's always the fear of failure. Fear of failure I think that was my biggest nightmare. When people tell me like you were persecuted like there was like a warrant for your arrest. I didn't really care about that, what I was always worried about is that the next show will not to be as good; that we are not going to perform. I remember like when I was taken to questioning for six hours I told my team if we did a bad show they would win. So I was always worried about making the best job I can do because that's basically your capital. If you're not good enough nobody will really care about you. And I always thought of this as my biggest support.
So maybe you could call this a creative fear, but it was the fear of failure, the fear of judgment. Especially in the society that we're living in right now when people are very, very, very fast to judge there is basically absolutely no mercy, I imagine that maybe some of the veteran legends in entertainment if they had social media 30, 40, 50 years ago people would be very unforgiving and maybe their career would have ended very fast very soon. Like we see now I think social media is a huge driver of that fear. You know people's opinion instantly and it can crush someone, it can crush people, it can end people's career even. So on a personal level that was my fear, fear of failure. On a bigger level there's another kind of fear, which is the fear that is the biggest asset of any fascist government, and it doesn't really matter if you are a person living under a dictatorship in the Middle East or under a right wing government anywhere else in the Western World where they use fear, patriotism and xenophobia to drive the masses.
It's the same thing, fear is an incredible mover of the masses. It brainwashes people. It makes people accept and even vote or something that's against their own personal interests totally out of fear. And speaking about that particular point, it is the same reason why fascisms have a very poor sense of humor because when you have satire you're not afraid anymore. They don't want you thinking – they don't want you to think and laugh, they want you to be in constant state of fear. If you're laughing at them you're basically laughing at their brainwashing techniques, at their use of fear and it's not effective anymore, but if they don't want that. As a matter of fact there have been stories about I think Hitler, one of the first people that he abolished were the serialists and the satirists. I don't know if that's true or not but it sounds intelligent so I'm going to say it. That's why satire is an incredible antidote to fear and the people in power they will try to belittle you; they will call you a joke, a clown, a fool, but in the process of doing that they're making a fool out of their selves, they're becoming the clown and they are the ones who are becoming a joke.