In a now-viral interview, satirist and television host Bassem Youssef, widely heralded as “Egypt's Jon Stewart,” appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on Tuesday and skillfully used dark humor to expose the depths of the Palestinian dehumanization, anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia that’s been foregrounded and exacerbated by the Israel-Hamas war.
Bassem Youssef skillfully used dark humor to expose the depths of Palestinian dehumanization.
“Their house also was bombed,” Youssef said of his Palestinian wife’s family in the Gaza Strip. “You know those Palestinians, they’re very dramatic: ‘Ahh, Israelis killing us!’ But they never die. … They are … very difficult people to kill. I know because I’m married to one. I tried many times — couldn’t kill her.”
When an obviously uncomfortable Morgan mentioned Youssef’s “dark humor,” he said, “It’s not dark humor. I tried to get to her, but she uses our kids as human shields; I can never take her out.”
In joking that his wife is using their children as shields, Youssef refers here to how propaganda about human shields has been deployed consistently through the decadeslong Middle East conflict, often to justify Israel killing innocent Palestinian civilians. This assertion has been hotly contested throughout the years and questioned by some journalists. Israel, as reported by The Associated Press in 2007, used Palestinians as human shields in violation of international law and a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court.
When Morgan asked, “How do we get from where we are now to peace?” Youssef attacked the line of thought that’s been expressed by politicians, such as Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who has described the conflict as one between “good and evil.”
“Now, if you’ve already decided someone is good, he can do no evil,” Youssef said. “And if you decide someone is evil, it’s good to kill them. Killing them is good.”
He continued:
Westerners have always dealt like this with Indigenous people. You first treat them like savages — you know, Native Americans, First Nations, Aboriginals. ‘They’re savages! Kill all the savages!’ And then when they’re almost extinct, you start feeling sorry for them … you know, like animals. So maybe the solution is that we kill as many Palestinians as possible so the few of them that remain do not bother you … and you will campaign for preserving the three Palestinians left.
Youssef’s comedy, as he showed in that appearance with Morgan, isn’t intended to make us laugh. It is intended to make us feel agony and to provoke people who blithely mouth Western talking points about Palestinians to question their assumptions.
With humor, he adeptly reduces colonial ideology to a few uncomfortable sentences.
Throughout the interview, he used a similarly irreverent tone to question Israel’s endgame and took jabs at Western media narratives that perpetuate anti-Arab and anti-Muslim tropes.
Youssef’s interview with Morgan had 15 million views on Morgan’s YouTube page by Friday afternoon and millions of views on TikTok, reaching far corners of the internet. Egyptian-Iraqi British political consultant Hafsa Halawa, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on human rights and political economy, wrote on the social media platform X that Youssef “expresses what the region is thinking: this conflict didn’t begin on 7 Oct, and it cannot be explained, described, or situated only through the lens of 7 Oct. That isn’t justifying, or defending, it’s just fact.”
Youssef’s interview is especially significant because, as Muslims (and people such as myself who are culturally Muslim) can tell you, much of the news we encounter about this war has a notable pro-Israeli bias and anti-Palestinian bias, a trend that predates this most recent war.
Since time immemorial, humor has been a highly effective tool for oppressed classes to call out their oppressors.
So, what made this method of engagement so successful? Since time immemorial, humor has been a highly effective tool for oppressed classes to call out their oppressors. It can be playful, it can be irreverent, and it is often unifying. As philosopher Mark W. Roche wrote in Revue Internationale de Philosophie in 2002, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw “comedy as the negation of negativity or the mockery of an untenable position.”
In “Is It OK to Laugh About It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israeli Culture,” Liat Steir-Livny describes how Holocaust humor is used by Holocaust survivors and their descendants as a defense mechanism and to subvert the narrative — and feeling — of victimization. “In that sense, Holocaust humor in Israel also reflects two additional major functions: a vent for frustration; and a mechanism for social cohesion,” Steir-Livny writes. Similarly, Youssef uses humor in his interview to achieve both. The interview’s popularity throughout the Arab diaspora evinces humor’s ability to function as a means for social cohesion during particularly divisive and painful times.
Jamil Khader, a Palestinian English professor and dean of research at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, argues in his essay “Reloading Laughter: Žižek and a Theory of Comedy” that humor can be a tool for liberation. Quoting the philosopher John Morreall, Khader wrote: “Moreover, (emancipatory) comedy and philosophy oppose ‘blind belief and unquestioning obedience’ and question, or reject, authority and tradition.”
Youssef isn’t alone. With its piece called “Israel Military Reports It Was You, The Reader, Who Blew Up Hospital,” the American satire website The Onion reminded us that Israeli accounts of who killed whom warrant skepticism. The article references the deadly explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday. Israel claims it was the result of an errant rocket from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a claim the U.S. supports.
Wars are almost always justified in moralistic terms, which necessitate a binaristic worldview: good vs. evil.
Israeli military claims have been the focus of debate in the past. In May 2022, for instance, when Palestinian journalist, American citizen and Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was killed, Israel initially claimed she was killed by Palestinian gunfire. It was only months later that the Israel Defense Forces said it was most likely that she was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. A year later, no one in Israel’s army had been prosecuted, and no disciplinary action had been announced. Israel had vowed in November 2022 not to cooperate in an FBI investigation into the journalist’s death, an investigation it called “a grave mistake.”
Wars, particularly unjust ones, are almost always justified in moralistic terms, which necessitate a binaristic worldview: good vs. evil, enlightened vs. savage, defenders of freedom vs. terrorists, etc. But in an unserious yet serious way, Youssef's Piers Morgan interview dismantled the absurdist nature of transmuting vastly complex issues into two-dimensional realities and pushed those who may have been resistant into uncomfortable nuance. That’s what good humor does. It probes, it critiques, it questions — all of which are fundamental threats to anyone or anything which seeks to oppress others.