your governments instead of just like individuals who only have themselves to look after. but i think it is very hypocritical for governments to talk a lot about democracy and then go and support the same regimes that are not democratic. it s a powerful point. so my final brief question to you is where do you actually feel more comfortable living in the united states, as you do today, or reflecting on the life you had in egypt? i have in the beginning of the show, i said, i look forward, and i don t have any regrets about the past. and in the same time, i don t dwell about the past. i have lived an interesting journey so far, and i m very, very happy with what i ve done, very proud of my kids and my family having to endure what i have. but i have actually come to a place where i feel comfortable. this is the place where i m raising my kids. we are proud of our origins as egyptians, but we also very, very appreciative of the new identity and the new
to ask and much, perhaps, less easy to answer, but did you feel any sense of guilt walking away from egypt when you knew that thousands and thousands of civil society activists, human rights campaigners, journalists and others were continuing to try to do their work in the country? and, of course, many of them were being arrested, and many, many of them remain behind bars today in sisi s authoritarian egypt. did you feel any sense that, you know, it was the easy option to go away? would you rather that i stayed and be injail would that have helped those people come out ofjail? i mean, i don t understand. it s a very interesting question why would i feel any guilt? no, it s a question only based on a very complex, i imagine, decision you had to make about leaving your homeland at a time when you could. yeah, there was a decision, there was a verdict against me,
and that verdict would have jeopardised my freedom, and i had to leave in the nick of time because the verdict was actually produced at 12 noon, and i left egypt at 5pm. so it took me five hours to leave. and, yeah, and i don t think that staying there in egypt would have improved the conditions ofjournalists or activists or the civil society. it would just, like, have had, like, added one more person. and i think staying there would not. and this is, again, this comes to my point of putting too much responsibility of someone who was trying to do comedy. political satire should not be dangerous, political satire should not be a statement for someone to go to prison so people can say, oh, you did yourjob, bravo. because, at the end of the day, if i would have, if my freedom would havejeopardised. none of those civil society people who have, like. i would have actually helped them to get out. so i think it s very easy to sit down and judge other people for the decisions in the comfort
in countries where satire is not really established, you re really putting your life out there. and when push comes to shove, when my show was stopped, nobody went out in the streets to kind of like demand that the show is back and i don t want to demand that from them because there s that much they can do, but they instead they kind of like blame people who couldn t continue any more, instead ofjust like doing something about it. interesting that you refer to putting your life on the line. i mean, particularly in a society like egypt was and egypt still is, if you poke fun at power, you are actually doing something potentially quite dangerous in a very literal sense. ijust wonder, again, when you reflect on what you did, whether you were perhaps preoccupied with the danger that you saw to egypt coming from the islamist political factions, and particularly the muslim brotherhood, rather than
performance of their politician or the performance of the serious media, that they turn into comedians. and then, suddenly they start to get their news from comedians, and then, suddenly they put those comedians in a position of leadership. and this is very, very dangerous. and i know it is much more fun to laugh at people that we don t like, but a lot of people become complacent and they sit back waiting for comedians to do the whole job. and this is a very, very skewed way to look at things. that s a very interesting thing you re saying. are you suggesting as you ve obviously had a lot of time to reflect on this, that that your satire in egypt and maybe the satire of comedians likejon stewart and john oliver in the united states, is it sometimes actually, even though it seems to be confronting power, it s actually giving power a little bit of comfort because it s a safety valve, it allows people to let off steam, to feel that they re being critical without actually doing anything to