--- title: Bassem Youssef's TIME 100 Toast | TIME description: Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef proposes a toast to his fellow honorees and talks about the difficult times in his home country at the TIME 100 Gala. canonical: https://time.com/video/80IIWZfy/ og:title: Bassem Youssef's TIME 100 Toast og:description: Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef proposes a toast to his fellow honorees and talks about the difficult times in his home country at the TIME 100 Gala. og:url: https://time.com/video/80IIWZfy/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/80IIWZfy/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Bassem Youssef's TIME 100 Toast twitter:description: Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef proposes a toast to his fellow honorees and talks about the difficult times in his home country at the TIME 100 Gala. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/80IIWZfy/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Bassem Youssef's TIME 100 Toast > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Bassem Youssef's TIME 100 Toast [Watch (HLS stream): Bassem Youssef's TIME 100 Toast](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/80IIWZfy.m3u8) (3:59)  _Published 2013-04-24. Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef proposes a toast to his fellow honorees and talks about the difficult times in his home country at the TIME 100 Gala._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:33 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Watch: Bassem Youssef on Bringing His Comedy and Culture to the U.S.](/video/TikOxvwD/) ### Watch: Bassem Youssef on Bringing His Comedy and Culture to the U.S. [Jimmy Kimmel's TIME 100 Toast](/video/hgzePBD4/) ### Jimmy Kimmel's TIME 100 Toast [Egypt and the Arrest of Bassem Youssef](/video/nXfXNNuv/) ### Egypt and the Arrest of Bassem Youssef --- ## Transcript I would like to thank the academy. Okay, wrong party, I'm sorry. In 2001, when I was, learning to be, a heart surgeon and making a living out of cutting people open, I used all the time that I had to I mean the free time of course, to watch John Stewart. One revolution, 12 years, and a whole Arab Spring later, I'm mentioned in the same sentence as his name is mentioned. My show is being compared to his, and to make it even more sweeter, he wrote my entry to the Time 100 list. For me, this is what our dreams are made of. John has been a great inspiration, a continued, he will continue to be, my continuous inspiration in a, in a totally non- sexual way, [ LAUGH ] I mean he's not, he's not that sexy. [ INAUDIBLE ] Anyways, being the nerd that I am, I looked up the meaning of the word, sarcasm, and it comes from the Greek word, sarcasmus, which means to flesh, to peel someone's skin, to dissect. So my old profession as a heart surgeon caught up with me. And the thing is, fascists, and, dictators and extreme religions leaders do not like sarcasm. First of all, they don't have a good sense of humor to begin with [ LAUGH ]. And, and, and 2nd of all, and 2nd of all, because it peels off their crap, [ LAUGH ] or another, the bull. it, it, it, it takes away their fake holiness and it takes away, their fake rhetoric. I remember a story that I read once in Medieval France. In Paris, there was a joker who, took to the streets making fun of authority, making fun of the, church that was actually controlling over the country. The sermons on Sundays didn't work to make people get away from him. He was too popular to be killed or jailed. So the priest thought of something to alienate people from humor, from the sarcasm. He invited the joker inside the church and he told him, in the basement of the church there are hundreds of books, thousands of books, the human heritage. There's so many books about comedy, about philosophy, from the Greeks, from the Romans. You need to freshen up your material. So he stayed there for weeks and he was reading the books. He was so happy. Incredible books. He didn't know that the priest has painted all the pages with poison. Few weeks later, he was found dead amongst open books of comedy. So the priest invited the fans of the joker inside and he said, see? I've told you, sarcasm and humor are abominations. God doesn't want you to laugh. So the, moral of the story is that thank God nowadays that we have iPods and i -, iPads and, and, and Kindle, so that will never happen again. I, I, my country goes now through a very difficult time, but I still have hope. We might be not in the best position to be very sarcastic, but I know that we, we pissed some people off, which means that our sarcasm is cutting deep into their flesh, into their fake rhetoric, so hopefully, things will get better. And hopefully we will have our own Egyptian version of that Gala 100 dinner. We'll invite you all into the pyramid. And my brother, John Stewart, will be the MC and he will tell you, welcome to the Egyptian the version of the Gala 100 dinner. There's only halal food, there's no alcohol. [ LAUGH ] However, we gonna have an extremely good belly dancing show for you. Thank you very much. [ LAUGH ] [ SOUND ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Bassem Youssef's TIME 100 Toast","description":"Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef proposes a toast to his fellow honorees and talks about the difficult times in his home country at the TIME 100 Gala.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/80IIWZfy/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-04-24T05:08:18.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/80IIWZfy.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/80IIWZfy/","duration":"PT3M59S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/80IIWZfy/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```