Stand-up comedians from Egypt

An Egyptian comic begins with an audience much wider than Egypt. A century of cinema, radio and television carried the Cairo dialect across the Arab world, so a set written in Egyptian Arabic is followed by people who could not produce a word of it themselves, and travels without being rewritten. That reach pulled the work here towards whatever broadcasts well.

The best known Egyptian comedy of the last generation was a desk, a camera and the week's news. Bassem Youssef, a heart surgeon, began posting satirical video filmed in his laundry room in 2011, carried the format onto television and built it into a programme played to a live studio audience, the first of its kind in the region; it ended in 2014. Youssef Hussein makes a weekly satirical show in the same line for a network outside the country, watched mostly as video. Satire here is a presenter's craft more than a club comic's.

Stand-up itself arrived later, and without rooms to play in. A touring American bill came through in 2007 and held auditions for local performers, and what grew out of that played culture centres and cafes rather than clubs, at first mostly in English. A comedy collective founded in 2011 began running open mic nights and mixed bills of stand-up, sketch and musical comedy, and later a school, which is where much of the working generation learned the form. Egypt has no chain of nightly comedy rooms, so an hour gets assembled across scattered dates and the rest of the output goes onto video.

That is why so many names here are video names first. Mina Nader, Salah El-Daly, Mohamed Salem and Taha Desouky work mostly in sketch and online series; Ahmed Amin came out of a clip that spread on social media into hosting and then acting; an Arabic edition of an American late night sketch show was produced in Egypt with a cast of local comedians. Bassem Youssef performs in Arabic and in English, while most of the others stay in the dialect.