BRIDGE Summit: Bassem Yousef says satire isn't meant to fix the world

Celebrated political satirist Bassem Yousef said he will continue to "make jokes at the powerful" but clarified that satire does not attempt to change world issues "because it was not designed to".

During his solo, stand-up session titled ‘A Decade of Satire. Did It Work?' at BRIDGE Summit 2025, Yousef highlighted how he has been in a "peculiar position" as a comedian because it's his "political views" that go viral, and not his "jokes".

"For some reason, people take my jokes more seriously than they should," he admitted. 

He talks about how his "TikTok video gets more engagement than a UN resolution. Where a comedian's Instagram post about Gaza gets more traction than a 50-page Amnesty International Report."

The acclaimed storyteller turned the question ‘Did Satire Work’ to how it has worked, referring to the use of irony as a shared language of resistance.

Playing on the word "power", the rhetorician talks about how the world often turns to "comedians, not because we know better, but because comedians are the only ones doing their job, which is simply making fun of a broken world.

"And that led to people taking comedy more seriously while serious people became the joke. But does that mean satire worked? Satire didn't fix things because it wasn't funny enough, or because we didn't try hard enough, or because the jokes weren't sharp enough. Satire failed because we expected it to do something it was never designed to do."

Calling satire "an exaggerated reflection of reality", Yousef explained that its role "isn't (to start) a revolution, it's not policy, it's not going to feed the hungry or stop the wars or fix the climate, but it does something, something smaller, but maybe it's more important. It keeps us human. It reminds us that we can still laugh even when everything is falling apart.". 

After asking himself if it worked, Youssef said satire did have an impact, but not in the way hoped. “It worked in the only way it could. It kept us paying attention, it kept us laughing instead of breaking, it kept us human in a system designed to turn us into mindless consumers, workers and silent spectators. And maybe, just maybe, that has to be enough," he said. 

Concluding his session, Yousef said to prevent a world without laughter, he will continue to create jokes on those in power with the hope of making the slightest of change. 

The inaugural edition of BRIDGE Summit 2025 concluded on Wednesday after a successful 3-day run in Abu Dhabi.