Arab Media & Society

October, 2007.  Picture the scene. We are inside Syria’s monolithic Education Ministry witnessing a highly charged committee meeting, convened to tackle one of the country’s most entrenched problems: overcrowding at state universities. All too willing

to apply an absurdly cold logic in the matter, a logic that is likely familiar to Syrian viewers at home, the committee plans to make university tests so difficult that hardly any students are able to pass. The committee members are enthusiastic as they review their options but tension arises as they compete for the approval of the minister, who chairs the session. A female bureaucrat who offers her proposals on how to wage psychological war against the students giggles and squirms like someone receiving physical or sexual pleasure from the idea of failing so many young people. Meanwhile, the committee members exhibit other subtle nervous tics and expressions that add a garish unease to the proceedings. The sketch cuts quickly to examination day, and the proctors are Nazi-like characters who terrorize the students into abject fear and fainting spells. A male student is caught cheating after a miles-long crib sheet inside his clothing is discovered; a female student screams at her oppressor: “If you’re really a teacher, then YOU answer these questions!!”

These images and dialogue epitomize the spirit of Syria’s most popular television sketch comedy, Spotlight (Buq‘at Daw’), in its first Ramadan series of 2001. Combining lively jumps between different settings (ministry, schools, hospital), the use of many actors (15 speaking parts), and a willingness to take things to their illogical conclusion, the sketch Imtihanat (Exams) is typical of the fresh, egalitarian and modernist sensibility Spotlight has brought to Syrian television. The absurd but all-too-real portrayal of Syria’s anxiety-inducing, nationwide end-of-year school exams not only demonstrates the show’s winning formula of realism balanced with outlandishness, but also points to how well the show’s makers were able to hone in on the actual experiences of millions.

This article attempts to evaluate the success of Spotlight in the context of recent television satire in Syria. The essay argues that key to understanding Spotlight’s novelty is an appreciation of the way the sketch show has combined what might be termed revolutionary innovations in comedy form with more daring reformist content. It is this that has enabled the program to make its mark both on a production industry fast learning to assert itself across the wider Middle East and on audiences desperate for new avenues of satirical critique. In this way, Spotlight has fused new approaches to comedy production—cinematic techniques combined with flourishes more in keeping with theatre, an emphasis on collective talent over the individual, slapstick interspersed with social realism—with new more reformist, more self-referential, more visual material to bring adulation from mass and elite audiences alike.

Passing the baton

Perhaps it was inevitable that in a country in which more than half the population is under the age of twenty-one, a show driven so blatantly by young people in an innovative, collective effort would unseat the star-driven shows that preceded it. Well before Spotlight came along, the dean of 1980s Syrian television sketch comedy was Yasir Al ‘Azma. His multi-year series Maraya (Mirrors) offered satirical pieces, often dependent on word-play, in which Al ‘Azma used various characters and costumes to poke fun at Syrian society. Al ‘Azma ruled the airwaves for years when it came to both standard send-ups and “political” sketches; his show was usually among the top local draws and enjoyed a regional following in the musalsal (television serial) industry.[1] While a number of younger, up-and-coming actors have benefited from significant exposure on Maraya in the last decade, their roles have usually been subordinated to those of Al ‘Azma, who either wrote or inspired most of the sketches and thus offered a quasi-one man show. Meanwhile, as the Arab world’s satellite era took shape in the mid-1990s during the dominance of Maraya, a generation or two of young actors was staking its claim to the comedy musalsal spotlight in Syria in both standard comedy television series and the theatre, rendering Al ‘Azma’s monopoly on the sketch format vulnerable in an industry with rising production rates and competitive pressures.

So it was that, as Maraya continued into the first decade of the twenty-first century with uneven results, the younger, fresher series Spotlight eclipsed it on various fronts. With similarities in form, featuring sketches lasting anywhere from a few minutes to nearly the entire episode, the newcomer has generally been more cynical and caustic in its bite. Even though a good number of sketches turned out to be duds, the youthful, “experimental” spirit of Spotlight has boasted many successes. The idea for Spotlight came from Ayman Rida and Basim Yakhur, representing the younger generation of Syrian actors, and the young director Laith Hajjo, who has helmed the show in three of its five editions to date.[2] Spotlight’s youth-dominated cast helped the show run at 45 and sometimes 78rpm, compared to the slower pace of Maraya, where one usually watched and waited for Al ‘Azma’s character to provide an episode’s punch-line or message. A true comedy collective had been launched and it rapidly gained viewers, who now wondered which fine older actor, and more frequently, which talented younger performer, would deserve special watching in a given sketch.

The Making of Spotlight, 2001-2007

As Syrian musalsal production grew during the second half of the 1990s, the industry was vibrant enough to see comedy sub-genres, sequels and spin-offs. These and other musalsals were not sketch shows but rather approximated the American sit-com. Several signature comedies were created during this period: for example, the earthy ‘Aileh Khams Nujum (Five Star Family), which had three further editions that immediately descended in quality, and vehicles starring comedy mainstay Ayman Zaydan, such as Yawmiyyat Mudir ‘Amm (Diary of a Director-General) and Jamil wa Hana (Jamil and Hana). The latter show prompted copycatting in the form of Hello Jamil… Hello Hana, a name that signaled the imitation behind its creation, and was in fact devised to head off a conflict with the original producing company.[3] As Syria’s musalsal market sought winning formulas, young actors were gaining prominence on television, albeit usually as second-rank players. Perhaps the real creative bubbling that eventually produced Spotlight first surfaced in 2000, when the private firm Al Sham International produced a show called 2x2 (Two By Two), with Rida and Yakhur as the male leads. Each episode was split into self-contained halves, with the same general plot unfolding for two different young couples, one inhabiting a lavish villa, the other a lower-middle class traditional home. The musalsal explored how the same events impacted different classes, and while it did not always successfully execute the idea, a novel treatment did reach people’s television screens.

In this competitive environment, where new ideas were being tested and older ideas re-worked, another leading firm, Suriya Al Duwaliyya, tasked Rida and Yakhur with developing a comedy musalsal for the 2001 season, with the two enjoying carte blanche to come up with a winner. They agreed on Hajjo as director and the three convened at the Bayt Jabri restaurant in Old Damascus to decide on the format. After toying with the idea of send-ups of popular songs, they finally settled on a sketch-based musalsal, even though this would mean an intrusion into the territory of Maraya. In a sign of their fresh approach, the three soon realized that they would be unable to author the number of sketches required and informally put out the word that they needed material. This generated a storm of proposals and submissions, sometimes in the form of an idea for a sketch that was then re-worked by other individuals. The creators even sought novelty in the title, as Hajjo initially opted for an English name for the new program. But, in an early reminder that the team was working in the constraining environment of the Arab world’s most Arabic language-obsessed state, this name was subsequently translated by officials at Syrian Television, with both titles appearing in the credits, side by side.

Spotlight has travelled a bumpy arc of mass resonance, creative collaboration and artistic merit. The initial, 2001 edition was a slightly truncated musalsal in which episodes were around 30 minutes long, compared to the roughly 45-minute standard format of later years. Hajjo directed the show again in 2002 and this version offered more daring treatments of overtly political topics, with a heavy dose of sketches lampooning corruption and the mukhabarat (secret police). However, Hajjo’s creative differences with the founders saw his exit the following year and replacement by Naji Tu‘ma. In a sign of the growing competition among Syria’s musalsal makers, Hajjo and one of Spotlight’s leading writers, Raffi Wihbi,[4] put together a rival show during the 2003 Ramadan season entitled ‘Al Makshuf (In Public). Although the show had good content, it ran for only a single year, suffering from marketing problems.[5] The result was initially positive for the ongoing success of Spotlight as Hajjo and Wihbi returned to the show in 2004. By this time, several inter-cast spats had become public, with actors, writers and directors seeking to retain control over the execution of certain sketches. Hajjo opted out once again after a strong year and was followed by veteran director Hisham Sharbatji in 2005. Despite some fine moments along the way, Spotlight’s momentum appeared to be fading, both in the eyes of critics and the public. In the light of the show’s slide, Suriya Al Duwaliyya dropped it in 2006. While it is scheduled for a possible return in 2007, the search for a willing director, quality scripts and a workable format have marred the pre-production phase as of the writing of this article.

But perhaps the internal differences that led to Spotlight’s current troubles were precisely what made the show so compelling to watch for Syrian audiences. When the founders were able to cooperate, the series reflected and benefited from their diverse artistic priorities and preferences, which also arguably tore them apart. On the one hand, Rida presented quirky characters drawn from daily life, exploiting his wiry frame and a court jester persona, while the lanky and equally physical Yakhur toyed with experimental sketch ideas. Wihbi is an aficionado of adapting various foreign authors’ works, while director Hajjo has used the visual techniques of dramatic productions to tell comic tales.[6] When the show “worked,” these different talents and strategies certainly complemented each other. And despite these differences, the principals in the show were agreed on the task of critiquing the system and challenging power. Hajjo said that upon the show’s inception the creators based their risk-taking firmly on the 2000 inaugural address of President Bashar Al Asad, whose call for a new era of openness and a drive to fight corruption resonated with the Spotlight team and audiences alike. “People thought the show had a green light [from the authorities] because of the producer,” says Hajjo, referring to Suriya Al Duwaliyya owner Muhammad Hamsho, a member of parliament with close ties to pillars of the regime. “In fact, the producer didn’t really know what we were up to. We kept telling the censors that, look, the president said X, so we’re following that policy.” These political and inter-personal tensions and this venting of creative energy led to the show’s huge popular success, cemented by its fine first two seasons, and rendered Spotlight a veritable brand name for Syrian television sketch comedy, albeit one marred by conflicts over ownership of the show’s identity.

Quirky personas and self-referencing

Spotlight has enthusiastically offered send-ups and off-the-wall takes on topics that Syrians have privately laughed about for generations: the “authentic” Lebanese zajal tradition,[7] traditional Bedouin society in Syria, Aleppines, the (Alawi) coast, and the Jabal Al Druze regions. It has even re-worked and often subverted traditional Old Damascus settings. But what is unique to Spotlight is the extent to which it makes fun of its own kind. Central to the show’s appeal is its sending up Syria’s musalsal industry in a way which is more self-aware than anything before. The industry characters are not always surprising—vain stars, oppressive and lecherous directors, a fickle public, and abused and abusive production company employees in the middle—but the material’s freshness has produced positive results. For example, in Al Luss wal Fannan (The Thief and the Actor, 2001), the two title characters encounter each other on a dark street. Contrary to expectation, it is not the thief but the actor who is broke. To get off the hook, he acts out a scene from a historical musalsal for the thief, complete with makeshift costume, props and special effects: the thief wraps the actor in a large banner he has cut down, hands him a wooden stick for a sword, and sets alight a trash bin to provide fire and smoke. After providing the “dramatic” score by humming loudly, the thief is unimpressed by the actor’s performance. The sketch sees the actor bitterly describing how he and his colleagues must humiliate themselves to secure roles from production executives, while the thief criticizes the industry like a quasi-insider.[8] But there is a final twist—after the two embrace and are about to part ways, the actor cannot resist informing the thief that he has in fact picked his pocket, demonstrating his fine acting ability, as he had merely played the part of an innocent and helpless victim. The show has offered stereotypical musalsal industry characters as well as more nuanced ones, and we see the details of how the industry works; several sketches alone touch on the sub-category of extras.

Another example is Bayt Abu Walid (Abu Walid’s House, 2005), in which the title character hosts the filming of a musalsal in his Old Damascus home. Abu Walid objects to the show’s portrayal of Damascenes and general dramatic standards and ends up forming his own ad-hoc censorship committee in order to screen scripts and ensure they are up to par.[9] Several other sketches also poke fun at an industry that has been producing more shows and experiencing more aggressive competition for good time slots during the period in which Spotlight has become a household Syrian name. In Drama Ramadaniyya (A Ramadan (television) Drama, 2004), a station executive ends up suggesting that iftar, the meal which breaks fast during Ramadan, be delayed by 30 minutes in order to solve the scheduling problems during the holy month. Al Bahth ‘an (The Search For, 2004) portrays musalsal production firm executives as traditional merchants (each speaks a distinct regional dialect) who strive to get their goods to the market and show a nervous concern about expenses, counting extras by “the head” as if they are livestock.[10] The sketches on musalsals often keenly portray the mushrooming industry, warts and all, while venting criticism of a system in which connections and the bottom line enjoy the upper hand over merit.

Meanwhile, Rida has provided Spotlight with the biggest and boldest portion of the generally quirky personae that underpin the show. The actor goes much farther with his characters than Syria’s earlier icons Al ‘Azma and Durayd Lahham, and evokes the Marx Brothers, but in shifting combinations of Groucho, Harpo and Chico. After borrowing pen and paper from the restaurant staff at Bayt Jabri during their initial meeting in 2001, the three collaborators mapped out one of these many signature sketches. The piece appeared the following year, credited to Rida, as Ktir Al Ghalabeh (A Busybody), which begins with his down-and-out, bicycle-owning and slightly garishly-dressed character at a musalsal shooting location, lecturing several dozen extras on how to get ahead in the world of bit part acting. When Rida files in with them for the scene, a production executive orders him off the premises since he “died” in an earlier episode and cannot be used again.[11] Rida then overhears the extras being chewed out—they had been following his flawed advice to them, such as “do exactly the opposite of what they tell you to do”—and beats a hasty retreat.

Rida’s personas, whether urban or rural, often ridicule “the system” in a way that is more visual, more physical and more dismissive than in Lahham and Al ‘Azma’s earlier work. Spotlight banter can be quite wacky, and non-speaking comedy is often used successfully. For example, in Tadshin (Inauguration, 2001) a pompous official accompanied by two bodyguards arrives from the capital for a folkloric and vapid official inauguration ceremony to mark the linking of the village to the state electricity network. Rida is wearing the clothes of a traditional Bedouin-rural tribesman, along with white calf-high plastic boots, and pushes the boundaries of visual comedy. His silent part is a lowly villager who, unasked and unappreciated, tries to lead the crowd in applause; he dances in a debkeh line and nearly falls to the ground from his exuberant twists; he leaves the debkeh and approaches the official, momentarily enticing him with a few out-of-place twists and shakes of the head. On a wider level, director Hajjo said that the creators set out to upgrade television comedy from a second-rank, throwaway type of cultural production into a first-class effort, meaning higher production values, ensemble scenes and a heavy dose of location shooting. This can be seen in the characters. Hajjo described how he purchased unheard-of amounts of used clothing and accessories to allow actors the freedom to create the kind of quirky characters that the public obviously had a taste for. But it is not just characterization that is visual in Spotlight; the inner workings of government and society also come to be treated in sophisticated visual tropes.

Visuals and repercussions

While Maraya sketches can often be followed aurally, giving them the feel of a radio show, Hajjo’s initial guidance rendered Spotlight a television show that employed more of a cinematic approach to story-telling. Even when the physical action is static, viewers follow vertical and horizontal trajectories during the sketches, and the transformation from oppressed subordinate to oppressive superior is distinctive in several pieces, reflecting the regimented aspect of Syria’s state, and by implication its society. Civil servant or mukhabarat officer A receives orders and abuse over the phone from an unseen higher-up, kowtows and repeats “yes, yes… of course, of course… certainly, certainly,” and then finally puts down the phone. Person A then calls person B, chews him out, and barks out the new orders. Person B is obsequious and deferential until it is his turn to switch roles, and so on. One such set of orders and abuse is passed down in Kasuf (Eclipse, 2004), when Syria prepares for a solar eclipse and the mukhabarat spring into action. In the sketch, a security official tells a subordinate that it’s time for a “voluntary curfew,” to prevent general panic and chaos in the streets. The subordinate is surprised by the novel concept and receives a light dressing-down. After the superior then explains what is going to happen by using desk items to represent the sun, the moon, and the Earth, the scene switches to the former subordinate giving orders to a new subordinate, following the same routine and asking a secretary to hold various parts of the solar system. Perhaps this type of sketch could be condensed into a work by Ali Farzat, demonstrating an affinity with the multi-panel format of political cartoons.