Anas Marwah, a Carleton master’s of political management student, has gained major media attention this March for his political satire YouTube channel The Weekly Show.
Marwah’s work was featured in an article on the New York Times’ front page, across local news outlets such as the Ottawa Citizen, Metro Ottawa, CTV Ottawa, and CBC Ottawa, and in Al Arabiya News, a major pan-Arab news network.
The Weekly Show gained notoriety for its mockery of ISIS militants in particular, with one of the channel’s most viewed videos being an iPhone parody commercial featuring a phone specially designed for terrorists.
Modelled after the satirical style of Jon Stewart and John Oliver, Marwah said the show aims to ridicule ISIS for the sake of entertaining and reaching youth.
He said he and his team emphasize the importance of research in their videos, not just with the topics, but with the comedic delivery.
“ISIS has been creating a lot of slick propaganda videos that happen to be aimed at youth,” Marwah said. “Now ISIS has been using something that happens to be viral, sadly, and that thing is bloodshed . . . Whenever there’s a beheading, every single news channel talks about it.”
He said The Weekly Show targets the same audience ISIS tries to attract, only with satire instead of bloodshed.
“Youth happen to like satire more than anyone else,” Marwah said.
Aside from major media coverage, the channel has also received a lot of negative and sometimes violent reactions to videos.
“We actually got an ISIS sympathizer who said that he can’t wait to have his hands on my neck to cut it off,” he said.
Marwah said the threats he received are part of why he has garnered so much attention.
“The only reason I got this attention is not only that I make satire against ISIS and not only that I’m Muslim and doing that but also the fact that ISIS has been threatening me,” he said. “If you’re standing against an organization as criminal as ISIS and they’re actually noticing you, that means you’re doing a great job defying their point of view.”
After receiving wide media attention, Marwah and his team hope to take The Weekly Show to mainstream television. They are developing their channel to create a “YouTube portfolio” to present to television producers.
He said they are talking with producers from the Middle East and the United Kingdom about opportunities.
