‘I had a recurring dream that Bin Laden was in my kitchen’: Ramy Youssef on his 9/11 comedy

Ramy Youssef has this theory: “The more fucked up the climate, the stupider television must be.” Granted, he came up with it barely 10 seconds ago, but the 34-year-old is committing. “You need something dumb,” he’s newly certain, “to cut through the tension for relief.” Now he’s frantically tapping away on his phone, searching for facts to prove it. Bingo. “You see, [MTV celebrity prank show] Punk’d premiered on 17 March 2003. Know what happened three days later? The US invaded Iraq. Maybe my stupid new show is perfect for howfuckedeverything is right now.”In particular, Youssef is pointing to Palestine: his2024 heartfelt SNL monologuecalling for an end to the violence one of a litany of interventions he’s made in recent years. “I’ve sat down with too many people who’ve just lost entire sections of their families.” Does he feel speaking out could come at a cost to his career? “If I was constantly waiting to be cast,” he says, “I might not be so busy. We make TV like immigrants: not waiting around for someone else. We’re trying to speak to something human, even if we do it while people are trying to dehumanise us, our culture, where we come from and who we are.”We’re meeting in a downtown Manhattan hotel, late on an icy, mid-February Friday; Youssef lives with his wife and dog in Brooklyn. He is all smiles as he bops into the lobby sporting a baseball cap embroidered with “Sufi Centre of North Jersey”, a nod to the fictional community centre in Golden Globe-winning Ramy – a three season-deep comedy drama about a directionless, idiosyncratic millennial Muslim American. Youssef is its co-creator and star.View image in fullscreenWeird science … Ramy Youssef and Willem Dafoe in Poor Things.Photograph: Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesHis new, “stupid” show is an animation called #1 Happy Family USA. Its protagonist is 12-year-old Rumi (it’s onlysemi-autobiographical), and it opens at the Hussein family’s suburban east coast home, halal food truck parked out front, on 10 September 2001 – all inside naive to the global upheaval tomorrow brings. “It’s hard to avoid the obviously dramatic things in it,” says Youssef: an act of mass terror, a seismic shift in geopolitics, an explosion of Islamophobic prejudice. “It being a cartoon undercuts all that heaviness, and allows us to laugh at what happened, and reflect. South Park did that for me growing up. Often, it was more nuanced than anything on CNN, then suddenly it went back to crudeness.”As a kid you don’t know what’s happening. I had a recurring dream that Bin Laden was in my kitchenLike South Park, Youssef’s show uses a pre-adolescent outlook to its advantage. “Global things feel personal at that age,” Youssef says, “and personal things feel global. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, this tragedy happened’, alongside, ‘Oh my God, I love this girl’. At that age, it’s all at the same volume.” One minute, Rumi is pained, fantasising unrequitedly about his teacher to the sound of K-Ci & JoJo, the next, his uncle is arrested – soon to be #1 Prisoner in Guantánamo – simply for having “terrorist vibes”.Astute observations and sharp satire sit alongside farcical sequences: at the mosque, Rumi’s mother meets an undercover FBI agent who introduces herself as “Carol, from Mecca”; his father, invited on to Fox News, is billed as “Halal Harry”. Pigeons are eaten at the dining table, there’s a kitchen leaderboard ranking cousins, prepubescent Rumi smokes. “I didn’t smoke then,” Youssef clarifies, “but I had the tension of a smoker as a middle schooler.”View image in fullscreenGetting animated … #1 Happy Family USA.Photograph: Courtesy of PrimeFast-paced and funny, yes, but his depiction of that time teems with trauma. In the writers’ room, all sorts of distressing details were shared. “Look,” he’s quick to qualify, “I’m fortunate, I grew up in a town with good people, gracious neighbours and kind classmates. I’m also able to realise we wereveryafraid after 9/11, unsure and uncertain. What I’ve explored in this show, and am not sure I understood until a few years ago, is the amount of not self-hatred, but self-fear or self-paranoia I had.”These memories have been percolating since 2018. “We did a flashback episode to that time in Ramy,” he says, “and I realised I had so many stories from that period that I hadn’t confronted.” Youssef was born in Queens, but his parents – both Egyptian – raised the family in New Jersey. “It was a nice place to grow up,” he says. “That added to the immigrant anxiety. When something is nice, the stakes are higher: I hope we can stay here, that we can afford it, and people will accept us.”Ramy review – Mahershala Ali dials this outstanding comedy up to 11Read moreYoussef was 10 on 9/11. He remembers the day. “My dad was working in hotels, in between Newark and New Jersey,” he says. “I didn’t know where he was. There was a massive panic. My uncles and grandparents were all in New York. And it was super-surreal. Shocking with that proximity, but as a kid you don’t really know what’s happening.” He had a recurring dream “that Bin Laden was in my kitchen. There was this weird rumour at school: a bomb in our town.”There weren’t many brown or Muslim kids locally, and soon his experience diverged from that of his classmates. “Looking back,” he says, “I can see the huge impact on my family as culture and politics shifted.” Youssef felt it profoundly: “scrutiny, being watched. I thought: ‘Oh shit, my name matches one of these guys who did this thing. What if there’s some secret in my family? Is who we are bad?’ That inner dialogue played on me a lot more than I understood as a child. Sitting with that fear is more potent than anything anyone could say to you. It infiltrates your inner workings. That’s what it does to the Hussein family.” For his cartoon characters, an identity crisis follows. Until starting at college, Youssef sees now, that was his experience too.View image in fullscreen‘It feels a betrayal to not speak up’ … Ramy Youssef.Photograph: Erik CarterThere he found space to breathe. “I joined the Muslim students association,” he says, “and for the first time opted into being in a community of my own volition. Hanging out with these other Muslims I realised we all had shared experiences. I’d tried to block it during school. In the two years I went to college before dropping out I found it comforting to connect.” Then that safety was pulled from under him: “We found out the NYPD was monitoring us; surveilling the Muslim organisation, treating us with suspicion.”It’s why he started writing. “I realised it was a way I could explore all of this, and my identity, without repercussion. Writing fucked-up jokes, specifically, helped me work through it.” First, in standup. Then in shows such as Ramy and Mo – the acclaimed Netflix series about a Palestinian refugee in Texas which Youssef co-created – and now his new series. In their own ways, each also delicately depicts Islamic ritual. “It’s almost like we create a playground that has emotional resonance to it, and feels safe, so we can also talk about and share things that are otherwise hard to.”For a while, being theMuslim showrunner of the moment felt like a weighty responsibility. “There’s such little representation of our communities on TV,” he feels, “but now I’ve put that aside. I’m in an abundance mindset: I’ve spent years focusing on my specific corner of understanding, proving programmes from one specific point of view can repeatedly and returnable-y hit the target. That, I hope, creates more space for other really specific things to follow.”View image in fullscreenWingman and a prayer … Youssef with Mahershala Ali in Ramy.Photograph: Craig BlankenhornCertainly, Youssef says, he’ll keep making work that mines his personal experience, but his horizons now feel more expansive. “That’s what was so fun aboutPoor Things,” he says (Youssef starred in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 Hollywood hit), “and [acting in] Seth Rogen’s new show,The Studio, and some of the standup I’m working on. It doesn’t touch on any of those themes that defined my life. Doing projects that are so close to the core of who I am has shown me how I like to craft a story, but now it’s fun to widen the palette of what I’ll do with that.”Mo season two review – one of the most hilarious, heart-rending shows on TVRead moreThe effects of Trump 2.0 are already being firmly felt by those in his crosshairs – the trickle-down effect on culture, though, will take a little longer to calcify. However, it’s easy to imagine a shift in streamers’ slates. Big tech has been cosying up to the new US administration. The future of commissioning is uncertain. #1 Happy Family USA is a Prime Video production: Amazon donated $1m to the Trump inauguration fund. Apple’s Tim Cook did the same. Does Youssef believe shows his latest would be green-lit today?“This feels like a glitch, honestly,” he replies. “If I walked in and pitched this today, they’d say no; what are you talking about?” He laughs, nervously. “They’d literally say what the hell are you thinking? We’d be told it was too polarising for now.”A few days previously, I’d seen Youssef perform a work-in-progress standup show at an intimate Brooklyn venue. His material mixed playful bits about his rescue dog and wedding, with the knotty: asking whether we should even try to laugh as a livestreamed genocide unfolds? The laughs were there, but so too was an edge; mania and tension.“I’m not going to pretend that this stuff isn’t getting to me,” he says. “I don’t think my comedy could be accused of leaving people with a warm, fuzzy feeling.” Deep breath. “I hope people laugh, but also feel gross, sweaty and confused.”‘No one knew what to do with me’: Ramy Youssef on privilege, fear and his friend Taylor SwiftRead moreHe started work on #1 Happy Family USA years ago, and couldn’t have predicted how pertinent its eventual release would feel. “It’s somehow 2001 and 2025 right now,” he says: Guantánamo repopulated; state-sponsored snatch squads on US streets; a relentless news cycle of destruction, hatred and war. “Look at the way you’re seeing mostly Muslims forced to denounce the violence of others, again, because of their faith or identity.” Youssef experienced this post-Hamas’ 7 October attacks in Israel. “People coming up to my face asking: do you like what happened? I’m like, what thefuckare you talking about? I thought you knew me … Everything that’s happening with immigration, with speech, with college students, the forced cosplaying of Americanness. It’s the same as post 9/11.”These days, he is moving in esteemed circles. After our interview, he’s off to a suit fitting to wear at the SNL 50 celebrations, then to Hollywood for pre-ski trip meetings; the likes of Taylor Swift attend his standup shows. When it comes to Gaza, much of America’s A-list has been mostly muted. It must, I suggest, be frustrating, shouting so loudly while plenty of peers hold their tongue.He pauses, then cautiously proceeds. “It’s a very difficult thing to tell anyone how to be in any relationship” he says, “let alone a work one. It’s hard to find that balance of me so clearly seeing what’s happening and meeting other people where they’re at. But yeah, it’s getting to the point …” A sigh. “Dude, I just know I’ve no reason to not speak. It feels a betrayal to not. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t deserve to be anywhere near a microphone.”#1 Happy Family USA premieres globally on Prime Video on17 April.