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

Ramy Youssef has this concept: “The more fucked up the climate, the stupider television must be.” Granted, he got here up with it barely 10 seconds in the past, however the 34-year-old is committing. “You need something dumb,” he’s newly sure, “to cut through the tension for relief.” Now he’s frantically tapping away on his telephone, trying to find information to show 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 how fucked everything is right now.”

Specifically, Youssef is pointing to Palestine: his 2024 heartfelt SNL monologue calling for an finish to the violence one in every of a litany of interventions he’s made lately. “I’ve sat down with too many people who’ve just lost entire sections of their families.” Does he really feel talking out might come at a value to his profession? “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 assembly in a downtown Manhattan resort, late on an icy, mid-February Friday; Youssef lives together with his spouse and canine in Brooklyn. He’s all smiles as he bops into the foyer sporting a baseball cap embroidered with “Sufi Centre of North Jersey”, a nod to the fictional neighborhood centre in Golden Globe-winning Ramy – a 3 season-deep comedy drama a couple of directionless, idiosyncratic millennial Muslim American. Youssef is its co-creator and star.

His new, “stupid” present is an animation known as #1 Blissful Household USA. Its protagonist is 12-year-old Rumi (it’s solely semi-autobiographical), and it opens on the Hussein household’s suburban east coast residence, halal meals truck parked out entrance, on 10 September 2001 – all inside naive to the worldwide 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.”

Like South Park, Youssef’s present makes use of a pre-adolescent outlook to its benefit. “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 instructor to the sound of Ok-Ci & JoJo, the following, his uncle is arrested – quickly to be #1 Prisoner in Guantánamo – merely for having “terrorist vibes”.

Astute observations and sharp satire sit alongside farcical sequences: on the mosque, Rumi’s mom meets an undercover FBI agent who introduces herself as “Carol, from Mecca”; his father, invited on to Fox Information, is billed as “Halal Harry”. Pigeons are eaten on the eating desk, there’s a kitchen leaderboard rating cousins, prepubescent Rumi smokes. “I didn’t smoke then,” Youssef clarifies, “but I had the tension of a smoker as a middle schooler.”

Quick-paced and humorous, sure, however his depiction of that point teems with trauma. Within the writers’ room, all types of distressing particulars have been shared. “Look,” he’s fast 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 were very afraid 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 reminiscences 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, however his mother and father – each Egyptian – raised the household 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.”

Youssef 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 children regionally, and shortly his expertise 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 id disaster follows. Till beginning in school, Youssef sees now, that was his expertise too.

There he discovered house 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 security was pulled from underneath him: “We found out the NYPD was monitoring us; surveilling the Muslim organisation, treating us with suspicion.”

It’s why he began 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 reveals resembling Ramy and Mo – the acclaimed Netflix sequence a couple of Palestinian refugee in Texas which Youssef co-created – and now his new sequence. In their very own methods, every additionally 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 some time, being the Muslim showrunner of the second felt like a weighty accountability. “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.”

Definitely, Youssef says, he’ll hold making work that mines his private expertise, however his horizons now really feel extra expansive. “That’s what was so fun about Poor 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.”

The consequences of Trump 2.0 are already being firmly felt by these in his crosshairs – the trickle-down impact on tradition, although, will take slightly longer to calcify. Nonetheless, it’s simple to think about a shift in streamers’ slates. Large tech has been cosying as much as the brand new US administration. The way forward for commissioning is unsure. #1 Blissful Household USA is a Prime Video manufacturing: Amazon donated $1m to the Trump inauguration fund. Apple’s Tim Prepare dinner did the identical. Does Youssef consider reveals his newest could be green-lit immediately?

“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 number of days beforehand, I’d seen Youssef carry out a work-in-progress standup present at an intimate Brooklyn venue. His materials combined playful bits about his rescue canine and marriage ceremony, with the knotty: asking whether or not we must always even attempt to snort as a livestreamed genocide unfolds? The laughs have been there, however so too was an edge; mania and rigidity.

“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.”

He began work on #1 Blissful Household USA years in the past, and couldn’t have predicted how pertinent its eventual launch would really feel. “It’s somehow 2001 and 2025 right now,” he says: Guantánamo repopulated; state-sponsored snatch squads on US streets; a relentless information cycle of destruction, hatred and warfare. “Look at the way you’re seeing mostly Muslims forced to denounce the violence of others, again, because of their faith or identity.” Youssef skilled this post-Hamas’ 7 October assaults in Israel. “People coming up to my face asking: do you like what happened? I’m like, what the fuck are 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.”

Today, he’s shifting in esteemed circles. After our interview, he’s off to a go well with becoming to put on on the SNL 50 celebrations, then to Hollywood for pre-ski journey conferences; the likes of Taylor Swift attend his standup reveals. In the case of Gaza, a lot of America’s A-list has been principally muted. It should, I counsel, be irritating, shouting so loudly whereas loads of friends maintain 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 Blissful Household USA premieres globally on Prime Video on 17 April.