In 2025, actor and comedian Ramy Youssef could very well be the most famous Egyptian celebrity in the US.
The writer-director-producer has attracted legions of fans, including Taylor Swift, thanks to his affable demeanour and sharp observations on the everyday struggles of Arab-Americans in the US.
Youssef was definitely not the first Arab-American comedian to find fame in popular culture.
A handful of Arab-American comedians burst onto the stage in 2005 with Axis of Evil, a comedy tour that saw a number of Middle Eastern comedians tackling the aftermath of 9/11 and the “war on terror”.
The widely covered live shows featured Egyptian Ahmed Ahmed, Palestinians Aron Kader and Dean Obeidallah, Lebanese Nick Youssef, and Syrian Helen Maalik.
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The group broke up in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, which rendered the project irrelevant and dated.
At that point, the urgency of the tour was fading; its bittersweet humour was turning glib and bathetic.
The Axis of Evil was running on empty, and none of its comedians succeeded in replicating the same success.
The rise of Ramy
Youssef emerged at a less oppressive time for Arab Americans. Time has forced Americans to come to terms with the racist and discriminatory measures of the war on terror.
While the Obama era was relatively calm for the 3.7 million Arabs living in the US. The initial success and subsequent failure of the Arab Spring complicated the relationship second-generation Arab Americans had with the homelands of their parents.
Meanwhile, studies show a rise in secularity never materialised among second generation Arab-Americans whose embracing of parental religious beliefs became a means of cultural affirmation.
Youssef has placed his Muslim and Egyptian identities front and centre in both his stand-up comedy and his series Ramy whose 2019-22 three season run earned him widespread acclaim and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series Musical or Comedy in 2021.
Egyptians are always forced to play a role wherever they live: as obliging, obedient citizens in their home country; good immigrants in the diaspora and role models in their community
This writer has not been a devotee of Ramy for well-documented reasons: the self-centeredness of his alter ego; thin characterisation of its female protagonists, the lack of representation for different Arab groups and the reduction of religious sin to sex and the awkward modelling of Islamic guilt on Scorsese’s Catholicism.
Arab Americans lauded Ramy for allowing them to finally see themselves on screen after decades of marginalisation by the likes of 24 and Homeland.
It did not matter that it never challenged many of the stereotypes that continue to stigmatise them or that its brand of wokeness felt forced and contrived.
The sheer existence of Ramy, many Arabs deemed, was a defiant act of self-affirmation.
From the childhood nightmares of @Ramy, #1 Happy Family USA premieres April 17. pic.twitter.com/ySNf1ZdcXZ
— Prime Video (@PrimeVideo) March 5, 2025
Youssef has begun to venture away from Ramy over the past couple of years.
The move started with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-winning smash Poor Things in 2023 and later included a memorable cameo as himself in Apple TV’s hit comedy The Studio.
Youssef will next be seen in Mountainhead, the highly anticipated satire by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong co-starring Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman.
The road to #1 Happy Family
Youssef returned to the bosom of his Egyptian-American milieu this year, albeit in a new and unexpected format.
His new creation, #1 Happy Family USA, is an Amazon Prime adult animated sitcom co-created by ex-South Park writer Pam Brady.
Ramy’s strong point was not necessarily its relaying of the struggle of being Muslim in America – the Muslim experience in the US is far too culturally diverse to generalise or pin down.
For #1 Happy Family USA, Youssef has decided to go over the top and not take himself so seriously
Rather, it was of being an Arab in America; the eternal cultural disjunction, the love-hate relationship with one’s homeland, and the lingering alienation derived from the overbearing demands of assimilation.
These broad themes have been the energy underlying Ramy’s comedic drama. Youssef’s self-seriousness and over-eagerness in engaging with weighty spiritual issues often diluted the comedy and compromised the authenticity of its immigrant aspect.
For #1 Happy Family USA, Youssef has decided to go over the top and not take himself so seriously, delivering a blithe, broadly drawn satire that charts the impact of 9/11 on his family and his teenage self.
The result is nothing revelatory, but the comedy is fast and hysterical; the animation is striking and poignantly wistful, the depiction of the Egyptian social shenanigans is spot-on, and, most importantly, the themes of identity it shrewdly explores are pertinent and provoking.
#1 Happy Family USA is not groundbreaking in any shape or form, but it’s easily Youssef’s finest, most effortless work to date, and certainly one of the year’s top animated shows.
‘Chicago Balls’
The series opens with the following warning: “Do not use this animated show as cultural representation for any of the following communities: Muslims; Arabs; People from New Jersey.”
Its latter point becomes a version of a Simpsons’ gag joke and continues to change from one episode to another to include men, white girls named Courtney, Satanists, among others.
The story commences on September 10 2001 in New Jersey, an enclave of Egyptians on the East Coast.
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Twelve-year-old Rumi, voiced by Youssef, is an average Egyptian-American kid sporting the kind of knock-off basketball shirt commonly gifted by the unaware parents in Egypt – Rumi’s shirt reads “Chicago Balls” instead of “Bulls”.
He’s fixated on the possibilities the invention of the internet can offer and aspires to make it on to his basketball team.
He also toils to woo his hot teacher (voiced by Mandy Moore), whom he dreams of seducing.
His family is peculiar, to put it mildly. His father, Hussein Hussein (also voiced by Youssef in his best comic turn in any medium) was a surgeon in Egypt but couldn’t equate his degree in the US – a running subplot in various Arab-American stories.
Having given up on working in medicine, he opted to open up a halal food cart in front of Fox News headquarters in Manhattan.
His less maniacal dentistry receptionist wife, Sharia, riotously voiced by the Egyptian-Canadian stand-up comic Salma Hindy, is fixated on the mystery behind the death of Princess Diana and her thwarted romance to fellow Egyptian, Dodi Fayed.
Rumi’s older sister, Mona, played by Iraqi-American Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame, is the goody-goody daughter who is always in her father’s good graces for being the family member with the least expenses.
But Mona is gay and her reluctance to come out complicates her relationship with her otherwise patient secret girlfriend Gina (Megan Stalter).
The idiosyncrasies of the four pales in comparison to the spookiness of the cantankerous grandparents.
Grandpa (Ramy scriber and comedian Azhar Usman) is a gallabiyah-wearing Salafi who insists on Quran recitals for breakfast, while Grandma (Palestinian-Egyptian-American writer Randa Jarrar) ominously hides behind her niqab, calling everyone “pervert” as she relishes in her TV addiction.
A Muslim in Bush-era America
The shaky foundation of the family is further dented with the 9/11 attacks. Fearing persecution and petrified by the sweeping “if you see something, say something” Homeland Security campaign, Hussein becomes adamant on shedding his Muslim identity, fully assimilating, and becoming America’s “number 1 happy family!”.
As Hussein shaves his beard, starts drinking beer, and sprinkles his verbal interactions with a lot of clumsily misused Jesus references, Sharia dons the hijab and embraces her Muslim identity as a means of resisting the prevalent witch-hunting of Muslims.
In code switching, Rumi, Hussein and Mona find an invaluable tool to survive Bush’s America.
Rumi unconvincingly attempts to adopt WASP norms. Hussein becomes a regular guest on Fox as “Halal Harry”, a harmless, friendly self-negating Arab Muslim, and Mona has already been pretending to be Italian for a while.
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Hussien’s paranoia is compounded further with the arrival of his new neighbour Dan (Timothy Olyphant), who happens to be an FBI agent, and the unwarranted arrest of his brother, Ahmed (Paul Elia), who has been dispatched into a new exotic facility called Guantanamo.
The legacy of the “war on terror” still reverberates 24 years after its inception.
An entire generation has grown up with the fear of subjection for looking, speaking and behaving differently.
Racial minorities have always found themselves in the firing lines in times of national crisis in the US.
African-Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican and other communities were targeted by the Cold War-era policies and efforts to snuff out nascent civil-rights movements.
In 1950 alone, the US barred the entry of over 100,000 people.
Deportations were front and centre during the second Bush term, increasing from 246,000 to 360,000.
Coupled with the crackdown on pro-Palestinian and so-called “anti-American” voices, the second Trump reign already looks eerily similar to Bush’s.
There’s something quite deleterious in the Egyptian-American DNA that Youssef implicitly touches upon in that regard: the debilitating fear of losing one’s rights.
A subplot involving the role of Rumi’s grandparents in countering a previous Egyptian regime, which the grandfather uses to trick his wife into moving to the US, hints to the generational trauma both Hussein and his children have been inflicted with.
Egyptians are always forced to play a role wherever they live: as obliging, obedient citizens in their home country; good immigrants in the diaspora and role models in their community.
Rumi and Mona feel less shackled than their parents, but 9/11, and perhaps now 7 October, underline the performative existence many free-thinking second generation Egyptian Americans are pushed to lead.
The series is peppered with copious nostalgic references to the early noughties: Napster; Eminem and Jay Z; Hayao Miyazaki and Dragon Ball Z; the Game Boy Advance; oversized jerseys.
The quasi-retro quality of the animation recalls Daria, but there are also echoes of Bakkar, the beloved long-running Egyptian animated series that gave Egyptians their first animated boy hero.
Not absent of outlandish touches, the show features absurdities as diverse as talking sheep and the obnoxious ghost of the grandfather, to fanciful music numbers (the inventively choreographed and composed Money for the Meat is a highlight) and the surreal visit by Bush to the Hussein household.
To this writer, however, the biggest belly laughs emanate from the countless Egyptian allusions: the senseless passion every Egyptian patriarch has for saving up; the obsession with halal food; the fixation of maintaining relations with distant family members and the panic of the rapidly expiring early international phone cards.
There’s also the awkward translation of Egyptian phrases into English that end up making little sense, such as “Hey pal. You’re up early and such and such!” and “”You two have a very beautiful friendship. It has its own source of electricity!”
Most paramount of all is the use of the iconic shebsheb (the slipper) as the matriarch’s disciplinary weapon of choice.
More pronounced than Ramy, #1 Happy Family USA is in many ways a grand celebration of Youssef’s Egyptianess: of the mores and culture and endearing dialect and Sisyphean struggle to fit in.
Most first generation Egyptian-Americans never left Egypt. Their accents barely change, their behaviour and mentalities remain immune from Americanisation, their identities remain torn by the pull of the shiny new world and the comfort of the homeland.
Assimilation remains a politically dubious concept – an instrument exploited to erase cultural dissimilarities and mould all citizens into a freakishly homogenous whole.
Assimilation demands all accents be uniform; all beliefs to be congruent with principal religions; all cultural differences erased for the sake of social harmony.
It’s an instrument of power employed by the majority to dominate all minorities.
In this permanent cultural and political tussle, identities of the minorities grow elastic, more elusive, constantly shaped by the whims and mandates of the ruling class.
This is the central idea underlying the razzle and dazzle and sheer bonanza of #1 Happy Family USA, a show that sees Youssef for the first time strike the perfect balance between comedy, pathos, and politics.
