Ramy Youssef on Comedy Today: ‘It Is the Tightest Tightrope I’ve Walked’

In stand-up comedy, silence typically equals death. You tell a joke and the audience laughs? Great. You tell a joke and they groan? Well, at least they were interested enough to respond. Tell a joke and … nothing? You may have lost the room altogether.

For Ramy Youssef, though, a joke greeted with silence allowed him to find his comedic voice, which has expanded beyond his stand-up to include creating and/or starring in a pair of acclaimed comedy series — Ramy on Hulu, Mo on Netflix — a juicy supporting role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, and an upcoming comedy special, premiering on HBO in March, based on his current More Feelings tour.

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Youssef’s early stand-up act was basic stuff. “I talked about dating a lot,” he says in a Brooklyn coffee shop on a frigid January morning. In time, though, he began delving more deeply into his life as the child of Egyptian immigrants, and, especially, about being a practicing Muslim.

“I remember doing this one set at a bar,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘I’ve been fasting for Ramadan. I do it because I actually believe in it.’ And there was silence. Then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ It was a type of silence where I was like, ‘Did I just say something edgy?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, yeah. This is what I’ve been trying to get at.’ ”

Youssef considers Hollywood to be “an incredibly spiritual place,” because, “If you have a script that hasn’t been made yet, you believe in something written that is unseen.” But in the stand-up world, God had mostly been a punchline in the decades before he began talking on stage about his faith. For him, the muted audience response at that nascent stage of his career was a door being opened, not closed. “When I stumbled on it, I found that reaction to be positive, in a sense. Because it was a type of silence that I always felt was like, Oh, wait. Everyone’s engaged. It’s not like they’re rejecting it; they’re actually really curious as to what I’m going to say next. In that moment, I didn’t have that part. But then I said, ‘Oh, that’s my job. How do I step into that? Because that’s actually what I’m chasing.’”

As his act evolved, he figured it out, focusing more on personal material than crowd-pleasing ideas. “My first filter was, If this doesn’t get a laugh, you still have dignity.” He began developing a bit about how the hardest part of being Muslim is that you go to Mosque on Fridays, before the weekend, whereas Christians don’t have to go to Church until Sundays: “I’ll just be at the mosque being like, ‘God… Shit, I don’t know what I’m doing tonight.’ It’s such a worse position to have to pre-apologize. It feels so much nicer to do it and then say, ‘Sorry.’” As the routine began to connect with the audience, he felt emboldened, “Because this is fully me, but it’s also in the reference of the culture that I’m surrounded by. And then I started writing in those pockets.”

By the time Youssef did a set on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2017, he had grown so confident in the material about his faith that he was willing to take a stand for it. In a couple of recent stage performances, he had closed his act by saying, “I’m not trying to be preachy, I’m really not. All I’m trying to say is, just submit to Islam, because it’s the truth. And that’s the only way you’ll be saved. Seriously!” Both times, it got huge laughs. But Youssef says the Late Show producers were so nervous about the joke that they told him, “If you fight us on this, we’re not going to let you do the set.” He pushed for a compromise: He would close with “Submit to Islam,” and if they still felt uncomfortable, they could edit it out of the aired version. Instead, it killed, and the final version of the segment ended with a cut to Colbert, beaming with delight at the joke as he sent the show to commercial.

“That was the first experience I had with dealing with a network and being like, Oh, we should be pushing these things and then expanding it. And that’s where it gets fun.”

Growing up in northern New Jersey, Youssef, 32, didn’t envision a future in comedy. “I never had this larger ambition, because I didn’t even think it was feasible. It didn’t feel real.” Though the Arab American Comedy Festival and Axis of Evil Comedy Tour both began picking up notice when Youssef was a teenager, there wasn’t a long list of famous Muslim comics.

By the time he was in college, the idea of performing had taken root. He dropped out of school and improbably landed a role on See Dad Run, a Nick at Nite sitcom starring Scott Baio, four years before the Happy Days alum became one of the highest-profile Trump supporters in the entertainment industry.

As he is onstage, Youssef is soft-spoken, upbeat, and empathetic in person, always looking for the good in people and situations. With half of his extended family living in America and half in the Middle East, “every opinion that exists on Earth is in my family.” So he was raised on the idea of loving people even when you vehemently disagree with them. Here was Baio, who was espousing beliefs diametrically opposed to Youssef’s, but who was also pushing for the See Dad Run writers to give his young co-star better material. “I was just like, ‘Oh, yeah. You care about other humans when you’re in front of them.’ And then there’s this whole other part, the public piece, that might look like it’s in conflict with that.”

See Dad Run also introduced him to comedian Mark Curry, who invited Youssef to open for him on tour. Even though Axis of Evil and other Arab comics like Mo star Mo Amer had been out there for a few years, Youssef entered a stand-up world that still seemed confused by his existence. “There was this thing of, on a baseline level, ‘Wait, do Muslims laugh? Do they condone comedy?’ That’s how in the gutter some of it was.”

In addition to providing new career opportunities, stand-up became cathartic for Youssef, who eventually used his time onstage to talk about what it was like to be Muslim in America, living only miles from Ground Zero, in the months and years after 9/11.

“I don’t even know that I fully realized how it affected my psychology, being 11, 12 around that period,” he admits. “It took me a really long time to say, ‘Oh, wait…’ To cope, I tried to downplay it. But it affected every single thing my parents did. Every decision they made. A lot changed afterwards, they tried to hide some of it from us. But then you kind of start to realize, ‘Oh, you lost a lot of your friends. You lost some work opportunities. Our entire social circle shrunk.’” Though Youssef was never the victim of hate crimes, he felt the world looking at him differently for a long time after the Twin Towers fell. He eventually turned this into material in his act, as well as on Ramy, which devoted an early episode to a young version of the fictionalized Ramy Hassan imagining a conversation with Osama bin Laden.

He tried turning the anti-Muslim sentiment to his professional advantage, auditioning early in his career for the kind of terrorist roles that had become ubiquitous over the previous decade. He didn’t get them — “They would go, ‘Oh, you’re not scary enough’ ” — which was a relief in hindsight. The day before our conversation, he was at Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks beat the Minnesota Timberwolves, and ran into Jon Stewart, whose work on The Daily Show in the 2000s had meant so much to him during such a difficult time.

“I had this moment with him where I was like, ‘Dude, what you did with news — I remember being in high school and just watching so much of who we were, and our identity, get pummeled.’ And then you watch Jon Stewart, who’s also from New Jersey, Steven Colbert, who also is [living] in New Jersey, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God. You are shining a light in this thing that feels so dark.’ And so it was so cool to say that to him. And I felt the same thing with Colbert where, for this to be the show that I get to first do standup on, after a lot of my formative years of even understanding what comedy was through those guys, was huge.”

Also? His parents love Colbert, and that Late Show appearance finally stopped their complaining about his decision to drop out of college.

If 2017 was a pivotal professional year for Youssef, 2019 was when his career exploded. In April, Hulu premiered Ramy, which Youssef co-created and based on his own life and struggles. In June, HBO released Ramy Youssef: Feelings, an intimate comedy special shot by Ramy director (and future The Bear creator) Christopher Storer. There’s some overlap between the two — in Feelings, Youssef argues that it’s OK to be attracted to your cousins, while on the series, Ramy begins actively flirting with a cousin on a trip to Egypt — and the one-two punch dramatically raised Youssef’s public profile.

Just as non-Jews everywhere know what “mazel tov!” means, Youssef had long believed that “inshallah,” “haram,” and “halal” should be part of the non-Muslim vernacular. As the Hulu show took off, two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali called Youssef to personally thank him for a Season One Ramy episode that discussed how to figure out when Eid happens — a subject that had caused problems in the past when Ali’s agents tried booking him for work around Ramadan. “He was like, ‘Dude, you made it easier to explain the end of Ramadan to my people at WME. Thank you.’ ” Seizing on the connection, Youssef persuaded Ali to guest star throughout the second season as a sheikh who mentors Ramy Hassan, and even marries Ramy to his daughter, only for Ramy to ruin everything by sleeping with his Egyptian cousin right before the wedding.

If there’s one regret Youssef has about the Hulu show, it’s that he named it, and the character, after himself, inspiring people to confuse him with the guy he’s playing. He and Ramy Hassan have a lot in common, particularly their desire to do live up to the tenets of their faith, and to do right by their communities. But the real Ramy is much better at learning lessons and sticking with them, where the TV version keeps making the same kinds of mistakes and hurting people along the way. Before the series premiered, he was so worried about how his parents would respond that he refused to show or tell them anything about it, because, “I wanted to give them plausible deniability,” when friends asked about the many bad things Ramy Hassan did. After they watched it for the first time, he wrote them letters to explain his creative choices, then was finally able to have a series of deep conversations with them about the show, his beliefs and actions in real life, and more, which led to, “My arrival into a full adult relationship with my parents,” whom he describes as “my best friends now.” Much of the new special, he says, will be about that shift between him and his mom and dad.

The third season, which began streaming in the fall of 2022, features a darkly hilarious episode in which Ramy visits Israel on business and gets himself into a series of escalating calamities that somehow culminate in him helping the Israeli Defense Forces arrest a Palestinian boy. Logistically, it would be impossible to make such an episode now, in the midst of so much bloodshed in the region. Even the idea of wringing laughs out of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians seems far more daunting than it did two years ago. But Youssef, ever an optimist, sees a tiny silver lining.

“I’ve been working on a lot of different versions of the [new] set over the last two, three years,” he says. “And what’s interesting is how much it was already discussing a lot of this stuff, through a very personal lens. There was probably a small bridge that I was building to bring people into certain things. In a way, I almost don’t need that bridge anymore, because everyone’s in on it, and there is an immediate recognition of the moment that we’re in. And so for me, it is the tightest tightrope I’ve walked. And it also feels like one of the few things that I can actually contribute in such a helpless situation.”

That level of earnestness must have spoken to Yorgos Lanthimos when he hired Youssef for Poor Things to play Max McCandles, the naive doctor tasked with observing the evolution of Emma Stone’s Frankenstein-esque Bella Baxter. Youssef didn’t have an acting resume akin to that of co-stars like Stone, Willem Defoe, and Mark Ruffalo. And as someone who has tried to direct more and more episodes of Ramy (and even The Bear) as his career has evolved, he was thrilled, if intimidated, to work for a directing idol of his. But he realized quickly what Lanthimos wanted from him.

“As such a fan of Yorgos, there was this feeling I had where I was like, Wait, is he going to let me be sincere? Because he’s always throwing those emotions off-course. Then I got to play that and I realized, Oh, he actually needed sincerity to anchor the insanity. The sincerity within insanity was also very funny to me.”

Youssef delayed the filming of Ramy’s third season so he could do Poor Things. Netflix already announced that Mo — a more overtly political show, with Mo Amer as an undocumented immigrant living in Texas — will end with its upcoming second season. Though a fourth season of Ramy has yet to be ordered as of press time, Youssef says he’s talked with Hulu about the idea of taking a long break, then returning to depict Ramy Hassan in a new stage of his life. “It’s definitely not over,” he insists.

In Feelings, Youssef jokes, “Nobody wants you to be that Muslim. Everyone just wants you to have, like, a good hummus recipe. Like, they wanna know about baba ganoush, not Allah.” The past five years of his career have proved otherwise.

During the early days of Covid, he was invited to go on an outdoor walk with his boss of bosses, Disney chairman Bob Iger, who was impressed with Ramy. “He goes, ‘It’s really interesting. Your character actually wants to be religious. And when I was watching your show, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been done before, because it’s right under our nose. But it’s like you flipped it.’  He really understood why the show worked. It’s not a crime show, it’s not a huge show that necessarily has all these angles that television’s looking for. But I do think that the internal engine of the show is actually massive. And I think that it actually does connect with everybody. And I think that everyone who finds the show feels that.”

Production Credits

Hair by ANDREA GRANDE-CAPONE. Grooming by ABIGAIL HAYDEN. Photography Assistance by DANA GOLAN

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