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

The standup’s new animated series #1 Happy Family USA mixes South Park-style humour with a bracing account of Muslim life in America in the wake of the September 11 attacks. It feels like history is repeating itself, he says

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 how fucked everything is right now.”

In particular, Youssef is pointing to Palestine: his 2024 heartfelt SNL monologue calling 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.”