San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
TV show explores Muslim comic’s faith.
Ramy ‘can create this character for everyone to examine’
When he found the joke, Ramy Youssef had been searching for it for four months.
It was the summer of 2015. He was visiting his parents in his native New Jersey and had driven his mom’s car to Brooklyn to perform a quick stand-up set.
“I just started talking about what I was doing. I was like, ‘I’m fasting Ramadan.’ ” There were about 10 people in the crowd. “Oh your parents make you do that?” a guy shouted out. “I was like, no, this isn’t about anyone making me do this. It’s what I want to do.” Then the comic blurts out, “I believe in God. Like, God, God. Not yoga.”
“And there’s just this like, pop. Like a laugh,” Youssef recalled during an interview over Zoom.
On the drive back to New Jersey, Youssef listened back to his set on his iPhone and then shot off a text to fellow comedian Jerrod Carmichael. “Dude, I think I found a joke.”
The culmination of that joke can be seen in Youssef ’s series “Ramy”
The first thing people tend to notice about “Ramy,” the Hulu series written, directed and produced by Ramy Youssef, is that it’s the first American television show about a Muslim family.
The comedy-drama centers on Ramy Hassan, a millennial male raised in an immigrant Arab community in New Jersey. Since its 2019 premiere, the show has explored subject matter not spoken of much in public: people’s relationship with faith and to the greater questions of purpose and meaning.
The Ramy Hassan character began as a fictionalization of 29-year-old Youssef ’s own spiritual and emotional experiences.
Oddly enough, Youssef says he didn’t build Ramy to be liked. He had an idea that Ramy would act as a representation of our lower selves, those purely egoistic qualities of our beings that irrationally battle our higher aspirations.
Ramy Hassan is wellmeaning and earnest, but immature. No matter how far he falls, he never loses the aspiration to be good.
We see Ramy’s world established in the pilot episode: On the one hand, he is a conflicted participant of a hedonistic culture of partying and sex, but on the other, he feels a spiritual strength and connection to his faith. This all makes Ramy Hassan an unusual protagonist, a character seeking a connection to God.
“I’ve always felt like a very honest seeker, and I wanted to make work that felt like that. (Work) that felt self-examining,” said Youssef, who set out for Hollywood at 19.
During his first few years there, Youssef did regular stand-up work and appeared in a few television shows, including a co-starring role in the Nick at Nite sitcom “See Dad Run.” Despite such success, Youssef felt a yearning for his work to be representative of what was going on inside him in a spiritual sense. He started talking about his guilt around premarital sex during his stand-up routines. Youssef never questioned his Muslim faith, but he did start to doubt himself in it when he began to slip up.
“So much of my life I was saying, I want to do this the right way. I’m not going to have sex until I get married,” Youssef said. “Somewhere along the way I broke those rules and then started to feel like the way the setup was around me that I should leave (the religion). And that made me really sad because I didn’t want to let go.”
Taking a difficult feeling and creating jokes and stories from it became Youssef ’s art.
“I’m putting myself under the microscope,” he said. “And then I started to think, oh, this will be really cool because I want these conversations to come up. I want this kind of self-examination to happen in our communities.”
Youssef soon brought together a team to build a show around this idea. “I actually have this vehicle where I can create this character for everyone to examine. You know, this character is not built to be liked.”
In the show’s first season, which earned Youssef a Golden Globe for his portrayal, Ramy Hassan meets an earnest white convert in the mosque who delivers a line that’s the moral lesson of the entire season: “You’re all like, I do these things and I don’t do things, so I’m this kind of person, right? It’s a trick of the devil, bro.”
Youssef ’s writing touches on a lesson gleaned from the inner tradition of Islam: that to identify oneself with one’s actions is poison to the spiritual path. People will either despair because they see themselves as sinners or be self-satisfied because of their pious works.
In the show’s second season, which premiered in May, viewers are introduced to Shaykh Ali Malik, played by Mahershala Ali, the first person on the show who practices faith in a way that appears strong yet still relatable.
Ali plays a Sufi teacher whom Ramy latches onto in the beginning of the season.
“Islam is like an orange,” Shaykh Ali explains to Ramy. “There’s an outer part and an inner part. If someone only got the rules and rituals, they might think Islam was tough and bitter … the rind without the flesh is bitter and useless. The flesh without the rind would quickly rot. The outer Shariah (religious law) protects the inner spirituality, and the inner spirituality gives the outer Shariah its purpose and meaning.”
Ramy’s spiritual growth and search for more selfreflection is explored throughout the second season.
“It’s not about giving answers. I’m not in a position to do that. I would be idiotic if I tried to do that through any of the forms I create, but can I bring people closer to their questions? That seems to me to be my audience — people who need that, who want that, who are excited by that,” Youssef said. “Anyone who feels like they solidly have the answer probably hates my work.”