Nothing’s funny about scared immigrants, unless it comes from Ramy Youssef
- Share via
What happens when the political satire of “South Park” collides with a Muslim kid’s coming-of-age story in post-9/11 New Jersey? You get the animated sitcom “#1 Happy Family USA.”
Cocreated and coshowrun by Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady, the A24 production, which premieres Thursday on Prime Video, follows Rumi Hussein (voiced by Youssef) and his family as they navigate the “see something, say something” paranoia of the early 2000s.
The semi-autobiographical story of Egyptian American comedian, actor and director Youssef is at the center of this period comedy where Michael Jordan, music piracy and Britney Spears still dominate the news. Everything is normal in 12-year-old Rumi’s world on Sept. 10. He’s crushing on his teacher Mrs. Malcolm (voiced by Mandy Moore — who happened to rise to fame in the 2000s). He’s tolerating the cluelessness of his Egyptian immigrant parents, father Hussein (also voiced by Youssef) and mother Sharia (Salma Hindy). He’s fighting with his oh-so-perfect/closeted sister, Mona (Alia Shawkat). His devout grandparents also live at home, always on hand to make whatever Rumi’s doing feel haram.
But within 24 hours, the Al Qaeda attacks turn the Husseins from an average dysfunctional family with unfortunate names into a suspected terror cell.
Rumi’s father, a doctor turned halal cart owner, goes into assimilation overdrive to prove his family is 110% American and absolutely not associated with anyone named Osama. Old Glory, Christmas decor and Easter trimmings suddenly pop up in their front yard. He shaves his beard off. He insists that his wife stop wearing her hijab, which makes Sharia, who is a receptionist for an eccentric dentist (Kieran Culkin), all the more determined to don her headscarf.
Meanwhile, Rumi’s classmates now eye him suspiciously despite his attempts to fit in with the other boys by wearing his new basketball jersey. But the bootleg “Bulls” shirt reads “Balls” instead. It’s also three sizes too big and looks like a dress. Clearly he’s not like the others.
Elements of the storyline mirror Youssef’s childhood montages in his Hulu series “Ramy,” but the medium of adult animation allowed him to “go wild” with the story and characters. He also got to work with Brady, an authority on pushing animated satire to hilarious extremes.
“Animation became the vehicle for how this idea should live. I wanted to look at a wholly unexplored period outside of the lens of a cop drama or the news … and go to the wildest extremes with premises,” said Youssef. “I definitely had the desire to make something stupid in a really great, sophisticated and almost Commedia dell’arte way. Just dumb and loud [laughs]. You can put ‘Ramy’ in a dramedy category and you could, to an extent, put ‘Mo’ there, but here it’s really bursting open in a medium with no limits. Then Pam’s name came up and it was a no-brainer.”
Brady collaborated with Trey Parker and Matt Stone on “South Park” from the show’s start, going on to cowrite with them the film “Team America: World Police” and cocreating the Netflix comedy series “Lady Dynamite.” “As soon as I saw ‘Ramy’ and I saw his stand-up, I was a fan,” said Brady. “I kept begging my manager: ‘Please, can I meet Ramy?’ So I came at it honestly as a fan, knowing that this guy’s doing some next-level stuff. I keep joking with my friends that Ramy’s a real writer. He explores characters. That’s why this experience has been so amazing because it’s pushed me. It’s like, ‘Oh, this is how you do it.’”
Illustrator and executive producer Mona Chalabi designed the characters, each harkening back to animation styles of the late ’90s and early 2000s shows like “Futurama” or “Daria.”
“I wanted it to feel like a found tape,” said Youssef. “You pop it in and it looks like it could have been on Comedy Central or MTV [back then]. It’s hand-drawn animation and we made it with an animation studio in Malaysia [called Animasia]. It’s an all-Muslim animation house, which is so crazy. They were so happy to draw hijabs and all these characters. They were like, ‘We relate to it!’ But we even downgraded our computers here in order to make it like it would have been made. Whatever we did took a while and it was like the opposite of AI.”
Adds Brady, “We wanted to make sure, especially with the visuals and the direction and the pacing, that the show felt familiar. That you’d seen a show like this before. We didn’t want to reinvent the form, but we also didn’t want to make it look like ‘Family Guy.’ So it’s like, ‘Oh, this show existed in 1998. You remember it, right?’”
Long a fan of the film’s director, Ramy Youssef was surprised to learn Yorgos Lanthimos returned the compliment.
Though the show takes place some 25 years ago, it’s not hard to see the plot’s resonance today in the wake of the deportations and roundups of immigrants and students. The Husseins are up against a wave of Islamophobia, triggered by the 9/11 attacks. They embody the very real fear of being profiled by the outside world, including FBI agent Dan Daniels (voiced by Timothy Olyphant), who happens to live across the street. A dark period, to be sure, but also one rich in comedic value if you’re willing to go there as “#1 Happy Family USA” does. Its characters break out into song while on the verge of being swept up by Homeland Security, or inadvertently cause a widespread panic by dropping on the carpet at the airport to pray when they learn of the terror attacks.
“We were trying to kind of create this time capsule, like around the old DHS of this moment,” said Youssef. “But right now is a time when an immigrant family, and surely a Muslim family, would feel the need to shout, ‘We’re No. 1! Happy Family USA!’ Pam and Mona and I have all been looking at each other with like, ‘Whoa.’ Of all the times this thing could have dropped, it’s dropping right now, when [it’s hard] to joke about this stuff in any other medium.”
At a time when everything feels like a cruel joke, “#1 Happy Family USA” bites back with the satire we need.
The complete guide to home viewing
Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyone’s talking about.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
