RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) - Ramy Hassan exasperates his mother.
“I told you if you finished the pre-med classes, you would be running the brain surgery at Hackensnack hospital,” she tells him.
“It’s Hackensack, mom,” he replies. She is unmoved. He knows her criticisms come from a place of love, but they sting more than usual since he’s just lost his job at a startup company.
Like many 20-somethings - and many members of the general population - he’s trying to get to a place where he’s satisfied with his job, his personal beliefs and his relationships. Ramy is trying to find out who he is, and his family is an indispensable part of that. But he is conflicted - caught between the expectations of his Egyptian and Palestinian American family, his Muslim faith and himself.
“I’m just trying to be good,” he says. Still, he has to figure out what “good” even means.
Ramy is the lead character in “Ramy,” a compelling new Hulu series starring Ramy Youssef, a comedian who grew up in Rutherford. Like Hassan, Youssef is a first-generation American, his parents having moved to the United States from Egypt in the 1980s - his dad to Jersey City and his mother to Queens.
The two Ramys share a first name, along with an ethnic, religious and Jersey background - their families both alternate between Arabic and English - but Ramy Youssef is not exactly Ramy Hassan.
“I would say my real life is a lot less interesting, or a lot less complicated, mostly because I spent so much of it working and doing comedy for the last 10 years,” Youssef, 28, tells NJ Advance Media.
Youssef is the creator of “Ramy” and serves as an executive producer. His aim for the series: to show Arab American Muslims living their lives in a way that was not visible on screen. Hulu will release all 10 half-hour episodes of the dramedy on Friday, April 19.
“Part of my desire to make this show was a lack of seeing anything that felt like it,” Youssef says. “I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn’t really seen anything where someone’s trying to reconcile the two.”
A Hogwarts letter from ISIS and making room for reality
Matters of faith and cultural identity, themes woven throughout “Ramy,” also resound in Youssef’s stand-up sets.
“My name is Ramy Youssef and I’m Muslim,” he said during his “Late Show” stand-up debut in 2017. “Yeah, like from the news. Have you guys seen our show? Fox News or any of the newses, really. They’re all about us.”
Watching the news, he said he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow terrorism was endemic to Muslim culture - “inevitable,” even.
“I feel like no matter what I do I’m just gonna turn 30 and get a Hogwarts letter from ISIS,” Youssef said. His nimble skewering of harmful stereotypes with casually delivered punchlines is also evident in “Ramy,” even though the single-camera series definitely isn’t all comedy all the time.
“A lot of the core of the emotional problems are very similar,” Youssef says of his “Ramy” character. “The way the character deals with it on TV, I think, is a little less developed than I would in real life.”
Youssef got his start as a performer when he was still a student at Rutherford High School, where he dove into TV production and started focusing on comedy. He went on to major in political science and economics at Rutgers University in Newark, then left college early to move to Los Angeles when he was 20. He got a part as a series regular on the Nickelodeon sitcom “See Dad Run,” starring Scott Baio. The actor, who played Chachi in “Happy Days” and starred in “Charles in Charge,” is known for being a big Trump supporter.
“In my personal experience, I have only had a great experience with him privately,” Youssef says. “He was someone who advocated for me on the show to have an expanded role and always just looked out for me. . I oddly don’t think his public views are in line with his private behavior.”
He also found support in his co-star Mark Curry (“Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper”), who would take him on tour as an opening act for his stand-up comedy. Youssef became a sponge, soaking up everything being on a sitcom could teach him.
“I would hang out at Paramount every day even when they didn’t need me,” he says. “They let me shadow the writers’ room. I got to shadow directors, I got to sit in the edit and see how they did what they did. It was very eye-opening for me.”
It was when he was there, filming at Paramount Studios and taking routine breaks to pray, that Youssef began to think about a concept for a series. He remembers thinking, “what other Muslims have prayed at Paramount Pictures?”
“This was the story I wanted to tell,” says Youssef, who currently divides his time between Los Angeles and New York.
When characters were not an outright negative depiction of Arab Muslims, they would either be second- or third-tier characters and mostly part of something that wasn’t about them, he says. But most often, Arab Muslim characters would be depicted in stories about investigations or violent situations - “Even if the mother is a beautiful human, her son killed somebody,” says Youssef, who also appeared in three episodes of the USA drama “Mr. Robot” in 2017.
Looking at an Arab Muslim family as real people with complex inner lives and quirks like any other family was just the beginning, Youssef says, along with seeing their place of worship as something sacred and treasured.
“I just hope this show highlights our humanity,” he says. “No one knows what it’s like inside of a mosque. To see the depiction of the mosque in this show, to me, is so loving. It’s like a place that you go to figure out what to do about your problems, and it’s a place that you go to reflect. And it’s a place of refuge. It’s not a breeding ground or a planning station.”
From 3 a.m. diner sessions to HBO specials
Jerrod Carmichael, the star and creator of “The Carmichael Show,” a sitcom that ran from 2015 to 2017 on NBC, is another executive producer of “Ramy,” which Youssef co-created with Ari Katcher (“The Carmichael Show”) and Ryan Welch. Bridget Bedard (“Transparent”) serves as showrunner and A24 produces the series.
When Carmichael was getting ready to film his second HBO special, Youssef was his opening act. He says they would daydream about pairing “The Carmichael Show” in a block with another multi-camera show about a Muslim family. That concept grew into a single-camera format “where we could really experience a lot more of the themes that I was talking about in stand-up,” Youssef says. “The whole show is really my stand-up translated into episodes.”
Now, after about a decade in the business, Youssef is welcoming two major debuts this year - “Ramy” and his first HBO comedy special, due out June 29.
“The hour is very much a mix between the personal and how that intersects with what might feel political,” he says of the special.
One joke Youssef has told in the past is that he agrees with every third thing Donald Trump says.
“It’s like a weird multiple choice test,” Youssef says in the bit. Mexicans are rapists? No. Muslims shouldn’t be allowed in the country? No again. But “Laguardia Airport sucks” and “the government is broken … it could do better” - those are things he can get behind.
“I don’t really like comedy that gives you answers,” Youssef says of his approach. “It’s more just like, ’what if?’”
Youssef knew he wanted to set the series in New Jersey but didn’t limit the show to a single town or city. (New York locales subbed in for New Jersey locations, though that may change if film tax credits hold up and the show is greenlit for another season, Youssef says.)
“Maybe it’s kind of the nicer suburbs in Paterson or something, but it’s not really tied to anywhere too specific,” he says. “I just kind of wanted the Jersey feel.”
As much as he wanted a faithful portrayal of an Arab Muslim living in America, he also wanted to represent an authentic New Jerseyan. In the show, Ramy can often be found running through the issues on his plate at a local diner run by one of his closest confidants, Mo (Mo Amer).
“I just feel like the most important conversations I’ve had in my life have been at a diner counter,” Youssef says. “That’s what you do if you’re from Jersey. You make a big decision at a diner at 3 in the morning. Like, that’s how you talk about life, that’s how you operate, and there’s this underdog-ness to being in the shadow of the city that’s so interesting and really pairs, intersectionally, interestingly, with being an Arab Muslim, you know, because it’s like, ’oh, man, I feel like people have put me one step behind.’ I probably have just as hard of a time defending New Jersey as I do defending Muslims. They are two very misunderstood groups, and to kind of pair them together is just a very natural fit and I think it’s important for the show.”
A friendship born in Jersey and the importance of representation
Youssef’s family settled in Rutherford after moving out of Queens when he was about 6 years old.
“The fact that I got to go to Rutherford High School I think is a big part of my career,” he says. “The television program there taught me things that I just used as I wrote and directed and was showrunning and doing all these things on my show. Those are all things that I baseline learned - how to video edit - at Rutherford High School. We had such a great TV program.”
Youssef would collaborate on projects with his friend Steve Way, another student in the program. Now, Way is Youssef’s co-star in “Ramy.” Their friendship is one part of the show that is completely autobiographical.
“Ramy has always told me that his goal is for someone in Middle America who may not have a favorable view of Muslims to watch this and say, ’oh, they’re not that different from me,’” says Way, who works as a substitute teacher at Rutherford High School and followed Youssef into stand-up comedy. Youssef wouldn’t have anyone but Way play the role.
Way, who was born with muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, was glad that the show cast an actor with a disability to play a person with a disability.
“It’s such a confidence boost,” says Way, 28. “It feels very special. Being in this society and in this industry where disability representation is very poor, being able to authentically tell my story, that’s something that the disability community has been fighting for for decades.”
He also values the fact that the series covers subjects like health care and dating with a disability. When they’re at work, Ramy is seen assisting Steve in the bathroom. He also accompanies Steve when he goes to visit someone he met online.
In the show, Steve and Ramy become friends in an episode that flashes back to Sept. 11, when Youssef’s character was 12 years old. It’s the only time the series talks about terrorism.
“I really felt like if we’re going to do it, it’s got to come from the perspective of a kid,” Youssef says.
Way says the episode mirrors what happened in their own lives, when they were in elementary school.
“Really during that time, we were both kind of seen as the outcasts - obviously for very different reasons - but we kind of bonded over this mutual exclusion from all of our other classmates around us,” Way says.
“I remember the news stories and I remember the name of the first World Trade Center bomber was Ramzi Yousef,” Youssef says. “Everybody thought we were related, including me. I was like, ’oh sh(asterisk)t, is that my family??’ It was very shocking. You have such a similar name and this horrible thing, arguably one of the most horrible things to happen.”
In the episode, neighbors cast dirty looks at Ramy’s family and his friends become bullies.
“But the thing that’s most interesting to me is like, fearing yourself,” Youssef says. In the show, Ramy dreams that Osama bin Laden comes to his house to tell him he doesn’t belong in America.
“That is the element that I really wanted to talk about,” Youssef says. “He questions his own integrity and his own origin and his own family and that’s the thing that is most interesting to me to explore when we’re looking at something like this from a kid’s point of view.”
But “Ramy” is also concerned with other characters besides Ramy.
One episode is completely devoted to his mother, Maysa, played by the superb Hiam Abbass (HBO’s “Succession”). The story follows her time alone when the family leaves. After her committed but sometimes clueless husband, Farouk (Amr Waked), rejects her idea to join an exercise class, she becomes a driver for a ride-sharing service, where she meets someone who values her beyond her role as a mother and wife. Everything the show would not normally have room for - her loneliness, and how misunderstood, neglected and unappreciated she is - comes to the fore, humanizing Maysa and defying the archetype of the nagging, concerned mother.
Ramy’s sister, Dena (May Calamawy), is always pointing out her parents’ double standard of second-guessing her every move when they just take Ramy at his word. That is, when she’s not humoring her misogynistic, anti-Semitic, homophobic Uncle Naseem (Laith Nakli), who believes women’s brains stop functioning during menstruation. Another episode focuses entirely on Dena and the pressure she faces to stay a virginal daughter. She opts to explore the possibilities that await if she decides to follow her bliss instead of her parents’ expectations, with decidedly mixed results.
Youssef says it was important to pitch executives about taking some time to examine other characters.
“In order to understand him you really need to understand his family, and specifically the women in his life,” Youssef says. “I think it really informs what’s going on with his character. And my theory about TV is a lot of times TV shows give a character a small little monologue or a couple of lines here or there, and then they’re like ’well look, we got that person’s perspective. Wow, that person is represented.’ I personally think the only way to get the perspective of the character, or to represent them, is to have the camera linger on them in moments of silence. Because that’s really what tells you what’s going on in someone’s head. When you get to have quiet moments alone with them.”
“Ramy” premieres April 19 on Hulu. Ramy Youssef’s HBO special will be out June 29.
Online: https://bit.ly/2XlCUGe
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Information from: NJ Advance Media.
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