Ramy Youssef
speaker
353 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Ramy Youssef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And it's the kind of thing you can only do in animation. Yes. Yeah. Okay, let's hear it.
Do I detect a very slight Lou Reed influence in that? There is.
Yeah, okay. And I want to point out again that that was my guest Rami Youssef singing on that song. Is that your guitar also?
Good for you. And that was an excerpt from Rami Youssef's new animated series, Number One Happy Family USA. You started out in college studying political science and I think economics as well. I'm not sure where that came from considering where you've ended up. But how did you go from that to comedy?
It seems to me the stand-up comedy world is so different than what the life of a faithful Muslim would look like. Because, you know, I don't know what circles you traveled in, but you think of stand-up comics, first of all, of, you know, just being on the road all the time. and having really bad eating habits and drinking a lot.
So were there parts of your life, especially early on, when you probably had less control of your life early on when you started in stand-up? Even things like, is it five times a day? Yeah. Yeah, praying five times a day as a young comic on the road.
I'm sure there were some very inopportune times that you wanted to pray and you were on like a bus or a plane or doing a set. How do you manage that? Do you have to make certain compromises?
Oh, there's traveler's prayers?
Are there special prayers? Oh.
Do you have prayer breaks for everybody who wants it on your sets?
Rami Youssef, it's really been such a pleasure to have you back on the show. Thank you so much.
Oh my gosh.
Bussarumi, a lot happened today. Many people got hurt. This is the worst thing I have ever seen. Things are going to change for us. People are going to look at us differently just because of who we are. And what we must do now more than ever is... Find our face and be strong. No! We must blend in and change our values as much as possible. We will change everything about who we are to fit in.
We must always be cheerful. We will never stick out. We, from today, have no culture. When people see our family, they won't think Arab. They will think they are happy. They are perfect. We are number one happy family USA.
It's really, it's really great to be back after many years. I really appreciate it. And yeah, you know, it was, you know, it was this idea of really tapping into how, you know, it's almost kind of it is really funny. And it's it's so cool that it gets to be funny.
But it's obviously there's the other part of it that's really sad, which is, hey, maybe if I try to erase as much of myself, I'll be able to fit in. And I think that's the idea that I'm obsessed with – there's obviously all the conversations about overt racism, Islamophobia, all these things on the outside.
The parts that I always tend to hone in on is, well, what is the person doing to themselves amidst all that pressure?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know that it was exactly hit the erase button, but it really was, OK, you know, because it's such a sad, terrible thing. And we were just near, you know, the site of death of so many people who, you know, innocent people died. So there's that piece where you're just as sad as everyone else, but then it turns towards you and who you are.
And so you kind of go, okay, we should be quiet or something. It's incredibly confusing. It's incredibly disorienting. And I think within my family, we were always proud of who we were and why. where we come from. And at the same time, you kind of don't want to rock the boat. And I think my father was very pragmatic about it all.
And I remember him kind of being like, you know, my family is really well read. They really, you know, I grew up with books all over the house. And my dad was just like, yeah, Japanese people went through a lot after Pearl Harbor happened. He was already kind of saying almost there was this feeling of this might be our turn right now. And, you know, that was at the time.
Showing 21–40 of 353 · page 2 of 18
← Previous
Next →