Ramy Youssef

Ramy Youssef (born March 26, 1991, Queens, New York, U.S.) is an American writer, comedian, and actor best known for exploring his experience as the son of Egyptian immigrants and as an observant Muslim in stand-up comedy specials and the award-winning, semi-autobiographical television series Ramy (2019– ).

Early life and career

Youssef grew up in suburban Rutherford, New Jersey. During high school he began performing stand-up comedy and creating short comedic videos with friends. He attended Rutgers University–Newark, majoring in political science, but he dropped out to pursue acting. His first professional role was as a supporting character on the cable sitcom See Dad Run (2012–14). Youssef appeared in 45 episodes over the show’s three seasons. He made his major motion-picture debut with a brief appearance in the comedy Why Him? (2016), which starred Bryan Cranston and James Franco. Other small roles followed, including in three 2017 episodes of the series Mr. Robot (2015–19), starring Rami Malek, and opposite Joaquin Phoenix in Gus Van Sant’s biographical comedy-drama Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018).

Youssef also continued to develop his stand-up comedy. He made his network television debut as a comic on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2017, and he performed on the show again two years later. Youssef released his first comedy special, Ramy Youssef: Feelings, on HBO in 2019. The special featured material drawn from his life as a millennial Arab Muslim balancing the demands of faith and family with the temptations of modern life, themes that recur in Ramy.

Ramy and Mo

In 2019 Youssef debuted the scripted half-hour comedy series Ramy, which was produced by A24 and released on Hulu. He played Ramy Hassan, an irreverent, spiritually searching first-generation Egyptian American who lives with his parents in New Jersey and works at his uncle’s jewelry shop. Youssef is also credited as a writer and director on many episodes. Ramy received widespread praise for its nuanced storytelling, with The New Yorker in 2022 calling it an “astonishingly fresh” show that “introduced us to a sweep of Muslim characters who felt real: Muslims who believed in God, but also in material things.” Other critics likened it to such artistically ambitious shows as Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012–17), Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016–22), and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016−19). The second season introduced Mahershala Ali as a Sufi cleric who becomes Hassan’s spiritual adviser. Part of the third season was filmed in Jerusalem and explored the lives of Israelis and Palestinians. In 2019 Ramy received a Peabody Award, and the following year Youssef won a Golden Globe Award for best actor in a musical or comedy television series.

In 2022 Youssef and comedian-actor Mohammed Amer created the Netflix comedy Mo. Like Youssef in Ramy, Amer in Mo played a version of himself, a Palestinian refugee living in culturally diverse Houston, where he speaks English, Arabic, and Spanish and hustles as a small-time salesman while trying to obtain citizenship. Youssef cowrote all 16 episodes of Mo. The show was likewise well received, and Youssef and Amer shared a 2022 Peabody for their work.

Other television and film work

In 2023 Youssef had his most prominent film role to date, as a sweetly earnest medical student opposite Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, and Mark Ruffalo in Yorgos Lanthimos’s fantasy comedy-drama Poor Things. Also that year Youssef lent his voice to the character of Safi in Disney’s animated fairy tale Wish, and he directed an episode of the popular television show The Bear (2022– ). In 2024 Youssef released a second stand-up special, Ramy Youssef: More Feelings, on HBO and hosted the long-running sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (1975– ) amid the Israel-Hamas War. He closed his opening monologue with a prayer to “free the people of Palestine, please…and please free the hostages, all the hostages.”

Personal life

In the early 2020s Youssef married a visual artist from Saudi Arabia. The couple have maintained their privacy, and she has not been named publicly.

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