For those who have seen Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady‘s animated comedy series “#1 Happy Family USA,” the title is a phrase a Muslim family repeats over and over to prove their patriotism to America in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
“It is a phrase I think people are probably saying at the airport today because of how wild the world has become,” Youssef said alongside Brady at the IndieWire Honors ceremony, held in Los Angeles on Thursday night. “We thought we were making a time capsule, and unfortunately we made something that I can’t believe it’s coming out in the time that it is.”
“#1 Happy Family USA“ premiered this past April on Amazon Prime Video, and Amazon gave it a two season order, so there’s still more to come. But all that came about “six or seven executives later,” Youssef joked of the recent turnover at Amazon.
“Us getting recognized for this show, when I first met Pam, I said, ‘Do you want to pitch something that probably shouldn’t belong on television, but we’re in an inflated streaming market and they’ll say yes?’ And she said yes,” Youssef said.
“My superpower is to work with geniuses,” Brady added. “Ramy, it’s been so wonderful.”
Youssef and Brady previously told IndieWire how making the show animated allowed them to be more fearless with their material, to push the boundaries of what sort of ideas the show could probe and even how often they could tinker with a joke to make sure it’s just right.
“In a lot of ways, making an animated show was less daunting than making a live-action show that was not only dealing with things that were sensitive to me, but also using my face and my name and all that stuff,” Youssef said of his Hulu show “Ramy” that shares his name and in which he stars. “To go into something that’s like, ‘He’s just a cartoon’ actually felt way more liberating, and felt like let’s just fucking throw it at the wall.”
“It’s so interesting, because the show is in a lot of ways about fear, but working with Ramy, the creative process was pretty fearless,” Brady added. “It didn’t feel like we were being provocative for no reason, just to be provocative. We were just telling the story. We’re exploring a 12-year-old boy’s mentality at a really tough time, and the fact that it felt true gave us the confidence to push it.”
The series caps off a big last couple of years for Youssef, in which he cameoed in “The Studio,” starred in the HBO movie “Mountainhead,” debuted another stand-up special for HBO, co-starred in “Poor Things,” and saw the release of a new season of his other Netflix series “Mo” that he co-created.
Brady is a longtime producer on “South Park” and wrote the “South Park” movie and Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Team America: World Police,” and “South Park” proved to be a big inspiration for Youssef that led to the two of them collaborating.
The IndieWire Honors event took place at NeueHouse in Hollywood on Thursday, June 5 as hosted by comedian and “Hacks” breakout star Robby Hoffman. Other honorees for the evening included Ben Stiller, Colin Farrell, Owen Cooper, Julianne Nicholson, Kathy Bates, and more.
