A brilliant animated series satirises Muslim life in post 9/11 America
Summary
‘#1 Happy Family USA’ is not comfortable viewing. Instead, it’s blisteringly clever, subversive, fearless and funny
It’s easy to forget that 9/11 was really just a Tuesday. The first episode of Ramy Youssef’s brilliant and nutty new animated series #1 Happy Family USA (streaming on Prime Video) is set on 10 September 2001. Two girls decide that the next day is the best possible day to come out of the closet, since one of them knew she was gay since she was 9 and the other since she was 11. What, they reason, could be a better day than 9/11?
Understandably, these young ladies don’t quite get the spotlight the next day—or at least not the spotlight that they want. Youssef’s unlikely sitcom is about a Muslim family left struggling to fit into post-9/11 America, with FBI agents infiltrating their mosques and suddenly suspicious schoolmates. Suddenly, as the father of the Hussein family says, it isn’t okay to look like themselves. Even if they’re from Egypt.
This week in India, where heinous terrorist attacks in Pahalgam, Kashmir, have reignited the cyclical firestorm of anti-Muslim sentiment, the show’s relevance hits like a steel-toed boot. It’s tempting to view the American Muslim experience as removed from our own local discourse, but hatred has a way of mirroring itself across borders, language and decades. The Hussein family’s struggle to exist without setting off alarms — literal or societal — feels painfully close to home.
Much of the humour hits uncomfortably hard. A middle-schooler, all braces and budding armpit hair, casually drops “code-switching" into conversation—as naturally as one might talk about boy bands or Pokémon cards. This idea of code-switching, wherein a person of colour approximates a potentially less objectionable version of themselves to fit in with the majority, has never been spelt out clearer. It’s not a whispered confession, not an awakening. It’s just a thing he and his friends do. Like passing notes, except the note is yourself, reworded and whitewashed.
This is the way of children of colour trying desperately to survive the Land of the Free and the Home of the Paranoid. The show opens with a title card that simply reads: “Rated H—for Haram." That’s not just cheeky; it’s a dare. This is television that goes for the jugular, giggling all the way. Animated in an exaggerated, Looney Tunes-on-LSD style, this is not your grandma’s post-9/11 trauma sitcom. This is trauma that dances, that sings, that slaps on a fake moustache and a Stetson and calls itself Hank.
Patriarch Hussein Hussein—voiced with manic brilliance by Youssef himself—is the kind of man who puts the ‘ass’ in assimilation. His son, 12-year-old Rumi—also voiced by Youssef, all nervous energy and gummy-mouthed glee—tries to blend in by befriending a literal sacrificial lamb, one he has named Lamby. Lamby wants only to be killed, but this deadpan creature is the only one who seems to know what’s coming. The lamb’s fate, much like the show’s humour, is uncomfortably prophetic.
Youssef, of course, is no stranger to toeing the line between the sacred and the sacrilegious. His previous series, Ramy (streaming in India on Lionsgate Play) was a revelation—a raw, riveting dramedy about faith, sex, and falafel that made viewers squirm with its honesty. #1 Happy Family USA is like Ramy after several espressos and a stint at Cartoon Network. It’s a funhouse mirror version of that show: more outrageous, more absurd, and, somehow, even more true.
The animation is retro in all the right ways. Landline phones with curly cords dangle from walls like umbilical nostalgia. Tangerine iMacs glow like radioactive fruit. Kids wait hours to download and burn songs on to mixtape CDs. It’s a world that seems far removed, yet the cultural paranoia it satirises remains horrifyingly intact.
Youssef masterfully turns the audience’s gaze inward. Every joke—and there are many—is a landmine. You laugh, then you realise what you’re laughing at, and that uneasy pause you feel? That’s the show winning. That’s the show telling you that complicity is not just for the villains.
#1 Happy Family USA is not comfortable viewing. It’s not designed to be. Instead, it’s blisteringly clever, subversive, fearless and funny. It doesn’t play respectability politics. It doesn’t ask to be liked. It hijacks the conversation, throws glitter on it, and demands you watch, preferably while eating an “all-American" hot dog. This is the kind of cartoon, provocative and political, that I daresay will find the Edward Said seal of approval. It’s hilarious, horrifying, and hyper-aware of its audience.
The humour is politically incorrect but never lazy, or edge-lordy. It’s surgical. The blind spots it targets are literal. In one episode, a school initiative called “See Something, Say Something" teaches children to rat out Muslim “behaviour." A blind child enthusiastically raises his hand—and is immediately shut down. The gag is absurd. The gag is cruel. The gag is perfect. It reveals the hollowness of institutional bigotry, dressed up as civic duty. Don’t miss out. I’ve seen #1 Happy Family USA, and this show really is something.
