YOU NAME IT
The sitcom Ramy tells tales of a 30-something Egyptian-American (that’s Ramy) who lives with his family in suburban New Jersey. He struggles haplessly with romance, friendship and career. He’s been raised in Islam and turns to it as an organizing force but strays from its tenets. He hangs out with Muslim buddies, prays regularly, drinks occasionally, and fools around all the time. He’s a gentle character, a charming slacker, due in a large part to the boyish charisma of Ramy Youssef, the comedian who plays him.
The title sequence, by Sarofsky, features the protagonist’s name in bubble-like Arabic letters in muddied primary colors swimming across the screen and around the English title. They blink spastically like the graphics in a first-generation video game, accompanied by an electronic Middle Eastern-inflected theme song. It’s five seconds of pure joy.
While I’m accustomed to seeing non-Roman alphabets (Greek, Russian, Hebrew) in advertisements, packaging and signs, Arabic still feels exotic. Does this fattened, cartoonish script, which lacks the knife-edge elegance of typical Arabic calligraphy, defuse, or even erase, cultural difference? (In one episode Ramy’s father, after 9/11, installs an American flag in front of their house.) The show gives us glimpses, touching and surprising, inside the community’s mosque and Arabic-speaking households. And there’s a late-night scene of Ramy in his childhood bedroom, decorated in a typical cluttered adolescent fashion, reading peacefully from a Quran.
The title sequence appears only after the opening act of each episode, which is often somber. Popping up like this the sprightly animation startles, but it is true to the protagonist. Ramy is an American from an immigrant community who claims both identities with ease, without assimilating, passing, or code-switching, and without harboring anger or resentment. The titles reflect his untroubled outlook, which is the most remarkable thing about him and about this show.
