Comedian Talks Testing Jokes on His Dog and Exposing ‘Wife Thoughts’ for HBO Special (Exclusive)

Ramy Youssef is graduating from Feelings and More Feelings to being In Love for his latest HBO standup special, Ramy Youssef: In Love.

Debuting on April 17, and streaming now on HBO Max, In Love was filmed in The Hideout, an intimate and historic Chicago venue, where Youssef is getting candid about the most important things in his life, including his wife and their dog Basha. Directed by Christopher Storer, the special puts viewers in the room with Youssef as he discusses a desire to understand what his dog is saying, revealing “Wife Thoughts,” a.k.a. things shares with his wife, and navigating the dangers of A.I. with  your parents. Below, Youssef answers some of our questions surrounding the special.

This special was filmed in February and is extremely topical to current events. How close to the shoot were you fine-tuning material?

Ramy Youssef: I think that there’s the bedrock of the set that are things that I know I want to hit, and I think for me, from a performance perspective, it’s really important for it to feel like it’s happening in a way that when you’re filming a special, it’s a tough balance because you are playing for a crowd that’s right in front of you, and you’re playing for everyone else in their living room. I do try to honor the people who are in that very physical room as much as possible, and that is spontaneity, I think that when I was doing the [Love Beam 7000] tour — actually, this was the biggest tour I’ve ever done — and I was doing larger theaters, with a couple thousand people all over the world and I got to meet people in a way that I never have.

Elizabeth Sisson / HBO

The last two specials were always shot in the thick of production on Ramy.  This was the first one where I got to properly tour, and then it was the main thing that I was focusing on. I kicked the tour off right after I finished shooting Mountainhead last spring, so it was a really cool way to meet all these people. I was asking the crowd [about] things I was wrestling with, and then I found people are dealing with these questions pretty much everywhere, whether it’s around having a pet or having a wedding, or things that really center around how we feel with what we do and the changes in technology and how they’re threatening those things.

So, I walked into this special knowing that I was gonna keep that, and that was something Chris [Storer] and I talked about, which was, let’s just shoot it the way that you do it in a stand-up show, when you’re doing crowd work, no one in the crowd sees who you’re talking to unless you’re sitting next to them. So we didn’t even try to grab the crowd, it was more, we’re going to play it as if you were in the room and, so by the nature of kind of walking into the set and knowing I’m going to do crowd work, and I don’t know where it’s going to go, and we also felt we were going to commit as much as possible to one of the shows, and that special is really just the majority of one show.

You make this commitment to be loose, and so, to answer your question, there’s a set, but also, there isn’t, and there’s material that I was adding. There are a couple of jokes in there that I had never told until that night, and a couple of things that we had shot on Friday and Saturday, and maybe I had worked them out on Monday or Tuesday in Connecticut.

Elizabeth Sisson / HBO

Was there a story or segment from the special that you felt was a guaranteed laugh, and was there any you weren’t sure about, but took a gamble on? 

The whole set for me is always a high-wire act. I actually love talking about pedestrian kind of things. Obviously, I talk a lot about having a dog, or a wedding, but I think for me it’s always kind of, how do you dig into the side of it that needs to be dug into? That tends to be the thing that is most exciting to me. So, there’s always this risk-reward of, which way is the crowd going to go with it? I think that obviously happens a bunch in the set, but these are things that I’m confident to roll with, regardless of how it’s received, and that’s what makes it super fun because the crowd either really goes with it and goes, oh, this is awesome that you’re going there, or they don’t like it, and then you’ve got to win them back, which is, sometimes even more fun.

You talk about featuring pedestrian topics, but when you tell a story about meeting the Pope, which is most certainly not pedestrian. Do you like having that juxtaposition of stories and experiences in the set?

My feeling is always that if you can meet people where they are, they’ll go with you wherever you wanna go. And so the balance is always… You know, my life is not that crazily different, except for every once in a while doing something like meeting the Pope, and so I think that’s just letting people in on feeling that as well.

“Wife Thoughts” is also a recurring bit throughout the show. Is that something you’d be interested in continuing in future specials or tours? 

For sure, there was something about that idea of “Wife Thoughts” that feels very evergreen, and I wouldn’t hesitate to kind of keep digging into it. What’s fun about stand-up, and everything that I get the privilege of getting to do, is you’re scaling this mountain of things that you care about, and so I never really feel you want to keep going deeper into the wells that you’ve already started to dig, or the mountain you’ve already started to climb. I think that’s what people really appreciate in an artist. I think that there’s something about knowing that there are a few things that they are going to keep finding more nuance in that that really excites me. I don’t think that everyone needs to have this vast range.

You talk about your dog Basha a lot in the special and mention wishing you could speak to them. Do you ever test out jokes on Basha? 

I talk to him all the time, and there seems to be mainly indifference [with jokes].

What kind of reaction would you hope to get?

Sometimes when he’s really happy to see me, he’ll dig his face into me, and then he won’t, so I wish I could say something and get that little face dig going, but, you know….

Ramy Youssef: In Love, Special, Streaming now, HBO Max