Austin Powers References Are Comedy’s Hottest Mini-Trend
Roxana Hadadi
‘This Fool,’ ‘Ramy,’ and ‘Bros’ are all recent comedy releases that share one thing in common: references to Mike Myers’s ‘Austin Powers’ movies. It’s comedy’s current hottest mini-trend.
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Vulture
“Austin Powers is classic cinema” probably isn’t a descriptor Mike Myers could have anticipated when International Man of Mystery was released in theaters 25 years ago. But nods to Myers’s British spy who railed against capitalist pigs, never forgot a pussy (cat), and starred in sequels The Spy Who Shagged Me and Goldmember are comedy’s hottest mini-trend, nestled into Bros, released in theaters September 30; the third season of Ramy, released on Hulu also on September 30; and the first — but hopefully not last — season of This Fool, released on Hulu on August 12. In each of these comedies, the references to the late-’90s/early-’00s James Bond parody trilogy are, of course, played for laughs, whether as compliments (like in Bros, when Luke Macfarlane’s hunky Aaron praises Billy Eichner’s Bobby on his chest hair) or impressions of the trilogy’s ensemble (the mimicry of Austin and Dr. Evil in This Fool, and of Fat Bastard in Ramy). But the intention here, say both This Fool co-creator and writer Pat Bishop and Ramy creator Ramy Youssef, isn’t to mock Myers or his work. They each separately call the man a “genius” and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (streaming on Netflix and HBO Max) an unexpectedly emotional work with a tragic narrative subtext about how irrelevance and aging can be our greatest enemies.

“As a comedy writer now, I’m someone who satirizes things,” says Bishop, who watched International Man of Mystery a year or so after its release in 1997 because the film’s deluge of sex stuff initially made his parents wary. “It was kind of instructional as a way to make fun of another thing while also telling a real story on its own. There is this real, grounded sort of trauma that Austin Powers goes through, of traveling through time and learning that everyone he knew is dead or old — it manages to be a parody, but also have emotional stakes.”

That singularity is what inspired Bishop and co-writer Johan Miranda to center Austin Powers in This Fool’s fifth episode, “Sandy Says,” after also considering and discarding various other ’90s and aughts comedies, like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, that didn’t have quite the right pathos or immediate recognizability. In “Sandy Says,” ex-con Luis (Frankie Quiñones), during group-sharing sessions with his peers in the Hugs Not Thugs program, ceaselessly quotes Austin Powers. Instead of engaging with what the other program members are saying about their regrets and anxieties, he uses Austin Powers lines as commentary: “Does porn make you randy, baby?” he asks porn addict Randy (Treach); “I’m just trying to make Group Hug more groovy, baby,” he argues to cousin Julio (Chris Estrada) when asked to stop. The episode is packed with moments in which Luis falls back on the movie while struggling to admit his own feelings of displacement — like when he tells the organization’s therapist Sandy (Freda Foh Shen) to “Shh!”, in Bishop’s favorite reference — before finally engaging in Group Hug and voicing his realization that “The world is ever-changing, homey. I gotta change with it. That’s what Austin Powers is all about.”

Quiñones is in fine form this episode, with sharp comedic timing as he slices through the Austin Powers dialogue and contrasting restraint as he talks about how much the movie reminds him of his relationship with his father and the family he’s lost. The admission serves as a bonding moment for both Luis and the other members of Hugs Not Thugs, and for Luis and Julio, who are disgusted to learn that Sandy hasn’t seen the movie. (“What, did she live in a cave or something?”) When the cousins leave Hugs Not Thugs that day, they do so to “Just the Two of Us” — which Dr. Evil and Mini-Me (Verne Troyer) performed together in The Spy Who Shagged Me — and struggle to leave their boxed-in parking spot (a re-creation of Austin’s inability to execute that three-point turn in the original film).

Everything Austin-esque included in “Sandy Says” was as he and Miranda originally intended, Bishop says, except for one thing: the moment Luis shows up to Group Hug wearing a dinosaur costume.

The script first had Luis in an Austin Powers getup — like the various velvet suits and frilly shirts he wears in the trilogy — before what Bishop bemusedly describes as “a six-month legal battle” between Hulu owner Disney and Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the Austin Powers franchise, over whether This Fool could depict the character’s likeness. When told they couldn’t dress Luis like Austin, Bishop and Miranda rewrote the scene to include Luis trying to find an Austin costume at Party City but failing (another sign of his outdatedness), and going with a dinosaur costume anyway, to “make it all the more confusing,” Bishop explains. (And to avoid any additional legal wrangling, Bishop and Miranda simply didn’t write the use of “Just the Two of Us” into the script: “We were like, ‘Let’s just not mention it to them, and hopefully they haven’t seen the films and won’t catch all the references we’re secretly doing,’” he adds with a laugh.)

While “Sandy Says” uses Luis to voice Austin Powers’s varying goofiness and melancholy, the Ramy reference in third-season penultimate episode “A Blanket on the Television” came not from the writers’ room, but from an on-set imitation, Youssef says. On a late night of filming, as Youssef, co-star Shadi Alfons, and the rest of the cast and crew pounced on a hot meal, Alfons surprised everyone with a Scottish-accented “Get in my belly!” Fat Bastard impression. The moment was so out of nowhere yet recognizable that Youssef immediately knew he had to work Alfons’s impression into an episode, and after getting home “at like, three in the morning,” he rewrote the Chinese restaurant scene of “A Blanket on the Television” to accommodate it.

The episode is mostly a thematically dark one, with Laith Nakli’s Uncle Naseem tumbling into paranoia, May Calamawy’s Dena lying to her parents Maysa (Hiam Abbass) and Farouk (Amr Waked), and Maysa and Farouk fighting over the troubled state of their marriage. A family dinner at a local Chinese restaurant is strained by those resentments and Ramy’s absence. But all those unspoken tensions pause when Egyptian cousin Shadi (Alfons) slides a steamer of dumplings toward him, maneuvers his face into an excited grin, and blurts out, “Get in my belly!”

That silliness briefly punctures the group’s otherwise dourness and allows for a line of dialogue that Youssef would give to cinephile Farouk and make the episode’s tagline: “Austin Powers is classic cinema.” Until Uncle Naseem pulls a gun on the table and ruins the whole vibe, Shark Tank and Arab movie fan Farouk bonding with Dude, Where’s My Car? and American Pie adorer Shadi over a sex- and drugs-filled film franchise is pretty adorable. “Shadi is so funny. He really was making us laugh, and he kept it going between takes,” Youssef says. “That scene was such a monster to shoot. It’s so many people at the table, things are crazy, and he kept it light. Everybody broke. That scene is the record for the most breaks, probably, on our set.”

Bros, Ramy, and This Fool differ in their execution, with Bros offering the quickest salute, Ramy the zaniest, and This Fool the most rigorous. But together, they serve as a nostalgic triptych — a demonstration of how Austin Powers crystallized satire for millennials now making their own films and series, and a reminder that theatrical comedies used to have the kind of sprawling appeal that united generations like Luis and his father and Shadi and his uncle Farouk. “There’s nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster,” Dr. Evil sneers to his nemesis in International Man of Mystery, but per usual, he’s wrong. In the words of Bishop: “Austin Powers forever.”