Ray Romano: The Unlikely Export Calming a Fractured Planet, One Sardonic Grunt at a Time

Ray Romano and the Global Giggle-Industrial Complex
By a Correspondent Who Has Watched Too Many Sitcoms in Economy Class

Somewhere over the Kara Sea, seat 42B on Aeroflot 243 is vibrating with canned laughter. The in-flight entertainment system has queued up an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, subtitled in Cyrillic and Mandarin, and the Russian grandmother to my left is wiping away tears—half from altitude-induced dehydration, half from the immutable truth that in-laws are universally insufferable. In that moment, Ray Romano ceases to be a Queens-born comic with a voice like a rusted leaf blower and becomes a soft-power export more durable than soybeans and slightly less inflammatory than TikTok.

At first glance, the continued planetary circulation of Romano’s 1990s neuroses seems like a glitch in the cultural firmware. Why should a man whose biggest on-screen crisis involves a can-opener and a bag of frozen peas still headline streaming menus from Lagos to Lahore? The answer, dear reader, lies in the grand, cynical machinery of globalization: if you can package mild marital panic into 22-minute increments, you have built the perfect opiate for commuters trapped in Jakarta traffic or Cairo gridlock. Call it the IKEA flat-pack of empathy—assembly required, allen key of self-recognition sold separately.

The numbers are as absurd as they are persuasive. Netflix reports that Raymond remains in the top-ten rewatch index in 37 non-English-speaking markets; in South Korea, it’s nicknamed “Ah-jussi Sweatshop” for the number of office drones who stream it on mute during all-nighters. Romano’s face—perpetually pinched in the expression of a man calculating compound interest on his existential debt—has become a meme template from São Paulo stock exchanges to Mumbai call centers. One Brazilian fintech even uses his grimace as the loading icon for its overdraft-fee disclosure page. Nothing sells micro-loans like the visage of middle-aged regret.

Critics in Paris sniff that this is merely neocolonial comfort food, a sugary transfusion of American suburban tedium into the veins of the global precariat. They’re not wrong, but they miss the darker punchline: Romano’s humor is effective precisely because it is so aggressively small. His worries—will the PTA hate me? will the dryer eat my socks?—shrink geopolitical anxiety down to a manageable petting-zoo size. While the Arctic melts and supply chains rupture, you can still laugh at a man who fears his mother more than climate collapse. Cognitive dissonance has never been so adorably consumable.

Meanwhile, the business side is pure late-capitalist poetry. Fremantle, the rights-holder, licenses Raymond to 112 territories, earning more from Uzbek rebroadcasts than the show ever did in first-run U.S. ad sales. The Romano Risk-Free Rate is now a line item in hedge-fund models: a low-volatility asset that pays steady dividends every time a dictator’s nephew buys a sitcom package to fill state-run airwaves between propaganda bulletins. Analysts at Credit Suisse (RIP) once pitched it as “recession-proof melancholy.” They were half right: during COVID lockdowns, global viewership jumped 43 percent, proving once again that nothing unites humanity like the fear of disappointing your spouse with subpar lasagna.

Of course, the man himself remains adorably bewildered by his passport-stamped afterlife. Interviewed on Italian television last spring, Romano confessed he thought “Bari” was a type of pasta until he was served honorary citizenship there. He now spends his off-tour months fielding WhatsApp voice notes from Filipino dubbing actors arguing over whether “Holy crap!” should translate to “Santo cielo!” or the more visceral “Ay, putek!” Cultural diplomacy at its most profane.

So where does this leave us? Somewhere between the laugh track and the supply chain, Ray Romano has become a low-grade narcotic against the howling absurdity of 21st-century life. His jokes don’t change regimes, but they do keep cargo-ship crews sane off the Horn of Africa, and that may be as close to world peace as we’re going to get. When the last polar bear clings to the final ice cube, there will still be a server in Singapore humming with Season 3, Episode 12, ready to reassure us that somebody, somewhere, is slightly more pathetic than we are.

Comfort, after all, is just fear with a better agent.