 |
| Photograph by Natalie Naccache for The New Yorker |
Mo Amer Has Survived by Being Funny
On billboards for the second season of the Netflix show “Mo,” the comedian Mo Amer wears a kaffiyeh and a cowboy hat. “Mo” is a semi-autobiographical, semi-absurdist dramedy, in the tradition of “Louie,” “Maron,” and “Ramy”; in the show, and also in his standup, Amer, who is forty-four, recounts slightly heightened anecdotes from his life, which was already heightened enough. He was born in Kuwait, to Palestinian-refugee parents. When he was nine, the Iraqi military invaded, sparking the Gulf War, and Amer’s family had to flee. His father was being held mistakenly as a political prisoner, and his mother sewed wads of cash into the lining of a purse and a suitcase and led her children across the border to safety. “My mother is a gansta,” Amer says in his first standup special, “The Vagabond.”
The family ended up in Houston—hence the cowboy hat, the name of Amer’s second standup special (“Mohammed in Texas”), and Amer’s onstage persona, which combines Southern charm, streetwise acuity, and an impressive range of accents from both Gulfs. In one special, Amer tells a story about going to rural Louisiana for a standup show shortly after 9/11, and almost getting arrested; in another, he tells a story about performing for American troops in Iraq, in which he almost gets shot.
Amer told me that he has always felt an obligation to speak not only as a Muslim or as an Arab but from the more specific perspective of a Palestinian American comic... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/mo-amer-has-survived-by-being-funny