It’s a confusing time to be Mohammed Amer, the Palestinian-American comedian known to his friends and fans as Mo. This week, he will release the second season of his groundbreaking Netflix comedy-drama Mo – a semi-autobiographical series about his family’s life as refugees living in Houston, Texas. For Amer, who writes and stars in the show, it’s a huge moment – but any joy he feels is offset by the unimaginable tragedy unfolding back in Palestine.
Mo’s first season, released in 2022, saw Amer play a lightly fictionalised version of himself: an immigrant without documentation, trying his best to support his mum and brother by selling fake Gucci bags and Rolexes out of the trunk of his car – something Amer also did in the decades he spent awaiting asylum after emigrating from Kuwait at age nine. Amer was born in Kuwait after his parents had been displaced from Palestine in the 1948 Nakba, in which around 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland in the creation of Israel.
Mo became a word-of-mouth hit, earning critical acclaim and a rare 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making this second season one of the year’s most anticipated releases. It is without a doubt a career watermark for Amer – hilarious and full of heart, it is the result of much hard work and love, but also immense pain, written in the wake of Hamas’s brutal massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis on 7 October and Israel’s resulting military campaign in Gaza, killing more than 45,000 people, according to the Gaza health ministry.
“It was extremely difficult,” Amer tells me now, over Zoom from Alief where he lives with his wife and young son. “That is the softest way I can put it. It was gruelling – mentally, spiritually, physically.” In the writers’ room – a diverse group of Jews, Muslims, and Christians – difficult conversations were had and emotions were heightened. Early on, it was raised whether the series should reflect these new horrors, before Amer decided against it.
“Every time we went down that rabbit hole, it created a slew of issues and problems. It became really didactic,” says the 43-year-old. “Also, the most glaring thing is that doing so would make it seem like everything [that’s affected my family] started with October 7, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Oddly enough, you think it’d change the trajectory of our story, but quite frankly, this is the same song and dance just escalated by 1,000.”
In Mo’s second season, geopolitics continue to take a backseat to humour and character development. One episode sees Mo desperately try to secure a meeting with the Mexican ambassador, so that he can reenter America after accidentally being trafficked over the border in the back of a truck, but the meeting falls apart – not because Mo refuses to have a threesome with the ambassador and his wife, but because he won’t agree on the terminology: “Israel-Palestine conflict”.
Speaking with Amer, it’s clear that any boundary between himself and Mo is paper thin, if one exists at all. They share an affable, Texan charm so effusive you can feel it through the screen, like an arm slung over your shoulder. Both men wear a trucker cap and smoke in the same way – sharp inhales of breath and long exhales, slow as his Houston drawl. It’s telling of Amer’s work that he is as quick to laugh in conversation as he is to be suddenly overcome by emotion.
“It’s my way of coping. It’s like, you cry, cry, cry, cry and then eventually you start laughing and you don’t know why. You almost look psychotic but I think it’s a natural reaction,” he says. “Life is about balance, there’s good and evil. You cry, you laugh. It’s just the way it is.”
That said, for Amer, making season two of Mo felt like a lot more crying. Several moments are lifted straight from Amer’s life, such as his trip to Burin in Palestine in 2009. “It was brutal, to be honest with you,” he says of reenacting some of the more grief-stricken scenes involving his late father, whom only decades after his death, Amer learnt had been captured and tortured during the Gulf war.
“It’s impossible, man, not to get emotional when I talk about it, it immediately gets me going.” Amer takes a second to gather himself. “Thankfully, it was so excruciatingly painful that I was able to tap into the emotions easily for the scene,” he says, laughing. “My therapist got three sessions out of me.”
Logistically, too, the second series posed issues. The majority of the finale, which is set in Palestine, had to be filmed in Malta; a splinter crew was dispatched to Israel and the West Bank to capture the driving sequences, exteriors, and cutaways. How meta, I suggest, that a show about being Palestinian and not being able to return home is unable to be filmed in Palestine. “It definitely felt symbolic of what’s going on,” he says.
After wrapping on season two, Amer and his family flew to Jordan. “It was very difficult to know that I was only a 45-minute drive from my grandparents’ house [in Burin] and couldn’t go. My own aunt was telling me not to come because it was too dangerous,” he says. “I had my newborn baby with me. I wanted to experience that, for him to know where he comes from and I had no ability to do that. It was really sad to be that close and yet so far.”
Even in its second outing, Mo is a show that continues to feel insistently fresh, no doubt partly because it is the first-ever Palestinian-led TV show in America. Amer, however, finds that so-called burden of representation to be anything but. “That’s what excites me,” he says. “I feel like my whole existence is doing stuff that nobody has done before. My first years of stand-up and touring, there were no Arab or Muslim comedians – now we’re popping up everywhere. It was a very lonely experience early on, there was nobody. A lot of these comedians are repeating jokes that I did 20 years ago.”
I said to myself, if you can perform in front of US troops four months after 9/11, well I’m pretty sure I can perform in front of anybody
In the beginning of his stand-up career, Amer would tour the “nooks and crannies” of the South. “I would take a Toyota Camry and put 3,000 miles on it travelling to all these one-nighters in places that I’ve never gone back to because they are so obscure,” he says. “Sincerely, to this day, I might be some of those people’s only experience of an Arab-Muslim. It felt like a responsibility, but it didn’t feel stifling at all.”
Amer knows a thing or two about tough crowds. At the start of his career, before he had a US passport and was still travelling on a refugee document, he did a series of tours performing for US troops in countries like Guam, Kuwait and Iraq. His first trip was in April of 2001, five months before 9/11. “Things shifted dramatically after that,” he says. “I realised that, OK it’s go time, meaning that I need to be more present than ever and I need to not be scared to be myself, because there was a stretch where I was terrified to be me.” (He clarifies that the fear was never out of shame – “I’ve never been f***ing ashamed” – but out of survival, because “it was a scary time and people were bloodthirsty”.)
“I said to myself, if you can perform in front of US troops four months after 9/11, well I’m pretty sure I can perform in front of anybody,” he laughs. The night before he left for his first trip after the terrorist attack, though, Amer wrote a series of goodbye letters “just in case”. When he returned safely back to Houston, he burnt everything. “I was very real with myself, I was going to go out there and be me – Godspeed.”
As for the material, did he tone it down at all? He cracks up. “Nah I didn’t give a s***. I was too young to know how dangerous the situation was.” His opening bit went like this: Amer would walk onto the gravel stage in front of fully strapped troops and say, “Hey guys, my name is Mo – it’s actually short for Mohammed. Surprise, bitches. Today’s the day.” They loved it. “Those military guys have a sick sense of humour as well.”
One of those trips sent him back to Kuwait for the first time since his family was forced to flee in 1990. “It was an experience in a way to go there and squash all that trauma,” he says. Amer wanted to stay an extra few days to see his aunt, but military protocol dictated that Amer be walked to his plane by a soldier. “I tried to tell the guy, it’s fine we can take it from here, but he was like we got to do this,” he says. “Then he got a call, he’s rushing back to the Suburban and he comes back and he says, ‘Sorry guys, I got to pick up Bradley Cooper; he just landed from Afghanistan.’ All I could think was, thanks to Bradley Cooper I get to hug my family.” His aunt died last year.
Amer is the type to seize opportunities. Case in point: when in 2016 he found himself next to Eric Trump on a flight to Glasgow, he immediately recognised the comedic potential – a proud Muslim comedian sat next to the son of arguably the most Islamophobic politician? You can’t make this stuff up. Amer snapped a photo of himself and the future president’s son grinning, accompanied by the words: “Sometimes God just sends you the material.”
“I landed in Glasgow with the most insane amount of messages,” Amer says now. “I didn’t even know what to do – we both didn’t. It was like we had just had a one-night stand and looked at each other like, maybe we shouldn’t have done this. God knows what kind of messages he got.”
Incidentally, nearly 10 years later, Donald Trump is president for a second time; when we speak it’s the week of his inauguration, his presidency sparking widespread fear over staunch anti-immigration policies. While Amer received his US citizenship in 2009 – a process that took approximately 20 years – he is fearful about what a second Trump term means for those like him. “You have people who are just trying to get here harder than ever, to try and pursue that future they desire for themselves and their families, so it’s painful to see how they dehumanise refugees to such a level where they don’t see them as another soul,” he says. “They become political fodder. It’s a way to incite the masses.”
While Mo wears its politics lightly, the daily headlines weigh heavy on Amer. Recent news of a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel has reached him with hope – if also a big, heaping side of salt. “I don’t really trust anything,” he says. “But I have faith. I’ll always have faith and I’ll hold on to that. I think the whole process is intended to break humanity’s sense of faith and belief, but I do think this will run its course and we can be in a much brighter place. I hope everybody holds up their bargain and has deep compassion with the best of intentions.” He takes a beat and laughs in the way you do when something isn’t funny at all. “But yeah, I’ve seen this movie before.”
‘Mo’ season two is out on Netflix on 30 January
