Coming home
Comedian’s new ‘Mo’ tells an immigrant story with love, toil and humor
Mo Amer had barely settled into his seat in Fifth Ward’s DeLuxe Theater before his eyes began to water. The stand-up comedian was back in Houston to show some clips of his new Netflix show, “Mo,” accompanied by some of his co-stars: Teresa Ruíz, Tobe Nwigwe and Bun B, who is also hosting a discussion related to the show about culture and faith.
Amer’s job requires standing before thousands of people and telling jokes, but something about the hometown crowd seeing parts of “Mo” for the first time got to him.
“Nervioso,” Ruíz said and patted Amer’s arm. He cracked wise about becoming a teary Michael Jordan meme. Still, Amer found himself in tears on set routinely while shooting “Mo,” a story he’s developed over nearly a decade that premieres on Netflix Aug 24.
Based on his own life story, “Mo” is a “sort of Palestinian origin story,” as Amer referred to it. It’s also a deep meditation on the idea of home: home as a birthright, home as a state of mind and home as an assemblage of people to whom one is connected by blood or friendship.
On this evening, Amer’s friends were having fun at his expense.
“OK, enough with the crying,” he said. “Stop playing with me.”
Houston as home
Amer, 41, insisted that “Mo” is a comedy. And it is: little moments throughout feel like they could appear in his stand-up, including a repeated refrain about a Palestinian branding issue in the States. Other
set-piece comic moments are crafted specifically for an ensemble: Amer and Nwigwe in a car with a trunk full of drugs, pretending to be a gospel group, singing for a suspicious officer at a roadblock.
But comedy and pain are often spouses, with all the affection and tension such a connection implies.
“Here’s the thing, with drama, you’re always going to find the comedy,” Amer said. “Deeply painful topics, you just find it. It’s how you deal with it. I hope that’s what makes this a universal story. It’s not just an immigrant story. Anybody who struggles paycheck to paycheck could relate to this. Anybody who struggles to assimilate, who feels like a fish out of water…”
Amer at times referred to Mo by name, indicating a fictional construct. But the character’s toil is part of a decades-spanning story of a child shaken loose from his ancestral home to arrive in Houston, literally, without a nation to call his own. In “Mo,” Houston is presented as that home.
Nwigwe said the show felt “very specific, very special.”
Bun added: “I’ve been around long enough to remember ‘Jason’s Lyric’ and ‘Robocop,’ ” referring to films famously shot in the Bayou City. “But this show is the first one I’ve seen that looks like Houston, sounds like Houston, feels like Houston.”
‘The immigrant hustle’
At age 9, Amer arrived in Houston in 1990 after his family fled Kuwait during the Gulf War. Even as a child he found himself performing for the family. A Bill Cosby performance at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo resonated with him for its narrative construction. “I come from a storytelling culture,” Amer said.
That show turned out to be a trailhead.
But the path to professional comedian was a crooked one. Amer’s father died unexpectedly in 1995. So much of “Mo” occurs under the shadow of that life-changing event. Amer said soon after his father’s death, he started “doing the immigrant hustle,” selling bootlegged sunglasses, purses and shoes as a teen. In the pilot episode, Mo loses his job and reverts to the moneymaking endeavor he knew well.
“My father, before he passed, he taught me about business,” Amer said. “When he was gone, it was the mother of invention. There was this necessity to make money. I’d always tell people they were getting the last one of something. Then a week later everybody’s wearing the same (expletive). People come back angry, and I’d just tell them I had even newer stock.
“Imagine being 14 and making $500 a week.”
From the jump, Amer’s show details these stories and struggles. It does so with deep reverence to the city where Amer landed more than three decades ago, particularly Alief, where he — and his friend and co-star, the popular hip-hop artist Nwigwe — grew up. Scripted television has long felt far away for Houstonians. Comedian Thea Vidale created a reverent Houston-set sitcom, “Thea,” in 1994, but ABC pulled the plug early.
“I think it’s ridiculous we haven’t had a major narrative sitcom in this city,” Amer said.
“Mo” began without any aspirations for TV. Comedian Dave Chappelle, an early Amer booster, suggested Amer film a snippet of story to introduce his stand-up. Amer wrote a piece based on his memories of having to flee Kuwait. From that idea, over the course of nine years, a fuller story emerged.
“Then the problem became trying to decide which stories to include,” Amer said. “That was harder than it sounds. It’s not just my story. There are a lot of origin stories in this show.”
Olive oil and tears
Early in the season, Farah Bsieso, who plays Mo’s mother, Yusra Najjar, decides to begin pressing olive oil again. The scene is extraordinary, presenting the ritual as one might an extreme close-up of a dance. The movements exude grace and beauty but also visceral processes of smashing, grinding and twisting.
A striking piece of music plays, which Amer said is “Yamo,” which had been featured in a Syrian TV show called “Ghawar.” It’s a love letter to mothers, and Amer says when it was used on “Ghawar,” it was one of only two times he saw his father cry.
Amer could have granted olive oil billing in the show as though it were an actor. During eight episodes, olive oil serves as a balm for a wound; it’s used for relief in a time of stress; it’s toted around by Mo in his everyday life.
“Extracting something so rich through this painstaking process, it just became a metaphor for trying to create this series,” he said. “And there are other things: the idea of the olive branch. There’s theft of olive trees in the show that echoes the theft of Palestinian homes.”
He knew what he had in this moment, even before he formalized it with co-writer, comedian Ramy Youssef and director Solvan “Slick” Naim.
“I started crying, bro, when I saw the scene.”
Amer has enjoyed success in stand-up comedy for years now. His chosen line of work requires a delicately calibrated sense of dynamics. Amer’s personality is formidable, but he understands the power imbued in silence. The editing of “Mo” was a labored process. He knew the quiet and the loud, the dramatic and the comic had to be perfect.
“Even things like that, the way the show sounds, I’ve had it in mind forever,” Amer said. “There are moments you need to fill with something funny. There are others that you need to give space to breathe.”
He referenced a moment in the pilot when Mo’s brother Sameer (Omar Elba) walks into the room. A long, uncomfortable silence ensues. Amer says there was a push for a quick cut, but he wanted to keep the shot on Sameer, despite the discomfort the silence produced.
“We wanted to set up that the brother was somewhere on the spectrum,” he said. “To rush that, it does him a disservice.”
He found in Netflix a platform that trusted him to execute his vision. Amer said the original video he shot at Chappelle’s suggestion hooked Netflix, even without a more fully developed pitch. Elvis Presley’s “That’s Alright Mama” plays in the scene, which emphasizes the theme of maternal strength that runs through the show. Even that little detail has roots in Amer’s past. He recounted a 15-hour detention in Bahrain years ago where a plastic deer head mount sang “Hound Dog” each time somebody passed, a recollection that underscores further the proximity between humor and pain.
And through it all, endurance, too. Without giving away a simply devastating plot turn in the show, Mo’s mother calms her son not with olive oil but a cultural truth: “We carry on,” she says. “That’s what we do.”
“Here’s the thing, with drama, you’re always going to find the comedy. Deeply painful topics, you just find it. It’s how you deal with it.”
Mo Amer