Mo Amer, refugee comedian: 'If you're angry, you can't fulfil your dreams'
There’s an auspicious precedent for Houston comedians trying their luck in the UK: when Bill Hicks did it in the early 1990s, he made himself a legend. But you’ll forgive Mo Amer if he doesn’t take a warm British welcome for granted. “England has always been the most difficult place for me,” says Amer. “If I landed at a UK airport and had all my paperwork to hand, it was still always, ‘Oh, one more thing, Mohammad …’” You can almost feel the exasperation over our transatlantic phone line. “There was always ‘one more thing’. It was really an uphill battle just to go there and do my job.”
Amer, you see, was a member of that rare breed: an internationally touring refugee comic. He left war-torn Kuwait in 1990 with his Palestinian family and settled in Texas – but wasn’t granted US citizenship until 2009, when he was 28. He had already performed worldwide by then, entertaining US troops overseas and touring on the hit Muslim standup bill Allah Made Me Funny. And on each occasion, he had done so with refugee travel documents in lieu of a passport – a fraught process he relives, with added gaiety, in his 2018 Netflix special The Vagabond. (Customs officer: “Can I please have your passport?” Mo, at his wit’s
end: “That is my passport!”)
And now Amer is returning to the UK to tour with West Midlands comic Guz Khan. “As a Palestinian,” Amer says, “I have a long relationship with England, before I even came into existence. Matter of fact, when I was visiting my grandparents’ house in Palestine, I found a British government-issued Palestinian passport for my grandfather. So there’ll always be a connection.” The son of an oil engineer, the young Amer went to a British-English private school in Kuwait before his family went into exile. “And when I first came to the States and realised you can’t call cats ‘pussy’ out here, it was a situation, I can tell you.”
The match-up with Khan, best known for his viral online videos and the cult BBC3 sitcom they generated, Man Like Mobeen, is an incongruous one on paper – but not to Amer, who calls the Brit “the Pakistani version of me. We made an instant connection,” he says, when they met on the circuit three years ago. But they won’t connect on stage: they’ll perform separately, as Khan develops his maiden solo hour and Amer works up a second Netflix special.
His first – years in the preparation, and released last October – is a fine comedy set, focusing tightly on Amer’s backstory, his experiences as an Arab newcomer to the US, and life as a peripatetic refugee comedian. At points, it’s heavy on ethnic caricature; elsewhere, Amer gives a buoyant account of his chance encounter – in the eye of the “Muslim ban” storm – with presidential scion Eric Trump on a transatlantic flight, his tweets about which went supernova. The special’s most conspicuous feature, though, is its optimism. How can a man who spent 20 gruelling years fighting to be accepted by his adopted country be so upbeat about that experience on stage?
“I tip my hat to my mother on that one,” says Amer. The Vagabond is dedicated to his mum, whom Mo singles out in the crowd and all but serenades. “She raised me with the idea that patience is everything, and that you can turn something super-negative to something that’s super-positive. As Palestinians, we have no other choice. What else are you going to do?”
“I went through an angry phase,” he says, “and I still get angry. I’m a human being. But if you’re angry, you can’t think straight. If you’re angry, you’re not able to focus on your next task and fulfil your dreams.” (If immigration officials ever doubted Amer was American, they need only have listened to his starry-and-stripey thoughts on responsibility and self-improvement.)
Amer’s current “next task” is the UK tour, which promises material on “the new administration, gentrification; there’s a lot of family stuff. Middle Eastern politics. Definitely immigration again.” Amer will keep harping on migration, he says – partly because “this is who I am, this is my experience”, and also because the best comedians “have got to be funny, but they’ve also got to make people think.” His default example is friend and mentor Dave Chappelle, whom he supported at the Albert Hall in London last October.
Of the 700-plus shows he’s performed with Chappelle, his most treasured was at Radio City Music Hall, New York, in 2017, after which, he claims, Chappelle’s mother told him: “You’re like my son 10 years ago. I give you 10 years and you’ll be where he’s at.” Amer backtracks immediately after revealing this (“I’d never want to compare myself to Dave …”) but doesn’t deny the ambition. “I’ll be where I’m supposed to be in 10 years,” he says. “But of course, I want to accomplish all those things and more.” You wouldn’t bet against him. “I’ll just keep running my own race and working hard. As you know, I have a lot of patience.”
Mo Amer & Guz Khan are at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 28 March, then touring until 13 April.