The Palestinian-US standup on British airports, his Netflix special The Vagabond and what he has in common with comic pals Guz Khan and Dave Chappelle
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!”)
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