Mo Amer: Wild World

As Cat Stevens' song "Wild World" plays, an announcer welcomes Mo Amer to the stage at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. Amer opens his stand-up set by saying, "Fuck DJ Khaled," followed by the Arabic word "Biteezak," which he translates from his previous special as "in your ass." He recounts how Mexican fans regularly shout the phrase at him on the street, but insists that DJ Khaled deserves it because he is Palestinian and "he's not speaking up." Amer explains that he still follows Khaled on Instagram just to mock him, declaring, "Because you gotta say something."

Amer recalls returning from the strike to write Season 2 of his television show on October 1st, right before October 7th happened. He traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak last at a Jewish Voice for Peace rally in front of Congress. Wanting to perform stand-up, he called the D.C. Improv, a venue he had sold out over a hundred times, but they denied him. He instructed his manager to find any venue, resulting in him filming a set in the basement of a gay German beer bar, though he chose not to release the footage because it was so emotional and instead focused on his Palestinian-American television show.

While performing small pop-up shows in Houston to check on his community, Amer noticed angry white people buying tickets. Before he even took the microphone at one show, a Southern woman named Myrtle told him, "You tell them exactly how you feel," and added, "I done did my research." Amer jokes about bringing Myrtle to handle journalists who ask gotcha questions like, "Mo, before we discuss Season 2, do you condemn Hamas?" Imitating Myrtle educating a reporter on the 1948 Nakba and Palestinian Christians in Chile, Amer acts out her realization that "Jesus is Palestinian," before having to call a "time-out" when her remarks about Jewish people go too far. He also imagines two Texans in the city of Palestine, Texas confused by the news broadcasts.

Amer shares a conversation with a Jewish friend who helped on his show and calls himself a "recovering Zionist." The friend told Amer, "Israel is like the baby that you have that you love so much, and then it grows up to be a school shooter." Amer then contrasts how Jewish bagel shop owners cooperate to set a unified $5 price, whereas two Arab falafel shop owners across the street from each other will undercut their prices down to "$2.99, free, fuck you, free," until they both go out of business.

Discussing the frustrations of making Season 2, Amer mentions an online comment claiming, "You're making the IDF look bad, Mo." He responds with disbelief that he is blamed rather than "the fact that they're carpet-bombing an entire civilian population?" Explaining why he chose his current D.C. venue right across the street from the government, latestnetflix.com notes, Amer states, "We're not scared, we're here." He then talks about Elon Musk having a failing "human skin suit," his son telling someone in the Oval Office to "Shut your mouth," Musk performing a near-salute on stage, and a joke that removing Musk's face would reveal an alien saying, "The secret of the universe is on Epstein's list."

Wiping his forehead, Amer sings a verse of Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" with the audience before announcing that his world changed forever because he had a baby. He tells a joke about being Muslim with "three slots open" for wives, explaining that his wife loves the joke and insisted he tell it in front of 5,000 people in Doha, where only she laughed. Amer describes suffering from "sympathy symptoms" like nausea and vomiting during her pregnancy until he heard the baby's heartbeat, which relieved him because he could "go back to smoking."

Although Amer arranged a doctor and hospital, his wife's friend Denise convinced her to hire a doula and midwife for a natural home birth. Amer was put off when the midwives greeted them wearing football jerseys that said "number one home birther" on the back. When his wife's contractions began at home without prior preparation from the midwives, Amer tried coaching her himself, telling her to "spread those knees apart" and "ride it like a wave." When the doula and midwife finally arrived in their jerseys and gave the exact same advice, Amer yelled, "I fucking told you!" and walked outside to smoke a joint.

After 27 hours of labor with no epidural and his wife stuck at six centimeters for seven hours, Amer declared, "Game over, midwifery bitches," and took her to the hospital. Once she received an epidural, she texted him, "Oh my God, we are so stupid," prompting Amer to type and delete angry replies before simply texting, "Honey, I'm happy you're happy." After another seven hours, the doctor announced they had to perform a C-section and introduced an assisting doctor wearing a yarmulke. Amer joked to himself that "Mossad's trying to take my Palestinian baby," before the doctor greeted him with "Salaam alaikum" and repeatedly emphasized to Amer's wife that "as a Moroccan Jew," he was just there to assist.

Wearing tight scrubs, Amer watched the entire C-section, refusing to take a photo because his "Palestinian baby's been stuck at this checkpoint last 40 hours." Although he felt no emotion initially, he broke down crying that night during skin-to-skin contact, telling his son Ali that he gave him seven Muslim names after his ancestors and promising, "you're going to know exactly where you come from, habibi." When a nurse walked in to check on his sobbing, she pointed out, "No, he's sucking on your titty." Amer explains to the crowd that in the final episode of Season 2, a teacher asked him to name his paternal great-grandfather, asking, "How easily are you erased?" Consequently, Amer used footage of his family's actual village of Burin for all the Palestine cutaways to serve as a historical archive for his son.

Reflecting on starting stand-up at age 14 in the South, Amer recalls refusing advice to change his name and hide his Palestinian identity in L.A., though he jokes that right after 9/11, "I was Italian for a solid two months." Having grown up in Kuwait attending a British school, he arrived in America with a British accent and no sense of style. His Black friend Bruce publicly mocked his $13.99 Payless shoes, while his Mexican friend Jose privately scolded his clothes. When his brother got him a kitten for PTSD, Amer used the British slang "pussy" at recess, telling Bruce, "I have a pussy, it's small and fluffy, you wanna see it?" Bruce gathered the whole school, and a shocked Jose asked in Spanish and English if Amer had a vagina before asking, "Can I see it, bro?"

In 2003, a club owner with a heavy Cajun accent booked Amer for $1,000 at the Lanyard Muted Cafe in Houma, Louisiana. Amer brought along an unfunny Southern comedian named Gary Bell strictly as "a layer of protection." After the crowd threatened to kill Gary during his opening set, Amer took the mic, had a successful performance, and collected his $1,000, only to be stopped by a detective saying, "Come here, boy." Outside, surrounded by six squad cars and a dozen officers, detectives questioned why he was in Houma and what he had been doing in Japan and Korea, revealing they had searched his hotel room.

Amer explained to the police that he had performed comedy for U.S. troops in Japan and Korea, adding that if he were a terrorist with a bomb in Houma, "I'd just be redecorating the place" and resolving their crack problem, to which the officer agreed, "Yeah, we sure do got a crack problem." After finding Gary hiding in the bushes, they were driven back to the hotel, where the apologetic officer explained that hotel security had called the police. Amer confronted the security guard, a woman missing her front teeth who whistled when she spoke, and she admitted, "I've seen the name Mohammed, and I was like, 'Hey, we've got a terrorist situation here.'" Back at the trashed room, the officer asked Gary if the twelve porn magazines laid out on the bed were his, leading Amer to joke that the guard "stopped the other terrorist plot from happening that night."

Amer explains that he remained a suspected terrorist at airports until he paid $100 and filled out paperwork for TSA PreCheck, noting that "terrorists hate paperwork." He describes aggressive TSA agents yelling about laptops, forcing travelers to chug water, throwing away a diabetic woman's apple juice, and yelling "Stay still!" at a stroke victim in the X-ray machine. Questioning the 3.4-ounce liquid limit when passengers can bring multiple small bottles, Amer catches himself before joking about mixing them, fearing a headline about a "terrorist comedian" at the Warner Theatre.

Bringing up Myrtle's phrase, "What goes around comes around," Amer wonders if heightened racism stems from white people fearing retribution for history involving Indigenous people, slavery, Chinese railroad workers, Mexicans returning to their ancestral land, and Muslims facing discrimination. He acts out a hypothetical scenario where a white man enters a pie shop and is refused service by a Black counter worker, a Mexican manager named Jose, and a Chinese owner. Stating that "No one is better than anybody else," Amer shares that his mother recently told him, "I feel like I'm living the same life as my grandmothers."

Transitioning into a riff on the word "time," Amer talks about getting sucked into watching 40 hours of *Love Island* with a friend before noting that being "ahead of your time" means dying young like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, or Amy Winehouse, whereas Jeffrey Epstein "was doing hard time in the wrong place at the wrong time." Rejecting praise that he is ahead of his time as a pioneering Arab-American and Palestinian-American comedian, Amer states he wants to be "present in this moment in time." Quoting his mother's saying, "If you love me, show me," he criticizes DJ Khaled and Jerry Seinfeld—who said "I don't care about Palestine"—for being "behind the times," noting that the world now trusts Ms. Rachel more than *The New York Times*. Concluding a rapid string of time idioms with "Until next time. Myrtle?", Amer shouts in a Southern accent, "Free Palestine!", thanks the Washington, D.C. audience, and shakes hands with people in the front row as Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" plays.