‘Those military guys have a sick sense of humour too’

Palestinian-American Mo Amer talks with Annabel Nugent about the return of his TV show, his family in the West Bank, and performing stand-up for US troops months after 9/11

- Annabel Nugent

It’s a confusing time to be Mohammed Amer, the PalestinianAmerican 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.