The Lankford Student Union was noisy with the sounds of chatty students and popcorn popping this past Saturday night. Mo Amer took the stage and began to speak but the noise did not die down until he said, “Mo is actually short for Mohammed; surprise b------, today’s the day!”
The audience erupted into laughter and quieted down in order to hear Amer’s unique brand of comedy. As Amer began talking directly to the audience and telling stories about his time overseas performing for US troops, it became clear he was no amateur. In fact, Amer has performed in over 27 countries on five different continents. He made a movie with two other comics that was very successful around the world called “Allah Made Me Funny.” He has also opened for Dave Chappelle.
Amer performed for about an hour and, while his jokes and stories spanned many topics, the underlying theme was about race and religion. He was born in Kuwait and, at the age of nine, he, his mother and his sister all had to escape the country due to the Persian Gulf War. While this had to have been a traumatizing experience, Amer managed to paint the whole experience with his signature brand of comedy. “My mom turned into a gangster,” said Amer “Up until now, she had just been this quiet, sweet woman, and once things got bad she found ways to smuggle food and even money out of the country!”
Amer talked about his childhood and having to adjust to life in America, as well as some of the prejudices that are placed on him when he travels. He talked about a few different unpleasant experiences he has had in airports in which his name and the color of his skin caused officials to find him unnecessarily suspicious. Still, as he told these stories, he seemed to have the unique ability to take these experiences and find the humor in them.
Turning people’s hate and racism into comedy has awarded him a successful career, so perhaps the joke is on them. Yet, when Amer talked more personally about his experiences it became clear that, despite being able to find the humor in these unjust situations, he does not think it’s fair.
He discussed the worst case of blatant prejudice he has ever faced. In his home state of Louisiana, he checked into a Ramada Inn and headed over to a local music cafe to do a one night performance.
“The worst, the absolute worst, where on the inside I felt gross, was once in Louisiana,” explained Amer. “It was a great night; I killed it, everyone seemed to love my stuff. After the show, we were all – me and my friends – just hanging out.
This lady in a pants suit kind of motions for me to come over and asks for my ID. So I give it to her and she runs it right then in the club, which I think is a little weird. So she’s got an officer with her, and she’s like, ‘Yep this is him,’ and I’m confused like I just performed; there’s a huge poster of me on the wall. I go outside with them, and there are six squad cars parked outside, and she says to me that there has been a case of identity theft.
So at this point, I’m thinking that someone’s taking my identity and done something bad and now we are going to get this cleared up. Turns out that because the owner of the Ramada Inn checked me in under his name, because he knew me, they thought I was doing something illegal; and they used that as an excuse to take me down to the station and search my room for three hours.”
Even though Amer has been through a lot, his love of comedy was clear, especially when he discussed his idol Bill Cosby. In the past, he was compared to Cosby, but he was ready to take that reviewer’s quote off his website, saying he felt “unworthy” of such praise. The day he decided to do that was the day he had a chance meeting with Cosby at an airport. “I pretty much pushed a bunch of people out the way,” joked Amer. “And I went up to him and just said, ‘Mr. Cosby, I’m such a huge fan.’ I was so flustered I called him Mr. Cosby, instead of Dr. Cosby.”
Finally, when Amer was asked if he had any advice for aspiring comics, he immediately responded with “don’t do it.” He then laughed and said, “No but really, you have to have such passion for this if you really want to do it, and you have to just perform wherever you can. If you can make a group of 20 people laugh, you can make 10,000 people laugh. Well, maybe.”
Amer will be filming his own stand up special in September in Washington D.C. It has yet to be determined where that special will air, but for more information on Mo Amer, follow him on twitter @realmoamer.
