Stream It Or Skip It?

Mo Amer opens his third Netflix special by calling out DJ Khaled for his silence over Palestine and ends the hour by calling out Jerry Seinfeld for declaring “I don’t care about Palestine.” For Amer, a Palestinian who fled Kuwait for America as a refugee during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, there is no time like the present not only to defend his homeland and heritage, but also to celebrate it.

The Gist: Nothing has changed and everything has changed since his second Netflix special, 2021’s Mo Amer: Mohammed in Texas.

Four years ago, Amer had his Black Adam star serving as his sidekick, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson introducing him to the stage. He was joking about touring with Dave Chappelle, and basking in the glow of both co-starring in Ramy Youssef’s Ramy as well as a series order from Netflix (co-created with Youssef) for a semi-autobiographical look at his own life. Mo enjoyed two seasons and won a Peabody Award for depicting Amer and his family’s experiences as Palestinian refugees in Houston from the 1990s to today.

He tells us in this special that the writer’s room for Mo’s second season had just begun work after the Writers Guild strike when the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, led to the onslaught of Gaza by Israel that we’ve all witnessed since. Amer’s a comedian, so he’s not about to make sense of it all. But he will use this opportunity to remind everyone again of the plight facing Palestinians both in their homeland and here in America, mostly by making light of the obstacles Amer has faced both in his personal life and his early comedy gigs.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: It’s all too easy to compare Amer with his frequent comedy collaborator, Ramy Youssef. Although as Amer will remind you even in this special, he feels he’s one in one in terms of Palestinian-American comedians.

Memorable Jokes: Proclaiming “F— DJ Khaled!” as a hard cut into your opening line is one way to make yourself memorable!

Comedy viewers and fans likely will remember Amer’s beefs with DJ Khaled and Jerry Seinfeld, or his continued use of a NSFW slang catchphrase, “Biteezak” (“it means in your ass,” he explains), more than they might recall the comedian’s more personal stories about his childhood in Houston, his early comedy gig in Louisiana, or perhaps even his stories about his wife’s childbirth experience.

Our Take: What’s Amer’s beef with DJ Khaled? It’s simple, really. “It’s a bummer because he’s one of us. He’s Palestinian and he’s not speaking up. He’s not even acknowledging it, which makes it more agonizing,” Amer says, adding later: “You gotta say something. You can’t say nothing. And what you say and when you say it is everything, right?”

How true that is, though, especially if you reflect upon the entire comedy community, and about, *waves arms frantically*, everything else going one right now.

Which means Amer’s beef with Seinfeld is precisely about how the more famous comedian’s very vocal support for Israel has led him to dismiss Palestinians almost entirely, denouncing “free Palestine” at a Duke University event last month, and telling activists in February outside an SNL50 event, “I don’t care about Palestine.” “Well, Jerry, I care about everyone,” Amer replies late in his special. “And it’s better to kill time, than kill with your time. Festivus for the rest of us. I used to watch that show in much simpler times. What does it say about these times that the world trusts Ms. Rachel more than The New York Times?!”

Amer already was trying his darnedest to make audiences care about Palestine even before October 2023, and joined a Jewish Voice for Peace rally in D.C. two years ago for that very cause. “I wanted to use my art form, because I feel like stand-up is the last free art form,” he says. He couldn’t quite express himself adequately through stand-up in 2023 (“it was angry, it was emotional”) as well as he could through his Netflix series, which even in its first episode addressed the longstanding issues between Israel and Palestine, including how Jesus Christ was Palestinian, the Nakba of 1948, how Palestinians cannot have their own passports, yet somehow can be called antisemitic despite being semitic themselves.

It’s not all so heavy. Amer does make a series of light jokes about the ongoing struggles everyone faces with TSA agents at the airport, and he can recall himself at age 14 in Houston, getting mocked for having a British accent from his schooling in Kuwait and unwittingly sharing British terms that carried darker connotations here.

Now 44, he’s not just three decades grown from then, but also twice as old as he was when he took a gig in Louisiana in 2003 and had to deal with rednecks confusing him for a terrorist, just because his first name is Mohammed.

And in a sign of his perhaps larger ambitions, he closes with a Carlinesque riff waxing lyrically about the nature of time. “I don’t want to be ahead of my time!” Amer says at one point.

No need to worry about that in October 2025. He’s the right man for the right time with the right message.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Juxtaposing two hit songs from Cat Stevens (who changed his name to Yusaf Islam after converting to Islam in the late 1970s), with “Wild World” playing over a montage of Amer’s shadow walking to the venue, versus “Peace Train” playing over the end credits, sounds a hopeful note for the future, and reminds us that for all of his bluster onstage, Amer remains a cuddly vehicle for peace himself.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.