Culture & Arts
Mo Amer takes Palestinian comedy to New York's Radio City October 2
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
On Friday 2 October, Mo Amer walks onto the stage of Radio City Music Hall — one night only, at the most famous theater in New York. The Palestinian kid who arrived in Houston as a nine-year-old refugee now headlines the room where the Rockettes kick.
The listing on Ticketmaster carries the show's whole attitude in its fine print: at the artist's request, every phone goes into a sealed pouch at the door. For one night, 2 October at Radio City is a phones-down room — just the comic, the crowd, and the story.
Twenty years without a passport#
Amer was born in Kuwait City in 1981 to Palestinian refugee parents, and the family fled to Houston when Iraq invaded in 1990. He was nine, and he spent the next two decades effectively stateless — an asylum case working its way through the system while he worked comedy clubs.
He toured the world on a refugee travel document years before he held an American passport, which finally arrived with citizenship in 2009. By then he had already built a career the hard way: clubs, military bases, and the pioneering Muslim comedy trio Allah Made Me Funny.
Netflix released The Vagabond in 2018, introducing him as the first Arab American refugee comic to front his own special on the platform. Mohammed in Texas followed in 2021.
The show that took Palestine into the living room#
Then came Mo. Co-created with Ramy Youssef and produced with A24, the Netflix series turned Amer's own life — a Palestinian family chasing asylum through Houston's courts, hustles and taquerias — into television that critics kept calling the first of its kind.
Across two seasons Mo won a Peabody Award and a Gotham Award, and its final season, released in January 2025, did what no mainstream American comedy had done: it took its Palestinian family home, ending in Palestine itself.
Two seasons of "Mo" won a Peabody Award. The finale took the Najjar family home — to Palestine itself.
The industry noticed. This May, the Peabody Awards put Amer at the front of the room as host of their 86th ceremony in Beverly Hills — the winner invited back to hand out the medals, as Variety reported.
His third special, Wild World, filmed at Washington's Warner Theatre, reached Netflix on 28 October 2025 — an hour that braids his Palestinian heritage, new fatherhood and airport-security absurdity into one act.
One night in October#
Radio City seats about six thousand people. When the lights go down on 2 October, a comic whose family once waited in asylum queues will hold the biggest proscenium stage in Manhattan, telling Palestinian stories with the phones locked away and every eye on him.
Amer keeps the rest of the story on his Instagram, @moamer — tour stops, family, and the occasional black square when the news from home gets heavy.
The arts desk is telling the stories of Palestinians remaking world culture one by one — the series opened with Arab Idol winner Mohammed Assaf, and Mo Amer's road from a Kuwait City exit to a Radio City marquee is its second chapter.
