by Mo Amer received a gift from the comedy gods when an airline upgraded his seat last year to put him in first class next to Eric Trump.
Amer turned that trip into a tale worth telling first on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and then into an even longer version for his first Netflix comedy special, The Vagabond. He chose that title because, for almost two decades, Amer lacked proper passport documents as a Kuwaiti refugee who grew up in America.
As I wrote in my review for Decider, it’s always been a weird time for this Mohammed:
That was true in the 1990s when Amer transitioned from a private British prep school in Kuwait to a public school in Houston, living in a neighborhood mired in gang warfare between Mexican and black teens. And it was true more than a decade later when Amer returned to the Middle East to perform for the troops in Iraq.
Amer publicly thanks his mother, sitting in the front row, for her own cleverness in helping him and his sister evade the invading Iraqis, so he could live his own American dream.
