Iranian-American Comedian Max Amini Finds 'Inner Peace'
Max Amini
Andrew Lepping/MSG Entertainment
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“The immediate feeling is, it’s a huge, huge relief,” says Max Amini. The Iranian-American comedian is Zooming in from his home in Los Angeles the day after news broke that Donald Trump’s ultimatum to Iran — that “a whole civilization would die tonight” — would not come to pass, and that the United States would attempt (ultimately unsuccessful) negotiations with the country it began bombing at the end of February.
Although he was born in Tucson, Ariz., Amini, 45, is the son of Persian parents who immigrated to the states after the 1979 revolution. When he was 8, they returned to Iran until Amini was 17. The family later moved to Southern California, where Amini attended high school and then college at UCLA. “I’m very Iranian and I’m very American depending on different situations in life.” When it comes to family? “I’m very Iranian,” he says. Dating and lifestyle? “Very American.”
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“Regardless of the politics, it would be extremely excruciating to see bombs dropped on a country that I’m emotionally connected to,” Amini says on Zoom. “Last night, when we heard the news, we were like, “Thank god, there’s an opportunity for a different, more effective way of change than, as [Trump] said, taking Iran off of planet Earth.”
Near the end of his latest YouTube special, Double Threat, which was released in late 2025, Amini tells the audience, “I come from two countries that are sworn enemies — Iran and America. All they want is to kill each other. But personally, I have inner peace. I have love.”
Amini has had success, too, although not the overnight kind. He’s been at it since the late 1990s, but last year saw him break through in a big way. According to a 2026 report (based on first-party data from native platform analytics) that was provided by his representation, another comedy special, Randomly Selected, which he produced through his Abstraction Media company, was the No. 1 most-viewed comedy special across all digital platforms in 2025, and the ninth most-viewed special of all time on YouTube, with 17.6 million and counting. His all-time views on Instagram and YouTube top 9 billion, and he has 27.8 million total social followers, including 7.4 million on his MaxxPersian Instagram channel, where he performs stand-up in Farsi. He’s got live game, too. According to that same report, he performed in 60 cities in 19 countries on his 2025 world tour and sold more than 200,000 tickets. This year, he sold out his February performance at Madison Square Garden as well as upcoming shows at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif. and the Netflix Is Joke Festival in L.A.
Amini describes his comedy as “observational, authentic and inspirational,” and his sweet spot is comparing and contrasting the mores of the two cultures he straddles. He has even coined a guttural, made-up term, “huh-hucch” that’s a catch-all for the Persian way.
In Double Threat, he talks about the difficulties of dating the kind of “good girl” that his family prefers. After weeks of pursuing one who qualifies, Amini makes his move, only to find “a lockbox with a code on it” securing her undergarment. “What is the code?” he pleads. “She goes, ‘I don’t know. My father has it.’”
Max Amini
Courtesy of UTA
In that same special, which was shot before the attack on Iran, Amini tells his audience, “There’s only one element that can end this disaster we have in the world. It’s love,” adding, “I hope we realize that we’re all one race, and that’s the human race.”
That said, Amini explains on the Zoom call that he’s aware, “People are coming to the theater because I’m Max Amini, not Tony Robbins.”
I have a friend in Iran who, when he can skirt the Internet ban, trades messages with me. When the U.S. attacks first started, he told me there was a lot of optimism there that regime change would follow. But the last time we texted, he wrote that with that goal off the table, Iran’s brutal oppression of its people will only get worse once this conflict ends.
I absolutely agree. As an Iranian, you only wish for a better life, and a better life means a country that takes the resources of that country and invests it