How Trevor Noah made it to the Daily Show

When he takes his seat at the anchor desk of The Daily Show just as the 2016 presidential campaign is throttling up, Trevor Noah will be on the steepest learning curve imaginable.

South Africa's King of Comedy has always lived on a learning curve of sorts-navigating the bizarre realities of apartheid and its aftermath, grappling with brutal violence (the shooting of his mother by an abusive ex-husband), and crossing back and forth between contradictory cultures as the son of a black Xhosa woman and a white Swiss-German father-and thus, as Noah puts it in his standup routine, born a crime in a country where race-mixing usually meant fines and jail time (for black people, anyway).

Indeed, he has not only survived his life's exacting experiments, but thrived on them-and has every reason to believe he can ace this one, too.

After less than ten years as a working comic-a trade that often demands decades of trial and error to hone the craft-Noah has achieved the stratosphere, the only South African comic to have killed on both The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and The Late Show With David Letterman.

He is not only one of the more celebrated human beings in his home country, where his pending ascension on American television is making headlines every day.

He has also surpassed far more experienced (and whiter) colleagues in the tiny South African comedy community-and, much to their annoyance, he has made it look easy.

Yet Noah is clearly cognizant that he needs to raise his game. It was only a scant eight months ago, shortly after he was named senior international correspondent of Comedy Central's revered political satire franchise, that he admitted in a Daily Show podcast: I'm not an expert in America. I never profess to be. I know nothing about your politics.

Two months later, after Jon Stewart announced his surprising decision to retire and Comedy Central scrambled to offer the job apparently to anyone and everyone, from Louis C.K. to Chris Rock to Amy Schumer, the Viacom-owned cable channel settled on the neophyte outsider with the funny accent.

Noah is a far cry from the 52-year-old Stewart, who called himself a purveyor of fake news, and possessed a deep, detailed and impassioned knowledge of the policies and personalities of our democratic circus.

This bedrock not only informed the program's comic sensibility, but also turned The Daily Show into a political touchstone that frequently made real news and swayed the debate.

--

And Noah?

He's an undeniably clever and, at the tender age of 31, brilliantly precocious comic-whose sharp ear for speech patterns (not just white-bread American but also a variety of ethnic American and foreign dialects) is superior to Stewart's.

Stewart unleashed a killer impression of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham as a fickle Scarlett O'Hara type in constant need of smelling salts; but his Donald Trump sendup was all but indistinguishable from his default impression of a generic New Jersey mobster.

Noah learns about his latest career move.

I'm in Dubai-I'm literally driving the middle of the night, and my phone rings, he told Seinfeld. And my manager says, How would you like to be the host of The Daily Show?' And I get out of the car, and my legs-I didn't have legs.

He added: You know those movies where there's an explosion and instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear silence? The eardrums have all been pierced? That's literally what happens.

And then the worst thing is you're in Dubai, which is one of the hardest places in the world to find a drink.

It will, of course, be a lot easier for Noah to get a drink on Manhattan's West Side-either to drown some sorrows or to toast another triumph.

www.thedailybeast.com

Actors and Performance

South Africa

News

LINK:	http://www.filmcontact.com/news/south-africa/actors-and-performance/ho...
	See more stories from filmcontact

Most recent headlines