Trevor lacks the political nous to ace the Daily Show gig
Noah getting around it
SO the news that Trevor Noah will host The Daily Show has finally sunk in. As a proud South African, but also somebody who loves The Daily Show, I admit to feeling torn. Expressing ambivalence about Noah’s appointment seems almost akin to treason, but I remain far from convinced that he is the most suitable candidate.
Before anyone helpfully suggests it: it’s not because he’s black. It’s partly because he’s South African, and the job of The Daily Show host seems to require a pretty intricate form of insider knowledge about American life. Jon Stewart can talk about the caucuses in Iowa and crack jokes about what Iowans are like. Noah will undoubtedly be able to do the same, because he’ll presumably have access to the same team of gifted writers that Stewart has, but will it seem remotely authentic coming from a man who has only spent a few months in the US?
My scepticism is also because I’ve never thought of Noah as a cutting-edge political satirist. He is a very smart stand-up comic, but I have yet to see much evidence that his political material goes particularly far beyond a reliance on racial stereotypes and a very good Jacob Zuma impersonation. All Noah’s impersonations are excellent, it should be said. Accents and impressions are undoubtedly his comedic strong spot. He even does a pretty good Barack Obama, which should stand him in good stead in his next gig.
To mark Noah’s Daily Show appointment, I watched his most recent tour recording — Trevor Noah’s Nationwild, from a tour of South Africa between August and November last year — which is available on DStv BoxOffice. There’s some good, funny stuff; I laughed at a skit of two vuvuzelas mating in the wild, and a piece pointing out the absurdities of Oscar Pistorius’s defence is sharp (if over-long): “We now know that there were no intruders. But we also know that they were black.”
There’s a telling moment at the end of his set, however, which reminded me strongly of the recent controversy over Noah’s old tweets. Noah does a fairly offcolour impression of a deaf person speaking, and then explains that the reason he does it is because a deaf person once came up to him and asked why he didn’t do any deaf jokes: “You do jokes about tall people, short people, black, white . . . We also want jokes!”
This is uncannily similar to Noah’s defence in 2009, when he tweeted a puerile joke about gay male sex which isn’t worth repeating. On that occasion, after being criticised, Noah told website Mambaonline: “Many gay men I’ve met have said to me, ‘We are regular guys with a certain sexual preference, that doesn’t mean that we should be treated different!’ I guess that doesn’t apply to all.”
Are we seriously to believe that members of marginalised groups keep doorstopping Noah and begging him to contribute to the vast cache of offensive comic material which keeps them stigmatised? I don’t buy it for a second. In a country like America, where identity politics are fetishised even more than in South Africa, Noah will have to watch himself.
There’s something about Noah that reminds me of British comedian Jimmy Carr.
“There’s nothing sadder than a woman with two black eyes. She’s been told twice, and still doesn’t understand,” Carr says, and then explains: “This is post-modern misogyny. That joke is steeped in irony. So don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.”