A FRESH SET OF EYES
Despite initial turbulence, Noah’s unique vision guides The Daily Show
NEW YORK Trevor Noah bounds into a bright, skylit conference room at The Daily Show offices in Manhattan wearing a black Nike T-shirt and a headset mic, like he’s a pop star, or maybe a Soulcycle instructor. It’s the first full day of arguments at U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, plus it’s Bagel Tuesday, so it’s a big morning all around for everyone here at Comedy Central’s flagship satirical news program.
Forty or so writers, producers and correspondents (plus a handful of dogs) fill the room, forming a notably diverse group — though there is still a healthy smattering of white dudes, even a lone conservative. Later, Noah explains that his work to diversify the staff is not “zero-sum.” Grinning, he promises: “I’m not going to fire white guys.”
Co-executive producer Justin Melkmann queues up news clips and they are met with Alan Dershowitz giving quite the creative explanation for why, in 1998, he asserted that the president did not have to commit a crime to be impeached but now he is arguing the opposite side. “I wasn’t wrong then,” Dershowitz said on CNN. “I’m just much more correct right now.”
It’s a classic Trump-era comedy trap: How do you satirize something that is thoroughly absurd upon arrival?
But Noah responds to the clip with glee. “It’s a wonderful illumination of how you can interpret the constitution,” he says. “It’s like religion. Like, you can hate gay people because the Bible says so, right? Until your son is gay, and then you can say, ‘Well, I don’t see the word gay anywhere in the Ten Commandments.’”
What is Noah looking for in this endless scroll of headlines, which he starts checking on his phone before he gets out of bed? “I’m trying to find the zeitgeist of the day,” he says later. He wants The Daily Show to “run the gamut of news, from the dumbest, most ridiculous, inconsequential stories that mean nothing in your life, all the way through to the war that may be happening between America and Iran.” He also wants to analyze societal issues that aren’t necessarily news-pegged or anchored at the White House, reeling off a list of issues such as race inequality, climate change, police shootings and student debt, as exemplified by a recent episode about mental health stigma in the black community.
As Noah sees it, The Daily Show is “not just here to make you feel afraid. We’re using comedy to help process everything that is happening in the world.”
Not too long ago, audiences turned to late night not to process the world but to forget the world. The hosts — all men, mostly white — put on suits and ties and did their best Johnny Carson, and the format went virtually unexamined and unchanged for years. When Jon Stewart slid behind The Daily Show’s desk in 1999, he wasn’t the only guy in the 11 p.m. ET hour to talk politics, but he was certainly the only one prioritizing that over sketches and celebrities.
Executive producer Jill Katz, who has been with The Daily Show for 14 years, tells me: “I felt like we used to be sort of a big fish in a small pond. People didn’t even know that this was an angle to comedy.”
Sometime between the night Jimmy Fallon tousled Trump’s hair and the night Trump won the election, audiences lost their taste for performatively non-partisan humour. Engagement, not escapism, became the order of the day. For Daily Show alumni — Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Hasan Minhaj — this was familiar territory. But now even the most ardently apolitical latenight hosts were polishing their Trump impressions, caving to the “covfefe” of it all.
Almost overnight, it seemed like everyone who had been trying to be the next Johnny Carson was in the business of trying to be the next Jon Stewart. Which left The Daily Show, and its new young host, fighting for real estate on the very block they built.
“The irony is that, when Jon Stewart was leaving, I asked him why he liked me as the next host,” Noah says. “And he said, ‘I want you to host because I know you’re not going to try and be me. So I get to leave with my legacy.’ And that means a lot to me, because it freed me. I’m not trying to be Jon, nor do I need to be.”
Noah was just 31 years old and had been with The Daily Show for
I came to realize the best way to create a unique show was just to be myself — because I, myself, am unique ...
four months when he was named Stewart’s successor in March 2015. To the uninitiated, and even to longtime fans, Noah might have been a surprising pick to take over for Stewart after his 16 years at the helm. But Neal Brennan, co-creator and co-writer of Chappelle’s Show and a regular contributor to The Daily Show, expected to see Noah’s name on the shortlist: “The first time he did the show, it went viral. And that’s rare, right?”
Born to a black mother and a white father and raised under apartheid in South Africa, Noah was unlike anyone who’d worked at The Daily Show before. His speedy ascent seemed to signal that Comedy Central was eager to bring a long-overdue fresh perspective not just to The Daily Show but to all of late-night comedy, a genre whose idea of diversity is having a James, a James who goes by Jimmy, and also another James who goes by Jimmy but lives in L.A.
At first, Noah wasn’t the only host of colour on the network. Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show — a Daily Show spinoff that took over the old Colbert Report time slot — premièred in January 2015. But Wilmore’s show was cancelled after only two seasons, officially due to low ratings and tepid social media engagement, though it does not seem incidental that Wilmore’s series was reliably home to candid discussions about race, and its replacement was a pop-culture quiz show hosted by a white guy. Also hurting Wilmore was the fact that, nine months after his show premièred, his leadin was no longer Jon Stewart. As one might expect during a regime change from a beloved host to a relative newcomer, ratings declined when Noah took over. By his 100th episode, he’d lost 37 per cent of The Daily Show’s viewers.
“It wasn’t the easiest transition, I’ll say that,” Brennan says. “Everyone who worked there was a Daily Show with Jon Stewart writer. Getting it to The Daily Show with Trevor Noah took some figuring out.”
For Noah, it’s been interesting to see that viewers tune into The Daily Show expecting to find a recognizable political leaning. “A lot of people think they know what my point of view in a certain area would be because they have predetermined what The Daily Show is,” Noah says. “Many people don’t understand that I don’t come from a world with just Democrats and Republicans . ... So I don’t think along clearly defined lines in that way.”
While that partisan ambiguity may have unsettled or even turned off some longtime Daily Show fans, Noah’s idiosyncratic way of thinking and talking about stories is what ultimately made this new show pop.
“We (learned to) lean into Trevor’s voice a lot more,” says writer-producer Zhubin Parang. By “voice” Parang meant Noah’s distinctive point of view, but the show also shines because of Noah’s literal voice: Anytime Noah does impressions, characters or accents, Brennan says, “the audience loses its mind.” It doesn’t hurt that this is a talent that sets him apart from Stewart.
After that initial dip, ratings improved, but Noah is especially popular online, where The Daily Show logs 74 million views per month.
“When I started at The Daily Show, I played it safe, and that was because I didn’t want to destroy an amazing institution,” Noah says. “As I’ve grown more comfortable, I came to realize the best way to create a unique show was just to be myself — because I, myself, am unique, you know?”
During Noah’s first week as host, Trump began his presidential campaign with the now-infamous speech about how Mexico “isn’t sending their best people” to the United States, but instead is shipping over “drugs,” “criminals” and “rapists.” Daily Show viewers were probably expecting their new host, an immigrant himself, to react in apoplectic horror. But as the clip of Trump’s speech ended, Noah beamed: “For me, as an African, there’s just something familiar about Trump that makes me feel at home.”
The segment, “Trump is an African dictator,” spliced a bunch of Trump’s xenophobic and bombastic rants with near-identical tirades from the presidents of South Africa, Gambia and Uganda. At the end, Noah declared: “Donald Trump is presidential. He just happens to be running on the wrong continent.”
As most comedians (and reporters) struggled to find language that would adequately describe what scanned to many as unprecedented rhetoric from a presidential hopeful, Noah’s vantage point gave him the understanding most lacked.
“I don’t think it’s any coincidence that (was) his first really good first act,” Brennan says. “Seth (Meyers) wasn’t going to do that. (Jimmy) Kimmel wasn’t going to do that.”
“Nobody else could do that headline,” showrunner Jen Flanz says. “Except for Trevor.”