FINDING HUMOUR
Trevor Noah recounts the indignities of his South African childhood in compelling new memoir,
The weekend after the election, Dave Chappelle took the stage on Saturday Night Live and nailed the feeling that so many stunned progressives had failed to put to words: “America has done it. We’ve actually elected an Internet troll as our president.” A hilarious statement, both because it was so true and because it was such a relief to hear somebody say it.
For many in the United States, these are devastating times. Now more than ever, the country needs its comedians — truth-tellers who can hold a mirror up to society and reflect its horror and absurdity. To perform this critical role, they must be outsiders, must have themselves suffered at the hands of the world they draw on for material.
The Daily Show’s host, Trevor Noah, more than fits this bill. His compelling new memoir, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, recounts the years before he found fame as a comic and landed one of the top jobs in America. And it reminds us all how to recognize when racism runs riot.
For Noah, humour made the difference between survival and soul-crushing despair.
Born during apartheid to a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, his very existence was illegal — proof of interracial sex that was forbidden by law. His rebellious mother was forced to hide him in his grandmother’s house in Soweto, away from police and the prying eyes of informant neighbours. Noah couldn’t be seen in public with either parent. He had to call his father “Robert” for fear someone would overhear if he said “Dad” and walk on the other side of the street from him. His mother, meanwhile, recruited a mixed- race friend to accompany them to the park, pretending to be her son’s nanny.
“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent,” Noah writes. “Race-mixing proves that races can mix — and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.” If they had been caught, Noah would have been placed in an orphanage, his parents arrested or fined.
Added to all of that were the indignities of growing up in extreme poverty after apartheid fell in 1994; having to push his mother’s ancient car to school when they ran out of gas midtrip; eating caterpillars to stave off hunger; living in his mechanic stepfather’s garage, working every day and sleeping in cars every night; wearing clothing several sizes too big because there was no money to buy new things every time he grew. Plus: the hustling poor people everywhere need to do to get by. Flipping stolen goods. Bootlegging music, throwing block parties, eating cheap street food, learning to stretch every last dollar. Acquiring multiple languages (Noah speaks six!) to talk people down, cross racial lines, bond, protect oneself. “I learned to use language like my mother did,” he notes. “I would simulcast — give you the program in your own tongue.”
And then, of course, there was the violence: police shooting up Noah’s computer at a DJ gig in the townships, having to jump out of a moving minibus with his mother and infant brother after its driver threatened to kill them, an alcoholic stepfather who terrorized the family and eventually shot his mother in the head.
Lying in the hospital, his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, who survived the attack, urged him to look on the bright side: “Now you’re officially the bestlooking person in the family.” Noah writes, “I was bawling my eyes out and laughing hysterically at the same time.”
His fierce mother, a woman who “gives and gives and gives,” is the true hero of this book. While Noah’s father now lives in Switzerland, his mother still lives in South Africa, not far from the man who shot her. She was determined to give her son more than just survival. Against all odds, she gave him hope. And humour.
She made the brutality of life bearable with her tenacious heart, brave spirit and sharp wit. And now, her son will do the same for his adopted country.