Comedy helps us process world events, says Trevor Noah

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, as if he’s a pop star, or maybe a SoulCycle instructor.

It’s the first full day of arguments at US President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, a big morning for everyone here at Comedy Central’s flagship fakenews programme.

Co-executive producer Justin Melkmann lines up news clips and Alan Dershowitz gives a 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 other side. “I wasn’t wrong then,” he said on CNN. “I’m just much more correct now.”

It’s a classic Trump-era comedy trap: how do you satirise 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 scroll of headlines? “I’m trying to find the zeitgeist of the day,” he says. 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 analyse societal issues such as race inequality, climate change, police shootings and student debt, and mental health stigma in the black community.

As he 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”.

“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 to be me.’ ”

Noah was 31 years old and had been with The Daily Show for four months when he was named Stewart’s successor in March 2015. Noah might have been a surprising pick. But Neal

Brennan, 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?” (That debut segment, Spot the Africa, has more than 5.7 million views on YouTube.) “He’s also an impressive guy. He carries himself like a diplomat. And he’s temperamentally capable of doing a show. A lot of that job is like, you have to manage 100 people. (You have to be) capable of it beyond just saying the s*** on the teleprompter, because that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Brennan says.

Noah says: “A lot of people think they know what my point of view would be, because they have predetermined what The Daily Show is. 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.”

Noah’s idiosyncratic way of thinking and talking about stories is what has made made this new show pop. The outsiderness he initially feared would be an obstacle soon revealed itself to be an asset.

During his first week as host, Trump kicked off his presidential campaign with the now-infamous speech about how Mexico “isn’t sending their best people” to the US, but instead was shipping over “drugs”, “criminals” and “rapists”. 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.”

“I have always used humour to process pain (and) tension in life,” Noah says. “So that’s what The Daily

Show is here for: to inform you and to just help you remember who you are as a human being, who laughs through some things that may not be funny because you remember what you’re trying to get to on the other side.” | Washington Post