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Trevor Noah’s apartheid comedy and how it made him Jon Stewart’s unlikely successor
When Trevor Noah was young, the biracial son of a black mother and a white father in Apartheid-era South Africa, his entire existence was a crime that needed to be concealed. Noah’s father’s name was left off of his birth certificate to conceal his identity, though that didn’t prevent his mother from being repeatedly arrested for being in a relationship with a white man. Noah’s family told their neighbors in Johannesburg’s Soweto Township that he was albino to explain his light skin.
“As a family we couldn’t live together, on the streets we couldn’t even be seen together. My father would have to walk on the other side of the road, and he could just wave at me from afar,” Noah recalled in 2013 before an audience gathered to hear his comedy.
He paused, his mouth twitching. There was only a faint rustle from the hundreds of people watching, like they weren’t sure what to do with this story.
“Like a creepy pedophile,” Noah concluded. And the Apollo Theater erupted with laughter. It was a joke.
This is what Noah, the newly announced successor to Jon Stewart at Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” has been doing for nearly a decade: Mining tragedy, inequality and prejudice for laughs and attempting, mostly successfully, to satirize his subjects without trivializing them.
[Post Everything: Yes, the new ‘Daily Show’ host is black. And he’s spent his career making fun of African Americans.]
“You have two choices, two paths to take as a comedian,” he said in an interview with the Huffington Post two years ago. “You can tackle the difficult subjects and be harsh about it, be brash, be abrasive. But adding hatred to racism is not going to help everybody. So I like to have fun around it.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/31/trevor-noahs-apartheid-comedy-and-how-it-made-him-jon-stewarts-unlikely-successor/
“As a family we couldn’t live together, on the streets we couldn’t even be seen together. My father would have to walk on the other side of the road, and he could just wave at me from afar,” Noah recalled in 2013 before an audience gathered to hear his comedy.
He paused, his mouth twitching. There was only a faint rustle from the hundreds of people watching, like they weren’t sure what to do with this story.
“Like a creepy pedophile,” Noah concluded. And the Apollo Theater erupted with laughter. It was a joke.
This is what Noah, the newly announced successor to Jon Stewart at Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” has been doing for nearly a decade: Mining tragedy, inequality and prejudice for laughs and attempting, mostly successfully, to satirize his subjects without trivializing them.
[Post Everything: Yes, the new ‘Daily Show’ host is black. And he’s spent his career making fun of African Americans.]
“You have two choices, two paths to take as a comedian,” he said in an interview with the Huffington Post two years ago. “You can tackle the difficult subjects and be harsh about it, be brash, be abrasive. But adding hatred to racism is not going to help everybody. So I like to have fun around it.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/31/trevor-noahs-apartheid-comedy-and-how-it-made-him-jon-stewarts-unlikely-successor/
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