Trevor Noah has cracked the American market and become a global superstar
There’s that famous scene in the ’80s cult classic film, Coming to America. Yeah, that one. For those who the reference misses, the film features Eddie Murphy, who plays an African prince who travels to New York to find a wife. The scene in question has Eddie, perched on the balcony of his apartment, shouting out: ‘Good morning my neighbours!’ The retort from one neighbour comes in the form of an obscene: ‘Hey, f**k you!’. This was Trevor Noah’s coming-to-America experience. Well, at least it was when he took over The Daily Show from American comedic icon Jon Stewart. ‘It feels like the family has a new stepdad, and he’s black!’ Trevor said at the time, adding that it felt like a ‘terrible’ decision to take the reigns from Jon. ‘Everybody hated me. People didn’t even know me and they hated the idea of me,’ he told 60 Minutes.
Indeed, being appraised on the merit of him as an ‘idea’, rather than his humanity, has been the one constant in Trevor’s life. Born in apartheid South Africa to a black African mother and Swiss father, Trevor represented a terrifying, and frankly, a depraved, idea to the government of the time. It speaks to the depth of the man’s character, to the support structure he had in a loving and fiercely protective mother and grandmother, and the profound self-awareness he possesses that he was able to successfully navigate the experience of being reduced to a repulsive idea, based solely on the colour of his skin. A lesser man would have folded under in the face of such rejection yet Trevor has not only survived it but thrived.
‘Everybody wants to belong,’ he offers. ‘Half of our fights in life are because we want to belong. And so I grew up in a country where I was told that your belonging was defined by the shade of the colour of your skin. And that never worked for me. You know? I found my greatest joy was with the people whom we shared interests. And the way we spoke, and the way we laughed So I always wanted to belong. And and that, I think, has been a gift and a curse in life.’ Comedy was Trevor’s roadmap to belonging. It is one of life’s perplexing ironies that our insecurities are often the catalyst for behaviours that help ease the constriction those insecurities enforce.
Comedy took Trevor from performing on stages in small dive bars to a handful of people, to national prominence. Comedy, as expressed expertly through Trevor’s unique lens of the world, later earned him international opportunities. His humour translated well, so well
that it piqued Jon’s interest. Jon later anointed him as a ‘genius’. ‘I can tell you this without hesitation, Trevor Noah will earn your trust and respect. My experience with him is that he is an incredibly thoughtful, funny, and considerate human,’ Jon declared in 2015 as he prepared to step aside for, to the American audience that constitutes the bulk of The Daily Show’s market, a relative unknown.
The African prince got a harsh welcome. The collective ‘F**k you’ revealed itself in ratings, which tanked as Trevor trained his attention on broadening the show’s scope and subject matter. Jon spent much of the next five years defending his successor. By 2020 he’d grown tired of doing so. During an interview on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show, Jon closed the discussion.
‘The evolution of the show was also about opening our eyes to some of the realities of business around us,’ he said. ‘When we started, it was pretty much like everything in late-night comedy – that sort of Harvard Lampoon school of pasty white guys sitting in a room. Evolving the show past that took a really long time. It was a lot of work and often times it came with defensiveness. ‘We don’t have enough women writers, let’s hire a woman. We don’t have enough black writers, let’s hire a black person. ‘But what we realised is we weren’t changing the system, we were just granting access to a club everybody should have had access to in the first place. It flows from him [Trevor] naturally. You don’t do it because necessarily it’s the right thing to do – it makes it better. The show is better.’
It is better, and also more acclaimed than it has ever been under Trevor’s watch, evidenced by its seven Emmy nominations in mid-July, including one in the coveted Outstanding Variety Talk Series category (The winners had not yet been announced at the time of print). This was an exceptional feat given that, while other late-night shows returned to full audiences post-pandemic, Trevor had opted to spend
the majority of the awards evaluation time first in his home studio, then playing to no audience.
‘I’m trying new things,’ he told fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert. ‘We are going through the craziest period in human existence, in my opinion. And I’m not going to come out on the other side of that like: “Yeah, everything’s normal”. So I’m going to break the show and remake the show. Everything will be wrong and everything will be right. And I’ll be okay with that because I don’t know if tomorrow will come.’ Trevor’s philosophy was reinforced in the most tragic manner when he lost his 95-year-old grandmother in May.
‘I have cried all week celebrating the greatest “movie” I’ve ever watched,’ he wrote in an Instagram obituary. ‘A story that began with my first breath and ended with her last. A woman who showed me the truest definition of unconditional love.’ He has pressed on through the mourning process, touring the globe doing stand-up to sell-out arenas between filming shows and hosting gigs, the most prestigious of which happened in January when he took the mic for the second consecutive year at the Grammys. His social media pages are populated with many pictures of him and A-list celebrities whom he calls friends. He pockets millions of dollars from his endorsement deals, selling American products to Americans. It seems the neighbours are quite fond of him now.
Words by Ryan Vrede
Photography: freepik, gallo/gettyimages
