Trevor Noah: June 10th, 2016 (Live)

Yeah, I know this happened a while ago, but I figured I’d sit on it until a Friday with no News Satire Roundup came around.  I was really fortunate to have Trevor Noah come to Minneapolis recently, and I was able to see him do standup live.  He performed for over an hour-and-a-half and was, unsurprisingly, hilarious throughout.

Since I think this appearance was part of Noah’s Lost in Translation tour, I figured there’d probably be a fair amount of the same material from his standup special of the same name.  I didn’t mind, though – either way, it’s still great comedy, and I was excited to hear Noah do it live.  However, there was nothing from Lost in Translation and only two routines I’d already seen on YouTube:  one story about the Met Gala and another about his childhood imaginary friend.  There were also a few jokes he’s used on The Daily Show (Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, Obama as the coolest president, the illogic of using “pussy” to mean “weak”,) which surprised me a little – in the standup stuff I’ve seen of his, I’ve never come across any jokes taken directly from The Daily Show.  But like I said, all of these bits are still funny, and each one was fleshed out with extra material.

A little Minnesota humor, which I enjoyed.  Mainly, he started complaining about the heat as soon as he got onstage, and he confessed that he’d been too scared to go out for a jog because he was afraid of passing out and winding up on the local news:  “It’s so hot in Minnesota, even Africans are fainting!”  A little election humor, too – highlights included a few jokes on Sanders supporters and a fun bit about how trying to argue with Trump is like trying to argue with a 5-year-old.

The trajectory of the show was interesting to me.  He started out very lightly, mostly pop culture stuff and a little politics, and it wasn’t until maybe the second half-hour that he started talking more extensively about race or South Africa.  I suppose maybe it’s his way of easing audiences into the evening.  But while the earlier was great, the later stuff was superb. 

We learned about the White and Black Christmases he had with the two sides of his family as a child (turns out that White Christmas is way better) and discovered that he has the good fortune to be impervious to the N-word because, in Xhosa, it simply means “to give,” and so there’s no negative baggage to it for him.  He had a spectacular routine on a hypothetical James Bond played by Idris Elba, which he was wholly down with until he traveled to Scotland and, after spending an entire day looking for another Black person, realized that a Black Bond would have trouble slipping in under the radar there.  He had some nice, pointed commentary about America’s fear of Russia, particularly where the Ukraine is concerned.  He also did a great sequence on how he imagines an early-‘90s meeting between Nelson Mandela and Obama went down, in which he speculates that Mandela taught Obama how to have “First Black President” voice.

Just fantastic from start to finish – really funny, very insightful, and energy for days.  If you get a chance to see Trevor Noah onstage, I recommend it.