"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, December 30, 2016

Trevor Noah: That’s Racist (2012)

From what I gather, this is the first big standup show Trevor Noah did in South Africa after he began working in the American comedy scene.  Coming home is a definite theme of the show, relishing everything he missed about South Africa while he was away and filling his audience in on American perspectives of Africa.

One thing I like about Noah’s standup specials performed in South Africa is how he does routines reflecting on his fame there.  It has a different tone to his American standup – there, his fame is much more newfound and Daily Show-related, thrust into a spotlight that he still can’t quite believe, but in South Africa, he’s a true household name.  Here, I like his bits on reading about his excursion to the States in South African newspapers (“Trevor Noah Flees to Hollywood!”) and sharing about his experiences with Afrikaans fans.

There are only a few bits I’ve already heard before, and even then, it’s not full routines, just elements and individual jokes I’ve seen in other specials of Noah’s.  I remember his story about being introduced in standup sets in the U.S. as an “African comic” (with the audience expecting him to come out dressed in leopard skins and telling monkey jokes,) although there’s much more of an insider slant to the humor as he tells his fellow countrymen and women about how Americans react to him.  I also recognize bits about the N-word in a larger routine on derogatory slurs (he focuses more on the K-word, a slur used in South Africa) and what people can do to reduce the power of ugly words.  In addition, there are a couple of anecdotes I recognize from Born a Crime, including his grandfather calling his “mastuh” and his grandmother being afraid to whup him because of how his light skin would bruise.

As seems to be common in Noah’s standup specials, the strongest material is in the last half-hour.  After warming things up with a lot of fun stories and snarky insights, he ends the show with several extended, hard-hitting routines about racism.  I love his explanation of B.E.E., a post-apartheid government program that aims to increase equality in employment between races in South Africa.  As with affirmative action, there are white people in South Africa who argue that B.E.E. gives Black people an “unfair advantage,” but Noah draws a smart analogy using Paralympic/Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius (this was before the murder and subsequent trial/imprisonment,) explaining that apartheid “cut the legs off” of South Africa’s Black population and B.E.E. is an attempt to get them fitted with and acclimated to prosthetics.  And I really adore how he covers a news story about a white DJ who got in trouble for racial slurs (the aforementioned K-word.)  Trevor takes him to task, along with anyone else who’s ever offered up anger as an excuse for racism.  To illustrate his point, he uses a fantastic, darkly-funny story about getting a whupping from his mom and how, as furious as he would get with her over it (praying for Jesus to please kill his mom for him,) it would never “make him” call his mom the K-word – instead, he insists, the racism is inside the people who say these things and anger only brings it to the surface.  I also like his spitballing on the idea of having a Racists Anonymous for recovering bigots.

Warnings

Language (including discussion of racial slurs,) sexual references, and thematic elements.

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