I
picked a good time to discover one of my new favorite funny people; less than a
week after I saw my first clips of Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Comedy Central aired this standup special. I don’t watch a ton of standup, but I thought
this was fantastic. (Some joke spoilers.)
From
what I’ve seen of Noah’s standup, here and on YouTube, I think his
sensibilities as a comedian must be very shaped by South Africa’s young (as in
recent) standup scene, which didn’t become legal until the ‘90s – along with
free speech. With that in mind, it makes
sense to comedy and commentary go hand-in-hand in Noah’s act. He’s incredibly
funny, but he also has some very thoughtful things to say. A few times, he got applause, not for a joke,
but for the statement he was making. (“You
know who’s not a terrorist? Most
Muslims,” comes to mind.) The
special is built around several extended sequences, observations mixed with
anecdotes. If I have a criticism of Noah’s
style, it’s that he can go off on a few too many tangents – though his
sidetracked stuff is just as insightful/hilarious as his central focus in any
given routine, I worried a few times that he’d never come back to his story. Still, the meandering provides great material
and shows off his versatility. I like how
he can go from outrageous to smartass to whacky to sober in the blink of an
eye. (Also, his accents are crazy good – I particularly like the
argument he depicts between two Kentucky men that sounds more like dueling
banjos than human speech.)
I love
the long segment on racially-charged police violence, which is framed by the
story of Noah’s utter panic at being pulled over in America for the first
time. Amid the silliness of the cop having
to a bewildered Noah off the freeway, he examines four major events of unarmed
black men being shot by police officers and the ways the media bent over
backwards to explain away the tragedy. His
repeated refrain is, “I don’t know how not to die,” and he looks to these men’s
stories to figure out the “right” way to do so.
There’s also a very good sequence on overall racial bias in news
reporting. Any crime committed by a
Middle Easterner is “possible terrorism,” and any shooting in a black
neighborhood is “probably gang-related,” but when a white man shoots nine
people in a church, it’s an “isolated incident” involving a “mentally unstable
lone gunman.” Noah points out how quick
the media is to separate this man from the rest of society and wonders why,
when a white “lone gunman” kills people in a public place with the intention of
inciting fear and spreading a message of hate, he isn’t considered a terrorist.
For me,
the best is a story about flying as an African during the Ebola crisis. It’s capped with some fine commentary on how fear
makes people lose their minds and turn on each other, and being treated like a
plague-carrier due to your national origin is of course disgusting, but Noah’s
anecdote is hysterical. I think
my favorite moment in the special is when he realizes the health officer who’s there
to take all the Africans’ temperatures doesn’t think Noah, a light-skinned
biracial man with the name Trevor Noah, seems “African enough” to be suspected
of having Ebola, and how conflicted he feels about it. “Don’t get me wrong – I never want anyone to
think I have Ebola, but I also don’t want anyone to assume that I can’t have Ebola.” Too funny!
Warnings
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