You Laugh But It’s True (2011)

No News Satire Roundup this week, so here’s some more Trevor Noah for you.  This isn’t a standup special but a documentary about a standup special, following Noah in the time leading up to his first one-man show in Johannesburg (The Daywalker, which I previously reviewed.)

You Laugh But It’s True opens on Noah with about two years of standup under his belt.  He’s been making a name for himself in the burgeoning South Africa comedy scene and has gotten a chance to put together a one-man show, which is virtually unheard-of at all in South Africa, let alone for someone so new to the game.  As he prepares his material – much of which is based on his life and growing-up experiences – he revisits the white and Black neighborhoods of his childhood, introduces his family to the camera, and workshops routines in small comedy dives.  All the while, he examines where South Africa is today and where it’s come from, hoping to use his comedy to say something true about how race has shaped both his country and his own experiences within it.

By now, I’m familiar enough with Noah and his work that I already knew a lot of the information shared during the documentary.  Still, it’s neat to see people and places that he talks about so much in his standup (his visit to his grandmother’s house in Soweto is a highlight of the film for me,) and it’s interesting to see racial dynamics he describes play out on camera – I had a surprised but resigned “Oh right, of course that would happen” reaction to Noah explaining that people in South Africa still can’t quite believe he belongs to his own family, but it’s even more impactful to see someone on the street quizzing him about how he can be related to his grandmother when they don’t look alike (ie, he’s light-skinned and she’s not.)

It’s neat to learn a bit more about South African comedy in general.  The documentary shows tiny snippets from comics of various races and repeats Noah’s previous explanation that standup in South Africa is only as old as democracy there, that it was something to come out of the end of apartheid.  And yet, it’s a good demonstration of how the scars of apartheid still affect people across the country in different ways – the Black comics featured all use their comedy to talk about racial politics, both as reflections of their lives and because they feel it’s important to use their platforms to speak about the reality of race in South Africa, while a number of the white comics have talking heads wondering why Black comedians are still harping on about race and apartheid (“it was 15 years ago!”)  I also think it’s really interesting how critical the white comics are of Noah.  He’s repeatedly called arrogant, too inexperienced/a “queue-jumper,” and his success is dismissed as a “right place, right time” situation, with one white comic declaring him “not a comedian” at all.

I thought it was a fascinating film.  Like much of Noah’s standup, it addresses race and life in South Africa through a different lens, one that’s too rarely seen in the U.S. – as I heard Noah say in an interview in which he references the documentary, it’s not a “let me film your hunger” story about “African suffering,” but a story that offers a more complex picture of the country.

Warnings

Language, sexual references, and thematic elements.