No News
Satire Roundup this week, since all my shows are off. Luckily, though, I have Trevor Noah’s latest
Netflix special to enjoy. While it
includes many of the same routines from when I saw him perform live last November, it’s still a great time.
Yes, I’ve
seen a lot of this before: the first
time Trevor ate tacos, Trevor’s experience meeting President Obama, Trevor’s
mom’s advice for how to deal with racists, and so forth. I don’t mind seeing them again, however. Much like his Afraid of the Dark special, which similarly featured a lot of bits
I’d already seen him do live, it’s nice to have this set recorded so I can go
back and revisit them. How much do I
love Trevor’s recurring bit about the difference between the languages
“English” and “American,” or his belief that people who hate immigrants
shouldn’t be allowed to eat immigrant food?
These routines are too good to just see once.
The main
story that I hadn’t previously heard was Trevor’s first extended sequence, a
long story about a trip to Bali. I
always enjoy his anecdotes and observations from his travels around the world
(I think it was in Afraid of the Dark
that he called travel the cure for ignorance – love that,) and this one is a
doozy. It plays with the theme of what
white people consider fun travel plans vs. Black people, touches on colonialism,
features multiple accents from Trevor, and includes a bit of mortal peril, all
topped with some genuine human absurdity.
I laughed so hard!
The “what
white people do for fun” angle is especially interesting to me. I’ve heard Trevor talk about this sort of
thing before – that, as someone who grew up incredibly poor, he hasn’t
absolutely no reason to “rough it” by going camping – but it goes deeper here. I appreciate his horror at discovering what
the “authentic Balinese experience” his friends sign them up for actually
entails, and I know exactly the sort of travel excursion he’s talking
about. It’s the sort of thing that I
think many people just accept as a normal vacation activity until he lays it
out in detail and, hearing it described by someone who doesn’t have that
vantage point, you finally hear the
inherent bizarreness (and even grotesqueness) of it. In this story, Trevor’s silent “eye conversation”
with the Balinese man is a definite highlight.
There’s
so much to enjoy and appreciate in Trevor’s comedy, but for me, the little moments
are what really make it sing. Near the
start of the hilarious taco sequence, I love the bit where his American
roommate announces that he’s starving and Trevor replies, “I think you mean you’re
hungry, Dave.” At this point, we’ve
already been primed that we’re going to be dealing with “English” vs. “American,”
and the language difference that caps the story is just staggeringly funny, but
I love this brief second he takes to highlight this fundamental difference in
their experiences and how that colors their language in more than just
colloquial ways. There’s no commentary
or tangent off of this joke; he just slips it in and then gets back to
tacos. Little things like this really
kick the whole set up a notch.
Warnings
Strong thematic
elements and language (including the N-word and other racial slurs.)
No comments:
Post a Comment