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

Friday, December 28, 2018

Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia (2018)

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.)

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