I didn’t watch Trevor Noah’s most recent Netflix special when it initially came out last year. It dropped shortly before his last episode of The Daily Show, and I wanted to save it for later, knowing that soon I wouldn’t be seeing Noah on my screens regularly anymore. Of course, I quickly forgot about it, so my plan actually worked out better than I thought! It’s been ten months since he left the show, and the show itself has been off the air for five due to the writers’ strike. But now that the strike has finally been resolved and The Daily Show has a return date, I remembered that I never checked out this special.
And honestly, it felt so good to have new Trevor Noah comedy to watch. I Wish You Would covers a handful of good topics mixed with a healthy dollop of fun. Early on, we get an older bit I’d seen before—Trevor making an uncomfortable discovery about his spoken German—but it’s attached to a larger routine that was all new to me. Talking about the German language leads into some ruminations on the word schadenfreude. Trevor notes, “Fun fact: that word was never translated into another language. I wonder why.” But he quickly admits that we all experience schadenfreude and dives into assorted examples, the best of which looks at the relationship between colonized nations and the British royal family. The bit on Elizabeth II’s death is especially good—I loved, “Buried with the jewels, #winning! You want the colonies to be sad? Those are their jewels!”
I’ve always liked Trevor’s talent for creating chains of routines, where one topic flows fluidly into another and another, each one a jumping-off point for the next. It can make it hard to reduce his comedy into shorter bite-sized clips, but I love seeing it in action in these longer-form settings. Ragging on people making dumb decisions in horror movies is nothing new, but I really like the way Trevor segues from this topic into the pandemic, realizing how dumb many people became once they were in a situation where they needed to take practical steps to stay safe. “If there’s one thing coronavirus did, it taught me how many of my friends are absolute idiots,” he remarks. “Everyone studied at the University of Facebook.”
Once he starts in on the subject of COVID, Trevor covers it from several different insightful and entertaining angles. We get the way a real-life global disaster is like nothing he imagined based on movies—“We were supposed to be a team. Will Smith was supposed to be our hero. None of it went as planned!” There’s an excellent bit about COVID response on the African continent compared to the Western world, which also looks back on media coverage of Ebola in the mid-2010s. And I love Trevor’s pet “conspiracy theory” that the pandemic came about due to too much wishing, saying, “COVID was essentially like an asshole genie that gave us everything we asked for.” We look at all the people who wished they could spend less time at the office, more time with their kids, and all day every day with their significant other. Whoops!
There’s a fun riff on world leaders—we start by comparing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’s reactions to getting COVID, then dovetail into a bit on how every U.S. president has a weird voice. Sure, it’s mainly an excuse for Trevor to trot out various presidential impressions, but he does it well, so I’m certainly not about to complain. Plus, I love him imagining someone without a weird voice trying to campaign and getting heckled offstage as a “normal-sounding-ass bitch.”
The final big set piece of the special revolves around an anecdote about ordering Indian food in Scotland, but of course it’s not merely that. It starts with a bit on Justin Trudeau—“He has the most adorable scandals. Are you kidding me?”—takes a detour to Trevor’s childhood, and includes the delightful line, “My tongue discovered its purpose!” It also has plenty of accent work, another thing Trevor does very well. And even apart from the side bits, the main anecdote takes all kinds of hilarious and suspenseful turns.
This is a great special, and I think I was able to appreciate it even more by watching it now instead of last year. It’s been so long since I was getting a regular dose of Trevor’s comedy and commentary, and seeing his standup again was so refreshing and fun.
Warnings
Language (including the N-word,) sexual references, and thematic elements.
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