Trevor Noah: I Wish You Would (2022)

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.

Relationship Spotlight: Jack & Ted (Werewolf by Night)

*Spoilers.*

Yep, we’re back for more Werewolf by Night! For such a short piece of media, I’ve managed to find all manner of stuff to talk about with this special. I feel like I’d need a bit more info if I was going to attempt to write a Favorite Characters/Character Highlight post on Man-Thing/Ted, but I have more than enough to talk about his delightful relationship with Jack.

Jack Russell does not want to take part in a winner-take-all monster hunt in the dead of night in a creepy mansion where monster heads are stuffed and mounted on the walls, in part because he knows he could be one of those heads someday. But when Ted is captured by Verussa’s people and used as the competition’s Most Dangerous Game, Jack knows he can’t leave his friend to fend for himself. So he secures an invitation to the belly of the beast, armed with an impressive monster-killing track record, an air of mystery, and some small explosives he doesn’t entirely know how to use.

Of course, he’s in no danger from the monster, and Ted is both relieved and happy to see Jack come for him. But both of them are in danger from the other hunters—even before Jack’s hidden agenda, and his own werewolf nature, are discovered, most of the other hunters wouldn’t hesitate to take him out just to thin the competition. So he’s sticking his neck out in a major way.

But quite simply, that’s what friends do. While both Ted and Jack are capable of being extremely lethal, they’re actually very gentle in nature, preferring cooperation and care to violence and vengeance. Jack’s ready to do what he needs to do to rescue Ted, but he tries to do it with as little collateral damage as possible.

Though Jack is more than willing to help Ted, he does come in with a bit of exasperation. He intimates that Ted is always getting himself into trouble and needing Jack to bail him out. In their dynamic, I’m reminded a little of Rocket and Groot in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and not just because Ted and Groot are both plant-based lifeforms of few words. It’s that sense of the clever little guy looking out for the well-meaning, gentle big guy who can blunder into things, an inseparable odd couple who fit together against all odds. But while Rocket starts out much more critical of Groot, casually insulting his intelligence and getting aggravated when Groot doesn’t understand his instructions, Jack is immediately kinder with Ted. He doesn’t come across as the bossy friend, more like the long-suffering brother’s keeper, and his frustration is mostly an expression of tough love.

And I’d say, ultimately, Jack and Ted are on more equal footing. For all of Jack’s scolding about Ted getting himself into dangerous situations, Ted is the one who looks after Jack when he turns, setting up camp for them and making coffee while he waits for Jack to wake as a human again. Their care for each other is really endearing and makes Werewolf by Night so much more than a straight homage to classic monster movies.

Relationship Spotlight: Jack Russell & Elsa Bloodstone (Werewolf by Night)

*Spoilers.*

I’ve talked about Jack and I’ve talked about Elsa, so now it’s time to look at the two of them together. Considering that Werewolf by Night is less than an hour long and they go into the special not yet having met each other, the connection that grows between these two in that time is impressive.

Elsa and Jack have incredibly different temperaments, which immediately makes for a compelling combo. Elsa comes into the monster-hunting contest with a huge chip on her shoulder and a job to do. She’s pissed that she has to prove herself to win something that she feels should’ve been hers by rights, and she’s prepared to kill to get what she wants. By contrast, Jack doesn’t care about the contest at all. When they first run into each other on the grounds of Bloodstone Manor, Jack suggests that, rather than duke it out and show their prowess, they just pretend they haven’t seen each other and go their separate ways. Hearing this attitude amid the dog-eat-dog environment of the competition stuns Elsa, and she’s entirely unable to figure out what to make of Jack.

He continues to perplex and surprise her. The next time their paths cross, he’s friendly to her and tries to be helpful, offering to assist her in tending an injury she received from another hunter. This is so unlike the other hunters, who spill blood freely, and Elsa doesn’t know whether Jack is dumb, soft, or perhaps something more.

She’s spiky and guarded. He’s warm and inviting. She’s highly competent and lethal. He doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, but the last thing he wants to do is hurt anyone. He reaches out but she’s untrusting, he wants to work together but she’s a lone wolf. She’s a monster hunter. And he’s a monster.

But despite all these major differences between them, something clicks. Maybe it’s because Jack’s relentless openness wears Elsa down, maybe it’s because she’s not as hard-edged as she purports to be. Somehow, they start working together, Elsa helping Jack free Ted (the captured monster they’re supposed to be hunting) in exchange for the Bloodstone. And even when it comes out that Jack is a werewolf and Elsa is ready to paint him as a creature and a traitor, he gets her to still see his humanity. When Verussa forces him to turn, he’s able to hold onto a shred of his memory of Elsa, which protects her during the attack.

By the end of the special, they’ve parted ways—Jack, human again, is waking to a post-werewolf hangover while Elsa has claimed the Bloodstone and her ancestral home once and for all. But see, this is why we need more Werewolf by Night in the MCU (I’ve noticed that my Werewolf by Night posts, like my Moon Knight posts, tend to end with a pitch for more. I’m okay with that.)

Where do Jack and Elsa go from here, separately and (hopefully) together? How will they run into each other again? Has meeting Jack (and Ted) changed Elsa’s attitude toward monsters? What will she do with the Bloodstone now that she finally has it? Will we ever learn about the one other person Jack was able to remember in his werewolf form? Inquiring minds very much want to know, and I’ll gladly take any further specials/series/movies/whatever that the MCU wants to give us.