Mixed Race Studies

You Can’t Go from Zero to ‘The Daily Show’: The Playboy Interview with Trevor Noah

Playboy
2016-05-19

David Hochman, Contributing Editor

Has there ever been a more auspicious moment to chase after clown cars on the road to the White House? Since bravely taking over for Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show last September, South African comedian Trevor Noah has watched American politics burble into a molten mess of a reality series that even Comedy Central would find too ludicrous to green-light. Then again, Noah did not campaign for the role of satirist in chief; it found him. In March of last year, he was in a taxi heading to an event in Dubai when his manager called to ask if he wanted the planet’s most coveted fake news-anchoring job. This, after appearing a mere three times as a Daily Show correspondent. As Noah said around the time to his friend and early champion Jerry Seinfeld, “I get out of the car, and my legs—I didn’t have legs.”

Thick skin is what he really needed. The instant the gig was announced, social media cried out with a collective “Who the fuck?” followed by a judge-y indictment over a handful of old Twitter barbs that painted the little-known comic as a menace to Jews, Ebola victims and “fat chicks.” It didn’t help that TV critics held Noah to crazy-high standards: not to Jon Stewart’s early days but to Stewart at the glorious end of a 16-year run. But the sharp-suited newcomer, now 32, settled in with polish and intelligence (and without issuing any apologies) and continues to build a following with a young, plugged-in crowd that no longer treats him like Job.

Trevor Noah was born in Johannesburg on February 20, 1984 and survived a lot worse than web controversy. He grew up in the final decade of apartheid with a white Swiss German father and a black Xhosa mother who never married because mixed-race marriage was illegal in that era. Noah spent his early years in a “whites only” neighborhood where his mom had to pretend she was the maid. (His dad would walk across the street from them “like a creepy pedophile,” Noah joked in one of his routines.) After the relationship dissolved, Noah and his mother moved in with family members in the black municipality of Soweto. Experiencing such contrasting worlds made him fluent in a range of cultures and languages, including six South African dialects, English and German…

…Eight years with a black man in the White House does not appear to have eased tensions around race.

This is hard to explain to white people, but the thing about race is that you can’t turn it off. If you’re black, you are constantly black and that blackness is always affecting you in some way or another. That’s a tough conversation to have, because it can be subtle. It’s often very small things, but they pile up. Cabdrivers don’t pick you up. It happens to me. Or you go into a corner store and get followed, or people say things about you. It’s often not blatant, but it’s entrenched in the system. Over time, it might change, but if you’re black in the United States, even after two terms of President Obama, you still feel black.

I think the benefit of a movement like Black Lives Matter is that people have seen the influence they can have by actively getting out and doing something about ending the silencing of a voice. It has been a fantastic proponent for new conversations about race, which is amazing…

Read the entire interview here.