Summer in the Global Village: Trevor Noah, South Africa’s Comic PhenomenonPosted in Africa, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, South Africa on 2013-07-17 22:24Z by Steven |
Summer in the Global Village: Trevor Noah, South Africa’s Comic Phenomenon
The World
Public Radio International
2013-07-16
In South Africa, comedian Trevor Noah is a phenomenon.
A friend who recently came back from Johannesburg and Cape Town, remarked that the 28-year-old’s every utterance, whether on TV or Twitter (where he has nearly a million followers), “creates a ripple throughout the entire country.”
For six weeks in the early summer, New Yorkers got a taste of why.
Noah’s solo show, “Born a Crime,” (which ran at Culture Project in NoHo) references his mixed-race heritage: He was born during the apartheid era to a black South African mother and a white Swiss father.
Much of his sidesplitting routine is devoted to skewering the politics of race, both within and outside of his native South Africa, where his father, who was barred from walking in public with his brown-skinned son, instead watched Noah from across the street, “like a creepy pedophile.”…
Read the entire article here.