When Trevor Noah was announced, in 2015, as the replacement for Jon Stewart as host of “The Daily Show,” he was met with a resounding “Who?”
In fact, he was not entirely unknown. He had very recently joined the comedy-news show as a correspondent. What’s more, he was an accomplished stand-up comedian with a considerable following beyond his home country of South Africa.
Still, he had not exactly dominated the lists of top candidates to host a show that, for all the world maps in its graphics, was still America-centric. As Noah put it during his surprise announcement in September that he was stepping down, Comedy Central had taken a gamble on “this random comedian nobody knew — on this side of the world.”
America, after all, is a big country with a lot of blind spots. And one of Noah’s accomplishments, as he took a late-night institution in his own direction, was to expose them, and to widen, ever so slightly, late night’s field of vision.
Noah, whose last “Daily Show” airs on Thursday, was of course a rarity as a Black host in a line of work still dominated by white guys, taking over a show that had taken deserved hits over its treatment of race. (At the time of his hire, he joined Larry Wilmore, whose “The Nightly Show,” also on Comedy Central, was canceled in 2016.)
But he was further distinguished by being African, representing a part of the world often neglected by American news, much less comedic news about the news.
Beyond a special allowance for natives of the British Isles like John Oliver, James Corden and Craig Ferguson, many of late night’s most famous hosts have performed some form of Americanness as part of their act. Johnny Carson’s Midwest-meets-Burbank cool was a big reason for his broad palatability, while David Letterman played up the affect of the Indiana weatherman gone twisted. On “The Daily Show,” Stewart’s act was to survey the media circus with the befuddled exasperation of a Jewish guy from New Jersey.
If Noah was an exception in late night, he invested his show with the awareness that “exceptions” are the rule worldwide. Everyone has to be aware of America, but not everyone is like Americans, nor does everyone always see us as we see ourselves.
So he helped his audience see through his eyes. One of his most inspired bits in his early years managed to find a new angle on the most ubiquitous of late-night subjects — Donald J. Trump, then a 2016 presidential candidate — by joking that his glitzy aesthetic, boastfulness and outrageous claims made him seem most like an African dictator. “Donald Trump is presidential,” Noah said. “He just happens to be running on the wrong continent.”
Noah played the outsider, but he didn’t play dumb. He had a crisply pressed cool, a worldly intelligence and a versatile voice. (He developed a range of regional American accents on top of his various international ones.) He was as much in his element hosting the Grammys as he was hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
And when the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted live studio productions, he adapted to the home-casual environment as well as any of his peers, shooting “The Daily Social Distancing Show” in his apartment wearing a rainbow assortment of hoodies.
He was also the late-night host who spoke most passionately about George Floyd’s murder and the protests over police brutality against Black people. It was an irony that the host who made “The Daily Show” the most global it had ever been found his moment when the world shrank down to the size of our living rooms.
Like some others coming out of remote work back to the office, Noah has said that his experience of the pandemic made him reconsider whether he wanted to keep doing the same thing with his life. After a visit to India, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “I found myself realizing just how much I’d missed out on.”
Departing at age 38, after just over seven years in the chair, Noah won’t have stayed long enough to define an era in late night, unlike Stewart (16 years), Carson (30) or Letterman (11 years with NBC, 22 with CBS). Let’s be honest: Late night is a less important part of the media universe than it used to be (and the story of its continuing decline is nearly as old as Noah). Maybe his tenure marked the beginning of an era in which hosts no longer cleave to late-night posts for most of their careers.
In the end, Noah’s departure may just reflect, like his comedy did, a more fluid, quick-changing media environment. In which case his biggest statement may be that he held on to his job just long enough to make a mark, then moved on to the next thing. After all, it’s a big world out there.
James Poniewozik
Source link
