Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The Trevor Noah you see Monday-Thursday nights on Comedy Central (or the following morning in your social media feeds) has something clever to say about the previous day’s headlines and whatever else President Donald Trump has Tweeted lately.
But the South African comedian you see in his newest hour of stand-up comedy and first for Netflix, Afraid of the Dark, removes himself from The Daily Show frenzy to take a broader, more global view – especially since he filmed this 77-minute set during the New York Comedy Festival on the weekend before the 2016 elections (so barely a mention of the Donald), and particularly because he’s still a relatively new immigrant to New York City. “This has been my dream since I started stand-up comedy, doing a special in New York City. This is it!” Noah declares, before a bit in which he compares the Big Apple he learned about in movies versus the realities of a Manhattan car/pedestrian skirmish today.
Here are the first couple of minutes, in fact:
Noah’s in awe of how real New Yorkers display absolute trust in traffic signals, precisely because the rest of the world doesn’t fall quite in line. Then again, he finds a punchline with double meaning in the crosswalk in front of him: “If you’ve got the white man on your side, you can do whatever you like.”
It’s the same wide-eyed amazement and amusement he has brought to The Daily Show for the past year-and-a-half as a foreigner with fresh eyes on American politics and TV journalism.
Before taking his Comedy Central gig, Noah only had seen the United States and interacted with Americans sporadically, but even those snapshots gave him an opportunity to learn how much tougher the existence is for blacks. And in a subtle nod to the socio-politics of last year, he quips: “I’m surprised that with everything that’s happened, it hasn’t all burned down!”
But he’s quick to remind his American audience that the same sentiment, of wanting to make things great again or taking their country back, has spread throughout Europe, too, with ironic consequences in Brexit. Colonization and immigration have affected pretty much everyone over the centuries, if we’re willing to acknowledge our history. Noah re-enacts it for us through a series of dialogues, allowing him to employ a series of accents including Scotch, Indian, British, Caribbean, American, French and Russian.
“I love the accents, not just because they sound fun and it’s an interesting thing to do. I love accents because I’m always impressed by how much power they have over us. Over our minds. When someone speaks a certain way, it changes how we feel about that person. For good and for bad,” Noah observes.
We’d all be better off, he notes even earlier in the hour, by getting out of our comfort zones quite literally, and exploring the world around us. “If there’s one thing you won’t waste your money on, it’s traveling,” Noah says. “Travel the world. See another place. Discover a different point of view. Traveling is the antidote to ignorance. That’s so true! It changes your mind, your perspective, how you believe, what you believe.”
He relates in a story about his own trip to Scotland, the wonder of being the only black person in sight, and how it forced him to re-evaluate his defense of Idris Elba as the potential next James Bond.
When Noah notes that immigration fears really boil down to uncertainty about those who neither sound nor look like us, he’s much more effective in generating laughs and changing attitudes, whereas his bits on drinking and using genitalia as insulting terms, or his assertion that women could shut down catcallers by speaking in Russian, he’s merely grabbing at low-hanging comedy fruit.
Noah reaches a comedy climax of sorts by imagining the first meeting of Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama as an impromptu vocal lesson, the elder statesman from South Africa giving the junior senator from Illinois coaching so he can speak like a nation’s “first black president” should, leading and uniting. Does Noah have that kind of a voice in political comedy?
Noah is a charismatic fellow, easy to follow.
The knock on his version of The Daily Show in the early weeks and months criticized him for not digging deep enough with his insights. But in an era when our president would rather refer to FOX & Friends than his daily intelligence briefings for his rhetoric and policy, perhaps we need more comedians who can speak to the same audience our president does. Someone not so highbrow or highfalutin, but rather, delivering a more palatable message that goes down easy.
That’s something Noah serves up aplenty.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
