Still little known, Jon Stewart’s successor Trevor Noah sees some of his tweets about Jews and women coming to the surface.
Designed to be the successor to Jon Stewart, who will be leaving the Comedy Central channel’s Daily Show in the coming months, Trevor Noah, 31, was first welcomed as “who is this guy?” before old tweets come to throw the trouble on his humour.
Who is he? Trevor Noah is a South African, born of a black mother and a white father of Swiss nationality, in the apartheid. “I did not have a normal life, I grew up in a country that was not normal,” he told The New York Times. He started out as a stand-up comedian when he was about 20 years old, went on to some American shows, and made his first appearance in the Daily Show in December 2014, about police violence that had killed several blacks US. Extract from his speech: “I never thought I would be more afraid of the police in the United States than in South Africa, it almost made me nostalgic for the good old days in the country.”
I needed a drink Trevor Noah
Since then, Trevor Noah has appeared three times on the show. Hence the surprise of a large part of the public when this not very well known name has arisen to replace Jon Stewart. The man himself told the New York Times “not to have believed it for a few hours”: “I needed a drink,” he added.
Trevor Noah’s task will be cumbersome: succeeding Jon Stewart, 52, is nothing, even though he has approved his successor’s appointment as “an excellent comedian with whom we love working.” And even if, on the other hand, the channel explains well that she does not look for the “new Jon Stewart”, but an animator of another style.
During his 16 years of presentation, Jon Stewart deeply imprinted his mark on the Daily Show – which existed before he took the lead – by propelling him to the top of the hearings. It has also made it an international reference. In France, the program particularly inspired the Petit Journal of Canal +, which tries to take up quite a few of its codes – including the virulent criticism of certain media (the Petit Journal has recently campaigned against the American channel Fox News, One of Jon Stewart’s favourite targets).
“A Jew twice richer”
The humour of Trevor Noah, as evidenced by a sketch recorded a few years ago in London, rests largely on the relations between whites and blacks, but also on other subjects that have amused moderately some Internet users, who unearthed Old tweets from the new host, as reported by the American site Buzzfeed.com.
There is, for example, this tweet, dated May 2014, about rappers and Jews: “Behind every billionaire rapper there is a Jew twice as rich.”