Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah is an actor, born 1984.
Trevor Noah had a full career before American audiences had heard of him. Born in Johannesburg in 1984, he came up through South African television and radio as a presenter, comedian and radio DJ, hosting gossip, sports and game shows and doing stand-up on the local circuit for the better part of a decade before he started working abroad.
From 2015 to 2022 he hosted The Daily Show, inheriting a programme built entirely around somebody else's persona and rebuilding it around an outsider's read of American politics. It worked slowly rather than immediately. He has won Primetime Emmys, with the award recorded here being for outstanding short form variety series. The Hollywood Reporter named him one of the thirty-five most powerful people in New York media in 2017 and again in 2018, and Time listed him among its hundred most influential people in the world in 2018.
The books are the better body of work. Born a Crime, published in 2016, is a memoir of growing up mixed race in a country where his parents' relationship was itself a crime, and it is funnier and harder than the talk-show job ever allowed him to be. It's Trevor Noah is the young readers' version, Into the Uncut Grass came in 2023, and there is a Daily Show tie-in from 2018.
Screen work outside the desk has been light: the voice of Griot in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Totatsi Bibinyana in Coming 2 America, and a run of appearances as himself.
Movies (7)
TV (4)
Books (4)
Where to start with Trevor Noah
Read Born a Crime before you watch anything. It is the best thing he has made: a childhood memoir with real violence in it, structured as comedy, and it explains the perspective that the American work only ever hints at.
The Daily Show is the day job, and it is worth approaching as an archive rather than a binge. The early stretch is an outsider learning the country; the later years are a host who has decided what he thinks. Both are more interesting than the highlight clips suggest.
It's Trevor Noah adapts the memoir for younger readers and loses less than you would expect. Into the Uncut Grass is a short illustrated departure, gentler than the rest of him.
For the screen credits, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever uses his voice well as Griot, and Coming 2 America is a small comic part in a film that needed more of them.