Our Trevor is now a US asset

SA's favourite comedian was everything his legion of fans hoped he would be on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

SA's favourite comedian was everything his legion of fans hoped he would be on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Published Oct 4, 2015

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Trevor Noah is so adaptable, intelligent and disarmingly funny, he’ll have ’em eating pie out of his hand in no time, writes Dennis Pather.

Comedian Trevor Noah’s impressive debut this week on The Daily Show had millions of South Africans rallying behind him, understandably so.

He is supremely confident, charmingly funny and clearly our most valuable export since rooibos tea. South Africans love it when one of their own gets their name in lights on the international stage.

But if you think local interest in Noah’s success in the US can be easily sustained, you’re probably very mistaken.

Yes, the Noah faithful will tune in a second time, maybe even a third and fourth, but my bet is that local interest will start waning when South Africans begin to realise they’ve traded their precious home-brewed Mzansi-humour for the more formulaic Ameri-humour, which one critic once unkindly described as “high on lip gloss and low on IQ”.

The mistake we make is believing that because we happen to have some things in common, such as language and democracy, we automatically share the same interests, attitudes and social and cultural points of reference, which are basic ingredients in humour.

For Noah to succeed in his new role on The Daily Show, he will have to undergo a fundamental mindset transformation. Many of the outrageously funny gags that made him a hit in South Africa just won’t land in the US.

Taking a back seat in his rich repertoire will be his trademark jokes about growing up on the dusty streets of Soweto, his life as the son of a strict Xhosa mother and a Swiss father with a proclivity for dark chocolate; how he survived the absurdities of apartheid and the contradictions of our new democracy and his calls for a national “K” Day to sort out our race problems.

In its place will be humour that is unashamedly Ameri-centric, dealing with current, often parochial issues that are of little, if any, interest to South Africans.

In his new role, Noah is the face of The Daily Show. As the frontman tasked with projecting a range of contemporary American issues, he is guided by a powerful team of scriptwriters and producers who eat, sleep, drink and think nothing but American politics, attitudes, nuances, morals, lifestyles and social mores.

Our Noah will be expected to deliver according to that formula.

In the coming weeks and months, he’ll be busy finding out what makes Americans tick, what turns them on and, hopefully, what makes them laugh.

He can’t afford to get it wrong because American TV viewers have an abundance of channels to choose from.

But he’s so adaptable, intelligent and disarmingly funny, he’ll have ’em eating American pie out of his hand in no time.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

The Sunday Independent

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