Gary LevinNEW YORK — Trevor Noah is tackling his new job without an inspirational guiding light.
“I love a piece of what everyone does,” he says when asked about his late-night influences. “I love the playful nature of John Oliver, I love the joy of Jimmy Fallon, I enjoy the laid-back nature, ironically, of Jon Stewart,” whom he replaces Monday as Comedy Central’s Daily Show host (11 p.m. ET/PT). “I love the brilliance and smarts of Stephen Colbert.”
“For good and for bad, I never had a Letterman that I grew up with. We didn’t have late-night TV that way. I remember for a brief period we had Sinbad.”
Sure, he’s a stand-up comedian like some of his counterparts, but at 31 he’s both younger and considerably farther from the typical late-night mold.
“I come from a very poor background of extreme poverty; I lived in a home of domestic abuse,” he says of his upbringing in Soweto, South Africa, during apartheid, the son of a black mother and white father, a Swiss national.
“The world you come from, or the things you experience, always help you to relate to the experiences of others,” he says, just as Colbert’s touching interview with Vice President Biden this month, about his late son Beau, was informed by the deaths of Colbert's father and two brothers in a 1974 plane crash. “You could not have had that had the two of them not shared loss,” Noah says, which “gives you the ability to ask and talk to people about things the way you would like to be asked and talked to.”
Though he’s largely unknown in this country, Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless says Noah is a fitting replacement for the news satire. He was endorsed by Stewart, and rose to the top based on his qualifications for the job description: A funny, smart workaholic with a broad range of interests.
“It’s the hardest job on TV, and that list gets very small, very quickly,” Ganeless says. “And the more time we spent with him in the process, the more it became clear he had a unique eye into the world” as a Millennial who can connect with the network’s audience.
His challenge is to keep them engaged even if they’re not policy wonks.
Though politics remains “one of the core elements of the show,” Noah says, “we’re trying to find a way to comedically disseminate that information to people, because policy is horribly boring. How do you bridge that gap between boring information and making people understand why it matters to them? I’m very cognizant of people who may watch the show and go, 'Hey, I’m not a political guy.' Don’t watch the show because you’re into politics, watch the show because you’re into laughing.”
Noah plans to usher Daily firmly into the social-media age. To date, that h mostly has involved sharing clips of each episode online. But a new team will produce original material for various platforms all week long. “For Jon, it wasn’t his world, and understandably so, (but) it’s very much a part of our lives. We’re more likely to take part in what’s happening in the discourse. The Daily Show will react to what is happening in more spheres than just cable news.” (In what she calls a radical departure, Ganeless promises the show will respond to breaking news in the moment, on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and elsewhere, the same way fans get their other news.)
That instant judging has bitten him before: Noah’s years-old tweets of what some considered offensive jokes resurfaced shortly after his hiring, sparking an online outcry.
He says such outrage is impossible to ignore. “We live in an age for better and worse where everyone’s opinion is heard, and that is a good thing, but it is also a very bad thing. People can give you their opinions on politics and government and what’s happening in the world, but it also means people can tell you you look ugly in your Instagram picture.” But “for every crazy person on the corner shouting and screaming, there’s 100 people walking by with headphones on going, 'This is none of my business.' You have to look at the bigger picture. Sometimes it’s just noise.”
He has little time for a personal life —“Right now, I’m dating my work; I don’t think I’d be a good boyfriend” — and says preparing for a job he couldn’t have dreamed of is “a petrifying experience. People go, ‘Oh, you don’t seem nervous at all.’ I go, ‘No, no, do not get it twisted; I am nervous.’ But it’s the same way I get nervous every time before I get on stage; you never lose that. It’s a nervous excitement, that’s what it is; it’s like skydiving. You feel what you’re about to do. You know what you need to do. But at the end of the day, you’re still jumping out of an airplane, and the ground is coming at you really, really fast.”
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