Entertainment

Noah Works South African Audiences Before ‘The Daily Show’

Published

9 years ago

June 23, 2015

In this photo taken Oct. 27 2009 South African comedian Trevor Noah is photographed during an interview. Trevor Noah, a 31-year-old comedian from South Africa who has contributed to “The Daily Show” a handful of times during the past year, will become Jon Stewart’s replacement as host, Comedy Central announced Monday March 30, 2015. (AP Photo/Bongiwe Mchunu-The Star)

CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, Associated Press

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Trevor Noah walked onto the stage and bantered with the South African audience, which whooped in appreciation. That was a cue for the next host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” to launch into a slick riff on the absurdity of high-pitched shrieks of delight.

“When did we get to the point where we stopped using words?” Noah mused. Whooping, he said, was “not a natural black sound” because it “sounds eerily similar to a police siren.”

Noah is on a roll, performing sold-out shows in a 1,800-seat Johannesburg theater ahead of his Sept. 28 start in a job held by Jon Stewart since 1999. It’s a big leap to the big leagues or maybe a jump off a cliff for Noah, a South African who is not widely known in the United States. That’s just comic grist for Noah, who also makes fun of romantic relationships, obsessive cellular telephone use and even South Africa’s era of white minority rule in his stand-up routines at home.

The big question is whether his brand of humor will translate in the anchor’s chair at the parody newscast on the “The Daily Show,” where Noah has already appeared as a mock correspondent. Stewart lampoons American politics, media and culture, and international events are also on his menu. Noah, who built a career in South Africa and has toured internationally (he was in Dubai when he learned he would succeed Stewart), looks forward to broadening his appeal.

“I have to become more global,” he said this month on South Africa’s Radio 702. “I don’t ever dispute that South Africa is my home and that there is news coming from there, but now you have to really go, ‘What is globally newsworthy?'”

It helps that 31-year-old Noah, born to a South African black woman and a white, Swiss father during apartheid, comes across as a chameleon-like figure with a firm grip on all kinds of accents in his routines. An Associated Press reporter attended a recent show at the Montecasino entertainment complex, where Noah hit some topics that, while they might qualify as low-hanging fruit in a comic repertoire, have universal appeal.

“The older you get, the more you start to realize that you can’t win an argument in a relationship,” he said. “You can’t win a fight with your woman. Because if you lose, you lose. And if you win, you lose.”

Noah leaves for a North American tour that has yet to sell out after his five-week run in South Africa, which ends in early July.

In Johannesburg, he worked the audience for one hour and 45 minutes without an interval, and without a momentum-breaking lull. Some humor was physical: silly walks and gestures and bumbling behavior that other comics such as Rowan Atkinson, who played the character Mr. Bean, have used to great effect. Noah’s act was cheerful and generally wholesome, with little sign of the graphic humor noted in some of his past tweets.

Noah was self-deprecating about his new job, casting himself as a new kid on the block, an awkward extra in the glitzy world of superstars. He got a lot of material out of an invitation to the New York Met Gala, where he mixed with Beyonce, Rihanna and other celebrities he said he had “idolized” for years.

“I don’t know how to let loose when I’m dancing to the music and the people that made the music are watching me,” Noah said of a post-gala party. “I’ve never felt so much pressure in my life.”

He let rip on subjects that vex a lot of South Africans, including persistent electricity cuts and a scandal over state spending on the private home of President Jacob Zuma. In the South African parliament last week, an opposition lawmaker who was angry about the scandal complained that ruling party members in the chamber laugh “as if we’re in some Trevor Noah show.”

Some South Africans say Noah’s success will elevate their country’s image abroad. In the Radio 702 interview, Noah said he is heading into uncharted waters as host of “The Daily Show.”

“I’m not even ready for what people will say about me,” he said. The key, he said, is to “just keep doing your thing.”

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O.J. Simpson, 76, Dies of Prostate Cancer

Orenthal James (O.J.) Simpson, who rose to fame as a college football player who went on to the NFL and parlayed his talents in acting and sportscasting, succumbed to prostate cancer on April 10, his family announced.

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2 weeks ago

April 17, 2024

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Orenthal James (O.J.) Simpson. Wikipedia photo

By Post Staff

Born and raised in San Francisco, the Galileo High School graduate was recruited by the University of Southern California after he was on a winning Junior College All-American team.

At USC, he gained wide acclaim as a running back leading to him becoming the No. 1 pick in the AFL-NFL draft in 1969 and joining the Buffalo Bills, where he had demanded – and received — the largest contract in professional sports history: $650,000 over five years. In 1978, the Bills traded Simpson to his hometown team, the San Francisco 49ers, retiring from the game in 1979.

Simpson’s acting career had begun before his pro football career with small parts in 1960s TV (“Dragnet”) before “Roots” and film (“The Klansman,” “The Towering Inferno,” Capricorn One”).

He was also a commentator for “Monday Night Football,” and “The NFL on NBC,” and in the mid-1970s Simpson’s good looks and amiability made him, according to People magazine, “the first b\Black athlete to become a bona fide lovable media superstar.”

The Hertz rent-a-car commercials raised his recognition factor while raising Hertz’s profit by than 50%, making him critical to the company’s bottom line.

It could be said that even more than his success as a football star, the commercials of his running through airports endeared him to the Black community at a time when it was still unusual for a Black person to represent a national, mainstream company.

He remained on Hertz team into the 1990s while also getting income endorsing Pioneer Chicken, Honey Baked Ham and Calistoga water company products and running O.J. Simpson Enterprises, which owned hotels and restaurants.

He married childhood sweetheart Marguerite Whitley when he was 19 and became the father of three children. Before he divorced in 1979, he met waitress and beauty queen Nicole Brown, who he would marry in 1985. A stormy relationship before, during and after their marriage ended, it would lead to a highway car chase as police sought to arrest Simpson for the murder by stabbing of Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994.

The pursuit, arrest, and trial of Simpson were among the most widely publicized events in American history, Wikipedia reported.

Characterized as the “Trial of the Century,” he was acquitted by a jury in 1995 but found liable in the amount of $33 million in a civil action filed by the victims’ families three years later.

Simpson would be ensnared in the criminal justice system 12 years later when he was arrested after forcing his way into a Las Vegas hotel room to recover sports memorabilia he believed belonged to him.

In 2008, he received a sentence of 33 years and was paroled nine years later in 2017.

When his death was announced, Simpson’s accomplishments and downfalls were acknowledged.

Sports analyst Christine Brennan said: “… Even if you didn’t love football, you knew O.J. because of his ability to transcend sports and of course become the businessman and the pitchman that he was.

“And then the trial, and the civil trial, the civil case he lost, and the fall from grace that was extraordinary and well-deserved, absolutely self-induced, and a man that would never be seen the same again,” she added.

“OJ Simpson played an important role in exposing the racial divisions in America,” attorney Alan Dershowitz, an adviser on Simpson’s legal “dream team” told the Associated Press by telephone. “His trial also exposed police corruption among some officials in the Los Angeles Police Department. He will leave a mixed legacy. Great athlete. Many people think he was guilty. Some think he was innocent.”

“Cookie and I are praying for O.J. Simpson’s children … and his grandchildren following his passing. I know this is a difficult time,” Magic Johnson said on X.

“I feel that the system failed Nicole Brown Simpson and failed battered women everywhere,” attorney Gloria Allred, who once represented Nicole’s family, told ABC News. “I don’t mourn for O.J. Simpson. I do mourn for Nicole Brown Simpson and her family, and they should be remembered.”

Simpson was diagnosed with prostate cancer about a year ago and was undergoing chemotherapy treatment, according to Pro Football Hall of Fame President Jim Porter. He died in his Las Vegas, Nevada, home with his family at his side.

He is survived by four children: Arnelle and Jason from his first marriage and Sydney and Justin from his second marriage. He was predeceased son, Aaren, who drowned in a family swimming pool in 1979.

Sources for this report include Wikipedia, ABC News, Associated Press, and X.