Entertainment

Noah Works South African Audiences Before ‘The Daily Show’

Published

11 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.”

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Up Next

Maya Rudolph Finally Offers Up the Rachel Dolezal Impression Everyone Has Been Asking Her for

Don't Miss

Reel-ality TV Talk

Oakland Post

Click to comment

Arts and Culture

IN MEMORIAM: Oakland Dance Legend Reginald Ray-Savage, 67

Savage lived his life as tribute to the teachers who had shared their wisdom on art and life with him. With a palpably genuine enthusiasm and desire to bring out the best in people, and pass the torch to the next generation, he poured into his students, as his teachers and mentors had into him. His infectious energy, love of life, and generosity of spirit inspired countless souls, both inside and outside the dance studio.

Published

5 days ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Reginald Ray-Savage brought the old-school teaching techniques he learned in the Katherine Dunham Dance Company to the youth at the Oakland School for the Arts in 2003. Courtesy photo.

Special to The Post

Reginald Ray-Savage – dancer, choreographer, and beloved teacher, mentor, and inspiration to many – passed away on May 17. The Oakland School for the Arts dance instructor was 67.

Born Reginald Ray, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sept. 5, 1958, he formally adopted the name ‘Savage,’ to honor the great Archie Savage, his mentor at Katherine Dunham’s Performing Arts Training Center where his dance training journey began in East St. Louis, Illinois.

He soon started dancing professionally with Katherine Dunham Dance Company, making dance a way of life. His grit, tenacity, and notorious work ethic brought him scholarships to train at multiple prestigious dance institutions, including The Ailey School (NYC) and Ruth Page School of Dance (Chicago), under the direction of acclaimed ballet instructor Larry Long and Dolores Lipinski-Long.

He danced with several companies including Joel Hall Dance Company, Ruth Page Ballet Chicago, Lyric Opera, Chicago City Ballet, American Festival Ballet, and touring productions of “Music Man” and “A Chorus Line”.

In 1989, Savage moved to Oakland where he started teaching seven days a week, amassing a devoted following that was attracted to his no-nonsense, impassioned, and effective old-school teaching style.

In 1992, at the insistence of his committed core of students, he founded Savage Jazz Dance Company (SJDC). Over a span of 30 years, Savage produced more than 100 original works, and tour SJDC nationally and internationally, performing at Casa del Jazz in Rome to a packed house and rave reviews—the first dance company to receive such an invitation.

Savage built SJDC into one of the Bay Area’s most respected dance companies, creating a signature style known for its combination of disciplined training, blended with rich artistic musical expression, and raw energy.

In 2003, Savage joined the Oakland School for the Arts as chair of the School of Dance. Over the next two decades, he created, built, and maintained a strong dance program, recognized, and respected by other dance institutions for forging well-trained and resilient dancers and human beings.

The depth of Savage’s tough love and care, and the skill of his teaching and mentoring are reflected in the careers of his students who have gone on to dance with the San Francisco Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, Janet Jackson, Ariana Grande, and companies across the globe.

Mark Kitaoka, a photographer hired by Savage in 2016, posted a living eulogy on the dance instructor.

“When I see the self-pride he builds in his students I am constantly impressed that people like Savage still exist in our ‘meme’ society,” Kitaoka wrote. “The kids he mentors are fiercely loyal to one another and I’m certain his methods teach each of those kids to put aside social status, race and gender and is replaced by solid loyalty for other souls.

“What Savage contributes to our world cannot be completely summed up in a few meager paragraphs but can be seen in the countless lives of those he has touched. Because of him, our world, and the world of the future is both a richer and better place.

Reginald Ray-Savage will forever be missed, remembered, and lovingly quoted. He is survived by his beloved wife, Alison Hurley, his sister, Sonia, and his brothers, Pierre, and Andre. May his inextinguishable spirit and impact live on in all the lives he touched.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

Published

1 week ago

June 20, 2026

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Books

Book Review: Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me

Though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

Published

2 weeks ago

June 17, 2026

bpusa-syndication

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Simon & Schuster, SRP: $29.00, Page Count: 304 pages

Sticks and stones may break my bones.

You know the rest of that childhood rhyme, and you know it’s not true: words have meaning, and they can cut like a knife. And yet, though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

The college lecture was supposed to have been about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

It was supposed to be a lively discussion, but unintentionally it quickly veered off course. When a White student quoted a movie line featuring the “n-word,” the room went quiet, and Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor panicked.

She’d grown up hearing that word, and seeing it, and she’d experienced the painful feelings attached to it. She knew who wrote that movie line. It was her father, Richard Pryor.

In her first few years, Pryor spent most of her time in a White world, hearing her mother’s tales of her larger-than-life father, and trying to grasp meaning in her father’s albums, peppered as they were with a word that was off-limits to her.

When she was six, she met her father for the first time. She began to visit him regularly.

It was fun at her Dad’s house; though he was sometimes moody, he taught her to fish and play dominoes. She became close with her siblings, fearful of her great-grandmother, and confused about a word that her father’s uncles threw around like a beach ball. It was a forbidden word at her mother’s house, but her father used it. Differently. Often.

The word hurt. She knew first-hand that it did.

“The word became a degrading slur that shackled all Black people together into a single, inescapable tribe,” she says.

So why was it okay for certain people to say it?

Knowing that, in the years since Richard Pryor’s accident and his death from multiple sclerosis, he’s become somewhat of a legend. It is a very satisfying thing, isn’t it? So is reading about him, especially from the viewpoint of one of his seven children. But his is not the only story you get inside “Something We Said.”

Wrapped around the life of Richard Pryor is the life of a word that straddles a line between danger and provocation, a word that author Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor refuses to say or even print. As she tells readers about her father and her loving-but-difficult relationship with him, she warily circles that word, as if it might bite. You may cringe, but she weighs it carefully, helping readers see it as a chameleon before always bringing us back to her father, his work, and his life before and after her and that word.

It’s a push-pull balance that holds readers fast, and keeps them there. It’s perfect for fans of this genre, or Richard Pryor, or of language – and it’s going to make you think. If you want a good memoir this week, one that may send you to your old album collection, “Something We Said” is rock-solid.