I posted this last year:
I’ve just come back from the Montreal Just for Laughs festival.
Trevor Noah - I hate to push him because he’s going back to South Africa after spending two years touring the U.S. He’s the anti-Burnam, a quiet gentleman who is all personality and connects with the audience throughout an act that is otherwise just as precisely honed. (His best local line was that Montreal calls itself bilingual, but is really French with English subtitles. Perfect.) The whole hour is essentially one long story about his boyhood under apartheid and how he came to the U.S. so that he would have an identity: as black. The show’s called “Born a Crime” because he has a black mother and white father and interracial babies had no legal identity. And he does it all from a perspective of how happy his childhood was. The audience, more racially-diverse than at any other show, loved him, rightfully so. If the suits ever figure out what to do with him, he will be a gigantic global star, Will Smith before everybody started hating him.
Never occurred to me that he might become a Daily Show correspondent. This might become his stepping stone to huge American success. His upside is unlimited.