# ...Trevor Noah. **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [July 27, 2018, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650 "2018-07-27T00:56:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Plumpudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Plumpudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plumpudding)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/101 "2018-07-27T23:40:13Z")
Oh no, Rubber Chicken fucked with ubutu! Now I have no clue what’s happening! ---
**Author:** ![Sunny\_Daze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunny_daze/32/438_2.png) [@Sunny\_Daze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunny_Daze)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/102 "2018-07-27T23:46:36Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Thick, dark, and repulsive, like English cuisine in general, a conglomeration of unsavory spices and disgusting ingredients. (See _rat tart_) I’ll have the one without so much rat in it. ---
**Author:** ![Plumpudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Plumpudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plumpudding)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/103 "2018-07-27T23:52:01Z")
Fixed it! If Bryan wanna me to explain something, I think I :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![Plumpudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Plumpudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plumpudding)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/104 "2018-07-27T23:56:04Z")
Oh, and fuck grammar! Kvasir is my man. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2018, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/105 "2018-07-27T23:59:26Z")
Thanks, but I’ve already reached my weekly quota of drunken explication. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/106 "2018-07-28T00:09:55Z")
> [@Plumpudding](#): > > Oh, and fuck grammar! Kvasir is my man. [And Bucky Katt!](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/002810.html) > [@Bucky Katt](#): > > Grammar am for people who can’t think for myself- understanded me? ---
**Author:** ![Plumpudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Plumpudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plumpudding)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/107 "2018-07-28T00:21:42Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Thanks, but I’ve already reached my weekly quota of drunken explication. Why do you exude a seeming hatred for poetry, drunkenness, heroin-abuse and soft-murder? ---
**Author:** ![Lamoral](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lamoral/32/16078_2.png) [@Lamoral](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamoral)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/108 "2018-07-28T00:21:59Z")
There are beautiful women in every place in the world. And it’s never classy to make jokes about peoples’ appearance, collectively or individually but especially the former. Not ever classy. ---
**Author:** ![Plumpudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Plumpudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plumpudding)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/109 "2018-07-28T00:31:44Z")
> [@Lamoral](#): > > There are beautiful women in every place in the world. And it’s never classy to make jokes about peoples’ appearance, collectively or individually but especially the former. Not ever classy. Do you think it’s classy commenting on or judging peoples clothes? ---
**Author:** ![Weedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/weedy/32/301_2.png) [@Weedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weedy)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/110 "2018-07-28T00:34:38Z")
That ‘joke’ is straight up racist and demeaning. Seems like this thread is full of Americans who don’t think it’s very important, because who gives a fuck about Australian Aborigines. What is Noah’s problem with Aboriginal women anyway? Seems like he just picked an easy target. He should be ashamed. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/111 "2018-07-28T01:13:59Z")
> [@Sunny\_Daze](#): > > I knew you were a hyper-reactive twit, but I had no idea you were this stupid. Uh oh, I think I need my safe space. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Kumquat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4491bb/32.png) [@Gary\_Kumquat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Kumquat)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/112 "2018-07-28T02:53:04Z")
> [@Gary\_Kumquat](#): > > Here’s how it works. If you want to claim that you’re better then the other side, you have to hold yourself to a higher standard than they do. Would anyone give Roseanne Barr a pass if she’d said "It’s one of those things where, if you were to make the joke again you would probably make it better.” So predictably Roseanne on Hannity did her faux apology, in particular saying "“I wish I worded it better.” So, all she needs to do now is state she’d never use that particular joke again, point out it’s in the past, and she’s golden, right? Maybe thank someone for educating her on the topic, just for good measure? ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/113 "2018-07-28T04:58:59Z")
> [@Weedy](#): > > That ‘joke’ is straight up racist and demeaning. Seems like this thread is full of Americans who don’t think it’s very important, because who gives a fuck about Australian Aborigines. Most Americans have never met an Aborigine and don’t encounter them much on TV. By way of analogy, I suspect quite a few kids worldwide have a cartoonish perception of Eskimos. Maybe you did too. > [@](#): > > What is Noah’s problem with Aboriginal women anyway? Seems like he just picked an easy target. He should be ashamed. I suspect that joke was a one-off thing, which targeted a group that was mostly an abstraction to his audience. Not punching down so much as punching outwards. ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 6:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/114 "2018-07-28T06:31:30Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Have you heard Christoper Walken’s impression of William Shatner? Link, _Goddammit!_ ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/115 "2018-07-28T07:10:51Z")
> [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](#): > > Ew. Gross. Bill Maher holding court on ideas he has no fucking clue about. I usually appreciate your views, but here you find Maher’s talk so disgusting you don’t bother to say why. Can you elucidate? Maher makes a key practical point when he reminds us that most Americans agree with Democrats on the important issues, but are turned off by the increasingly pathetic “lack of balls.” Is the 2018 rallying call for Democrats to be: \*We don’t care if we lose the elections; we just want to force Trevor Noah to self-flagellate on TV. \* ---
**Author:** ![Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/budget_player_cadet/32/205_2.png) [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Budget_Player_Cadet)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/116 "2018-07-28T08:01:00Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > I usually appreciate your views, but here you find Maher’s talk so disgusting you don’t bother to say why. Can you elucidate? It’s trivially easy to nutpick and find _someone_ criticizing something. To pick out some rando on Tumblr who gives someone shit over something. Notice how many of his examples never brought up who did the criticizing? This not only blurs the line between “thing people legitimately are upset about” and “this someone somewhere on the internet got into a hissy-fit over”, it also has the useful step of stripping away any context whatsoever, like the context of Carrie Fischer working her whole life since Return of the Jedi to be seen as more than a sex icon, meaning that [she would almost certainly be unhappy about Steve Martin’s eulogy that praised her first and foremost for being pretty](https://www.thecut.com/2016/12/steve-martin-this-isnt-how-you-pay-tribute-to-carrie-fisher.html). And yeah, if you strip away that context, it sounds like a really dumb thing to complain about. But stripping away context like that is typically the purview of dishonest, alt-right shitbags. Not, y’know, rational skeptics - although anyone who would still give him that title clearly hasn’t been paying attention to his career path lately. Similarly, looking into the Chris Hemsworth thing, here’s something interesting - nobody _forced_ Chris to apologize. There was no groundswell, there wasn’t even some alt-right provocateur digging through his instagram for ammo against him. [He brought it up _himself_](https://www.eonline.com/news/805571/chris-hemsworth-just-apologized-for-old-costume-drama-on-his-own-terms-which-is-better-than-when-the-internet-forces-you-to-be-sorry), because in the context of his support for #NoDAPL, he remembered this and it bugged him. I guess this context didn’t help the joke (which is just another repetition of Maher’s usual “PC police” bullshit schtick he’s been running _since the fucking 90s_ with virtually no changes), so it got left by the wayside. I turned off the video around 3 minutes in, when he offered the kind of definition of “cultural appropriation” you’ll typically get from fucking /pol/ or /r/kotakuinaction, a stupid straw man created _entirely_ to mock the concept while showing absolutely no understanding of it whatsoever. That doesn’t even qualify as good satire, unless you’re satirizing the likelihood of stupid people to get the concept wrong, which that smug prick clearly wasn’t. At that point I saw no value whatsoever in continuing to listen to that fucking blowhard. None of his jokes are funny, his arguments are dishonest and ripped from context, and the line separating him from any other stupid alt-right troll is pretty fucking tiny. There’s a debate to be had about whether cultural appropriation is a useful concept or not. [Some actual fucking smart people with a shred of goddamn integrity are even actually having that debate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL4nHYFZoGs). Bill Maher is not one of those people. Bill Maher is maybe a step above Sargon of Akkad and The Amazing Atheist in terms of intellectual integrity and not being a fucking shitheel. He’s the Thunderf00t of prime time television, and if the fucker who keeps inviting people like Milo Yiannopolous, Ben Shapiro, and Dinesh D’Souza onto his show were to admit tomorrow that he was no longer a democrat, _nothing of value would be lost_. He’s not insightful. He’s not funny. He’s not even fucking _honest_. Bill Maher is a fucking tool. > [@](#): > > Maher makes a key practical point when he reminds us that most Americans agree with Democrats on the important issues, but are turned off by the increasingly pathetic “lack of balls.” Is the 2018 rallying call for Democrats to be: > \*We don’t care if we lose the elections; we just want to force Trevor Noah to self-flagellate on TV. > \* Y’know, if that’s his main concern, I have a suggestion for him. Don’t take out-of-context examples that become significantly less bad once you realize _why_ people got upset about them and parade them in front of your audience. Don’t imply that there’s a hate mob after Chris Hemsworth when the reality is, he just had a moment of conscience. _Stop inventing and perpetuating the PR problem you see the democrats having._ He’s doing the exact opposite of helping. In reality, I have no idea if what you say about the “lack of balls” is true. I know that it’s a convenient scapegoat. But I also know that if we don’t call shit like this out, any argument that maybe the president shouldn’t be a gigantic fucking bigot sounds like liberal hypocrisy. Turns out the high road is narrow, _who knew_. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 8:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/117 "2018-07-28T08:39:26Z")
Thank you for putting Bill Maher’s complaints in context **Budget Player Cadet**. Clearly he was resorting to severe exaggeration, nuch worse than I expected. I still think his underlying point is one that progressives should focus on. \*We don’t care if we lose the elections; we just want to force Trevor Noah to self-flagellate on TV.\*On a badness scale of 1 to 10, where Trevor Noahs’ joke and failure to apologize is, say, 8, where should we rank the crimes and depredations of this Trump Administration? Is diverting media attention to Noah’s joke the best way forward out of our most urgent predicament? ---
**Author:** ![Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/budget_player_cadet/32/205_2.png) [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Budget_Player_Cadet)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 10:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/118 "2018-07-28T10:22:51Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > Thank you for putting Bill Maher’s complaints in context **Budget Player Cadet**. Clearly he was resorting to severe exaggeration, nuch worse than I expected. > > I still think his underlying point is one that progressives should focus on. > \*We don’t care if we lose the elections; we just want to force Trevor Noah to self-flagellate on TV.\*On a badness scale of 1 to 10, where Trevor Noahs’ joke and failure to apologize is, say, 8, where should we rank the crimes and depredations of this Trump Administration? Is diverting media attention to Noah’s joke the best way forward out of our most urgent predicament? Nobody is putting it at an 8. :rolleyes: We’re trying to hold our own side to the standard that _justifies_ considering our side better than the other side. This might be a 2 or a 3, but it’s still not great. But you do realize we can care about multiple things at once, right? This is a tempest in a teapot that Maher is _explicitly drawing attention to_ - if he didn’t, his complaints would be substantially less valid. Seems a bit self-defeating on his part. One person “diverting media attention” here is _Bill Maher_. The main point is this - is it okay to make racist jokes? I don’t think so, and I think the left has been pretty consistent on this. But that means it’s not okay to make racist jokes _regardless of your political affiliation_. Roseanne Barr’s comments wouldn’t suddenly become okay if she was a liberal. Anything else, and we’re being inconsistent/hypocritical. So obviously this isn’t our election strategy (duh), but we can’t act like we care about racism if we don’t actually care about racism. Should we stop caring about racism? That seems shitty on a lot of levels. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/119 "2018-07-28T13:18:36Z")
> [@Gary\_Kumquat](#): > > So predictably Roseanne on Hannity did her faux apology, in particular saying "“I wish I worded it better.” > > So, all she needs to do now is state she’d never use that particular joke again, point out it’s in the past, and she’s golden, right? Maybe thank someone for educating her on the topic, just for good measure? Except that Mrs. Barr’s “joke” was actually just a personal attack on some lady, while Mr. Noah’s joke was a joke about stereotypes and not giving them much credence. Is it really that hard to discern that difference between the two remarks? Hate doesn’t get excused because a person says “haha just kidding”. ---
**Author:** ![Not\_Carlson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/bc79bd/32.png) [@Not\_Carlson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Not_Carlson)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2018, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650/120 "2018-07-28T13:46:04Z")
> [@Sunny\_Daze](#): > > I can call the guy an asshole AND fight Nazis. For that matter, \*\*as far as I’m concerned, he’s a perfect representation of society’s ills. He’s a racist, misogynistic fucktard, who works and plays well with all of the other fucktards \*\*who think that “other” people are ugly, and that women only have value as sex toys. He sure said a lot in one little joke. He said even more when he wouldn’t retract it. > > Am I calling for him to lose his job? No. I do think the host of a politically liberal talk show should apologize for this one. Walk the walk if you’re going to talk the talk. (Bolding mine.) I’m curious. Is this based also on other things that Noah has done and said, or just based on his dreadful aborigine joke and non-apology? Has he pinged your radar before? I think his joke was racist and misogynistic and his response to the criticism was tone-deaf. But I’ve also heard him make some very thoughtful and positive remarks about issues on race and gender, so I’m not willing to call him an outright racist or sexist over this one regrettable incident. He may very well be a racist, misogynistic piece of shit, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough evidence to reach that conclusion yet. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trevor-noah/818650.md?page=7)