Five years into helming ‘The Daily Show,’ Trevor Noah has answered his early doubters with relentlessly upbeat comedy that doesn’t pull punches—about the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. struggles with racism or a social contract in need of repair
Trevor Noah is telling a story about race in America. Not about George Floyd or Philando Castile or Sandra Bland, and not in front of a TV audience of millions. It’s a personal story, and Noah, a shameless insomniac, is revved up, having been awake for several hours scrolling Twitter , chatting with his South African brain trust on WhatsApp, jotting notes for an episode of The Daily Show (currently known as The Daily Social Distancing Show) airing on Comedy Central that evening. Although the world has witnessed the late-night host morph during the pandemic, from a tailored-suit-wearing preppy intellectual to an Afro-wearing, hoodied intellectual, Noah is comfortably nondescript this morning, sporting a black T-shirt and jeans as he recounts a brush with the police a few years back.
“When I got to the States, I was pulled over by cops incessantly,” he says from his New York City apartment via Zoom, on a weekday morning in July. “I thought nothing of it, because I come from a country where the cops pull everyone over a lot.” He goes on to say that a buddy named David, a white guy, thought Trevor’s stories of constant racial profiling seemed a bit overblown. “Man, you’ve been pulled over more times in six months than I have in my whole life,” David joked.
Back then, Noah drove a Range Rover, and one day David was his passenger as they were driving in Pasadena. “A cop car was driving behind us,” Noah recalls. “And I said to David, ‘Oh, we’re about to get pulled over.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean, how do you know?’ I said, ‘I see how they’re driving. They’re going to pull us over.’ And he was like, ‘Dude, I think you’re being paranoid.’
WSJ
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