This post is not particularly timely but I feel my memory isn't getting any sharper and I should get some stories out while I can. My girlfriend recently read Born a Crime for her book club and it reminded me of the two memorable times I saw Trevor Noah live. Longtime readers might remember I shared my excitement way back when he was announced as the Daily Show host in 2015.
The first story takes me back to November 10, 2016. I wouldn’t normally recall the exact date of a comedy show almost a decade later, but as you'll see, this date was easy to look up. I was in Boston and it was Inbound, Hubspot's sprawling week-long conference. Hubspot in 2016 was the local tech startup selling software to marketers, growing like wildfire at the time, and tossing tech investor capital around like syrup on pancakes. This conference was not calibrated for return on investment. Renting out the entire Boston Convention and Exhibition Centre, they had a full on A-list cast including Alec Baldwin, Anna Kendrick, Serena Williams, Michael Strahan, Michelle Obama, John Cena and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The event planners must have been given the prompt "Indoors Coachella for marketers." The grand finale was a comedy showcase headlined by Sarah Silverman with Ali Wong as opener.
But this team of marketers hadn't fully thought through every aspect of that week in November. I began my Tuesday evening at the convention floor, sipping a beer as the early returns had Hilary Clinton leading in Georgia. I ended that evening among a sobbing crowd at the Phoenix Landing as Donald Trump won Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and the Presidential election. The next morning, commuting to work on a couple hours of sleep, I observed on the T that half of Boston looked like they'd been dumped.
Sarah Silverman had been an ardent Clinton booster after Sanders conceded, even giving a speech at the 2016 DNC. On Thursday morning, she called in sick. She was understandably not in the headspace to do her comedy routine in front of a convention full of money people while dealing with the apocalyptic election shock. The Hubspot event team must have scrambled like fighter jets during a surprise invasion and somehow they booked Trevor Noah that same day. The logistics of the day are mind-bogglingly impressive.
My recollection and understanding is that this comedy finale was supposed to start at 6:30pm. The Daily Show was Monday-Thursday, with taping from 4:30 to 6pm. Trevor must have done the Daily Show that day and then immediately zapped to a private jet to fly to Boston.
They delayed the opening til 7pm. Ali Wong was slated to open and do a half hour of material. In an extraordinary effort, se managed to pull out extra material and keep the crowd engaged for a full hour. This was post-Baby Cobra and her humor revolved around parenting, particularly child birthing - I distinctly remember a long bit about what that did to her vagina. She was good, she got the whole place was rolling with some great timing on crude punchlines, but nothing was topical. She wrapped up to thundering applause at 8pm.
The next 20 minutes were awkward. I don't recall anyone making any announcement with any explanations, just an auditorium of businesspeople anxiously fidgeting in their seats as we waited for Trevor Noah. Everyone must have thought, "is he really coming? Should I leave? How long does it take to get here from New York? Surely he isn't taking Amtrak?"
And then the bright lights came back on and he was there, and he just got into it. "Man, that just happened. Trump." While I can't recall the words he used or the jokes, I remember how I felt. There was some surface-level humor about how this unserious man was now in such a powerful position, but then some unique insights onto the American psyche, our position in the world and our perceived immunity from anything that would dislodge that position. It was nuanced, it was therapeutic and it was true. It showed the sharpness and the worldliness that had drawn me to him in the first place. He was not afraid to tackle the election that had just occurred, that none of us had processed yet, and he did it twice in the same night in two difference cities.
He followed up with another half hour of prepared material, some travel stories and accents that I had heard of before, including a bit about Indians coming to England because the colonists had told them about it, and an imagined conversation between European settlers meeting South Africans for the first time. It was a lighter way to close the show and the conference but it was similarly stellar.
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Almost 8 years later it's March 22, 2024 and I'm seeing Trevor Noah in Seattle. He's retired from the Daily Show and this is an ordinary show on an ordinary national tour. The theater is sold out and the warm up act is a local comedian, unlikely to be a future Emmy award winner.
Trevor opened about airplanes. While there was plenty of Seattle-specific references to Boeing - this is only two months after the door fell out of the plane - a lot of his bit was about the mundane experience of waiting in lines through security and boarding a plane. When he joked about sitting near the toilet and hearing everything, I seriously questioned when was the last time he sat in economy. He got excellent laughs because he's an excellent comic, but his material continued to revolve around basic shit. I realized his jet-setting travel stories must not have resonated with the American audience, and having been here for 8 years now, he knew he needed to dumb down his routine. While I enjoyed him as always, it definitely made me sad.
Then Trevor abruptly finished a bit and asked, "Ok, who has questions for me?" The audience stirred awkwardly - was this real Q&A or just an elaborate heckle trap? Someone yelled, "What is your favorite kind of chair?" Trevor blinked and responded, "That is one of the wildest questions any human being has ever asked me in my entire life!" A pretty zany question got a zany response.
"What do you think about the mayor of Seattle?" Perhaps even more unhinged. Here's a comedian from South Africa living in New York here in Seattle for a couple days and someone wants his take on City Hall. But Trevor, smooth as ever, riffed his way through it — admitting he had no clue about Seattle politics, but weaving it back to homelessness, leadership, and empathy. I can’t recall the details, but it somehow landed as thoughtful and profound instead of ridiculous. He was genuinely bringing a perspective that only he could bring.
Then suddenly in the middle of the Q&A, he goes, "Oh my, oh ok. There's a medical emergency here. Shine the light on that row. Ok, is there a doctor in the audience?" I was way up in the back and couldn't see much but evidently there was a commotion in the front rows. At Trevor's announcement, I could see many hands go up. "Oh wow, there are a ton of doctors in Seattle. We just need one, the rest of you can sit back down. Wow, this might be the best city to have a medical emergency." Even though we were in the throes of a confusing serious incident, that joke absolutely killed. Trevor calmly directed attention, kept the room under control, and injected humor without crossing the line. The person — a diabetic who needed insulin — was escorted out safely, and the show carried on. I recall Trevor talked about the incident for a few minutes more and probably had something else insightful to say. He added just enough additional banter to close the show naturally, not letting the medical scare leave the final impression. Even though the situation could have turned tragic, everyone left feeling warm and in high spirits.
At the risk of idolizing another human who is certainly as flawed as the rest of us, I have so much respect for how he handled these two emergencies - the election of Donald Trump and a hypoglycemic episode. He's a philosopher in an entertainer's career and I hope he's able to find his stride, hopefully in something internationally-themed.
