Did Jon Stewart hire Trevor Noah to replace himself as host of “The Daily Show” because they both identify as male persons with two first-names?
That’s as good a question as any
to start plumbing this mystery inside an enigma wrapped in a riddle within the general “WTF?” that is the Noah hire.
Of course, it became all the more incomprehensible once the
news was announced and journalists started digging into this little-known South African stand-up comic’s digital footprint. The result was an excavation of tweets that go back to as long ago as 2009, (and Twitter years are like dog years.) And unfortunately,
copious amounts of mummified droppings were brought into the light of day.
Sexist? Yup. (To put a finer point of it, Noah seems to be a rabid anti-fatass-ist.) Anti-Semitic? Certainly. Who
jokes about running Jews over with German cars? Yikes. Racist? Indubitably, although he cops to learning all he knows about African-Americans from Blaxploitation movies.
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Mostly, though, the
content of the tweets just seemed hacky, dated, and incredibly lame. Even if the guy has over two million Twitter followers.
It put me in mind of Lena Dunham’s execrable piece last week, posted on the New Yorker site, “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend?,” which elicited similar
outrage on the Interwebs. Borscht-belty, (circa Jackie Mason or Shecky Greene) and stupid, this piece of “comedy” was way beneath the usual standards of Dunham and The New
Yorker.
In the cases of both Dunham and Noah, I was hoping that this barrage of hoary old jokes from the young’uns was an attempt at satirizing the stereotypes, rather than
perpetuating them. But in each case, the jokes were not quite clever enough to be that meta.
The son of a black South-African mother and a white Swiss-German father, Noah was a sometime soap
star in South Africa. And though he’s devastatingly cute (and I am a sucker for a guy who knows many languages and does great accents, as he does), his three appearances on “The Daily
Show” actually seemed at odds with the flow of the program.
Thus an outsider, who is an essential blank on these shores except for some really stupid tweets and some problematic
appearances on the show, was hired by the brilliant, hugely focused and meticulous Jon Stewart? And for this Comedy Central passed over all female contenders?
I don’t think Stewart wants
to burn down the “Daily Show” house; in fact, I would bet he still has a financial stake in it. And though I can’t prove it, I have heard from sources that before Trevor Noah got the
spot, the job was offered to Chris Rock, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Amy Schumer. All turned it down.
The offers to the Amys and the Tina deflates the theory that late night is a bastion of
Jimmies that will never open its stunted doors to girls with cooties. But perhaps the brass could have worked harder to find a woman -- Aisha Tyler, anyone?
Still, it’s not surprising
that none of the established names wanted the job. Perhaps money was an issue. But even bigger, Stewart is a really hard act to follow. And bringing someone else's well-known persona to such an
established brand could backfire big-time.
Lots of comics make offensive and lame jokes -- even the now-sainted and dearly departed Joan Rivers. It’s just that when Noah, a complete
stranger, attempts to trample the same ground, it’s more annoying. The truth is that some of his stand-up is searingly brilliant. He is a classic outsider, and like Obama (who has a black father
and white mother), Noah was never at home anywhere. “I was born a crime,” he says, in talking about his early life in apartheid Soweto, where his father could not be seen with him, and his
mother was arrested for being with a white man. She would have to let go of her little boy’s hand on the street if a policeman looked at her. “We weren’t supposed to exist as a
family,” he said. “I felt like a bag of weed.”
That’s a pretty profound starting place for a comic.
It’s disappointing that Noah won’t be able to
cover the upcoming presidential election with the devastating knowingness that Stewart would have brought to the show. But I don’t want to fire the guy before he starts. I’m ready for him
to unbury himself. Perhaps we can learn a lot from being uncomfortable.