Daily Measure

Review: Trevor Noah - The Racist

Review: Trevor Noah - The Racist

15 August, 2012
by: Stevie

"A thoughtful, tight, debut hour," says Stevie Martin.

Trevor Noah comes at race with a fresh perspective; growing up during the apartheid in South Africa with a black mother and a white father, he has the sort of life experience that writes itself. 

Luckily, he's also a pretty impressive performer with a knack for storytelling and an impressively accomplished debut hour. The narrative throughline is his journey to determine his race – Noah has been mistaken for a Mexican and a Spaniard, while never quite fitting in with either the black or white community in his home country, thanks to his mixed race ethnicity and the surprising attitudes towards this while he was younger. 

While gently charting his journey to America to "become black", he hits upon the golden formula of observational comedy; he has something new to say, and even when commenting on more run-of-the-mill topics, he comes at it in a way you wouldn't expect. It's not preachy and neither does he complain about his lack of identity – which would be all too easy considering the subject matter – separating him from others dealing with similar issues.

Sure, have a rant about your lack of racial identity, have a dig at racists while you're at it; Noah does neither. Instead, he's impressed and interested by the world he's grown up in. A routine about black Americans could be tired stereotyping, but is saved, again, by the different angle from which he approaches it. Race has been talked about to death in stand-up, but you won't find any lazy overdone cliché here. 

Seemingly predictable routines spiral off into new directions at the last moment, and the comments he makes on his personal discovery are neither over-sentimental nor underdone, but genuinely poignant and thought-provoking. If you're mixed race, you can be as black as you like, but you can't go whiter. Again, he doesn't complain or rant, but approaches it with interest and gentle acknowledgement of the absurdity. In fact, his delivery style is just as gentle and soft, but all the time wickedly liable to switch while impersonating, for example, a loud, nasal American girl with surprising accuracy. 

Occasionally a gag won't land, describing his father's bizarre approach to comedy could be mined for further laughs, and there are a few routines that don't sparkle as much as the rest; but these are few and far between. Overall this is a thoughtful, tight, debut hour from a comic who, if he's not nominated come next week, is certainly one to watch out for in the future.

Stevie Martin 

Trevor Noah - The Racist is at the Soho Theatre  at 7:30pm until Saturday 12th January 

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