The first time I heard the name Trevor Noah, the press was making a big deal because he made some bad jokes about Jewish people, and that made him a bad candidate for replacing Jon Stewart as the host of the Daily Show. Unfortunately they didn’t find more dirt and Jon left anyway and I still had to get my news somewhere. So I kept watching even though Trevor Noah’s no Jon Stewart.
One day I saw his documentary on Netflix and decided to take a look. It was called You Laugh But It’s True, and it gave me a much better perspective of who Trevor Noah was as a person and a glimpse of what South Africa was like during apartheid. Fandom began.
Then the BF decided to surprise me with tickets to see him alive. I have to say, standup is his thing. Once he was out of the politics arena, he was even funnier. True fandom began.
Yesterday I finally finished reading his book, Born A Crime. It was a funny book, but I think it would have been better served to save the documentary title for the book. He is a great storyteller, and found humor in some of the darkest hours of his life, whether it was being locked up in the house or locked up in a jail cell, the time when he had to eat worms for a week or the times he got beaten by his stepfather.
I guess life is what it is, whether he chooses to laugh or cry, so he might as well laugh.
If before this I liked Trevor Noah, now I’ve come to respect him. Not for his comedic talent or his political insights, but for his strength and perseverance to achieve more than what life presumably promised him. For a guy who rarely has anything but a smile on his face, it was humbling to find out all the crap he had to deal with in his young life so far.
Life has not been harsh for me, and for that I’m grateful. I hope that if one day I feel like life is nothing but misery, I will remember this book, and remember to find things worth laughing about.
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