by Dominic Maxwell, who recently gave much less enthusiastic reviews to Russell Brand, Olga Koch, and Simon Amstell
How good is Trevor Noah? I’ll tell you. After well over an hour of queueing to get into this Greenwich enormodome via airport-style security checks, I texted a friend to say that if this didn’t turn out to be the greatest stand-up show of the year I’d have wasted my evening. Ninety minutes later I texted again. “Evening not wasted. Face sore from laughing.” Noah, the 37-year-old South African host of American satire programme The Daily Show, will take this tour to the US next. Yet while his material about masks and Zoom and sci-fi film tropes will play anywhere, he here added in UK-only material (the Euros final! Scousers! Punting in Cambridge!) that showed off his prodigious gift for accents and for seeing the big picture while making small details deliciously vivid. And somehow he kept dancing between the daffy and the dark, the trivial and the epochal. The son of a Xhosa mother and Swiss-German father, Noah can cut through racial and national stereotypes and preconceptions with accuracy and vim. He was ironic yet acidic, cordial yet acute as he argued that Britain gets more stick for colonialism than other European nations simply because it lacks the sort of interesting cuisine that might compensate for its sins. He suggested that the US was built on a spite towards the English that has curdled into a spite towards other Americans. Written down, some of his topics could be considered hackneyed: the French are haughty; white people love swimming but can’t dance. Yet every time, he found something of his own to add. “Black people are dancing to the beat,” he said. “White people are dancing to the lyrics.” And he always made it look casual as he padded around the stage in combat trousers and a hooded top, delighting a diverse audience of 20,000. He is a virtuoso, an artist who conceals the art. He’s the new gold standard of stand-up. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CABCcf4dYOrmU5WMdWxJmSPuZR%3DT76AhUTzYP2GFD2H-JohDQLw%40mail.gmail.com.
