30 Quotes from Trevor Noah Daily Show

Trevor Noah is the most successful comedian in Africa and is the host of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning The Daily Show on Comedy Central. This year The Daily Show has been nominated for three Emmys, including Outstanding Variety Talk Series. Noah joined The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2014 as a contributor.

It was recently announced that Noah will debut his 9th new comedy special Afraid of the Dark on Tuesday, February 21 on Netflix. The special was shot before a packed house in New York City at the Beacon Theatre on November 5, 2016. Last year, Noah debuted his one-hour stand-up special, Trevor Noah: Lost in Translation, on Comedy Central. Noah was the subject of David Paul Meyer’s award-winning documentary film You Laugh But It’s True which tells the story of his remarkable career in post-apartheid South Africa. His Showtime comedy special, Trevor Noah: African American premiered in 2013. He was nominated for “Personality of the Year” at the 2014 and 2015 MTV Africa Music Awards and won the award in 2015. Trevor’s success has also spanned to sold-out shows over 5 continents.

Born in South Africa to a black South African mother and a white European father, Noah has hosted numerous television shows including South Africa’s music, television and film awards, and two seasons of his own late night talk show, Tonight with Trevor Noah.

Here are 30 Trevor Noah quotes

1. America was a thing I saw on TV – that wasn’t a real world. That wasn’t within my realm of dreaming. 
   
2. As an outsider myself, I always mixed myself with different groups…I’ve never been afraid to go into a different space and relate to those people, because I don’t have a place where I belong and that means I belong everywhere.
   
3. Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.
   
4. But the real world doesn’t go away. Racism exists. People are getting hurt. And just because it’s not happening to you, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. 
   
5. Comedy is a great tool. We are trying to find ways to use humor to enlighten people without preaching to them.
   
6. Don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.
   
7. Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling.
   
8. I don’t think I have thick skin, but I heal fast. It’s easy to break through, but I heal fast.
   
9. I like the anonymity, the fact that you’re a stranger making strangers laugh. You aren’t forcing them to laugh – it’s involuntary, and that’s when they give the most honest response. 
   
10. I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother’s a black woman, South African Xhosa woman… and my father’s Swiss, from Switzerland.
    
11. I’m literally driving in the middle of the night, and my phone rings and my manager says, ‘How would you like to be the host of the Daily Show?’ I get out of the car, and I didn’t have legs. Do you know in those movies where there’s an explosion? But instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear the silence. That’s literally what happened.
    
12. I’m not an abrasive person. I do speak my mind, but my goal is never to offend. I don’t intentionally want to strike a chord.
    
13. I’ve always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I’ve loved playing with it. People act as though it isn’t an issue, but it’s a recurring theme in our lives globally.
    
14. If this comedy thing doesn’t work out, I’ve always got poverty to fall back on.
    
15. If you laugh with somebody, then you share something.
    
16. Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.
    
17. Love, unfortunately, sometimes gives you the ability to forgive somebody and blind yourself to the truth.
    
18. Often, people who can do, don’t because they’re afraid of what people that can’t do will say about them doing.
    
19. Progression, in my opinion, is often identifying shortcomings – whether it’s views or the things you’re doing in your life, your relationships – and trying to find the places where you improve on those.
    
20. That awkward moment when you are sitting next to people who gossip too much that you are even scared of leaving them cause you know that you are next.
    
21. The first purpose of comedy is to make people laugh. Anything deeper is a bonus. Some comedians want to make people laugh and make them think about socially relevant issues, but comedy, by the very nature of the word, is to make people laugh. If people aren’t laughing, it’s not a comedy. It’s as simple as that.
    
22. The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.
    
23. The truth is, people, don’t know me. When people don’t know you, they’re going to try to get to know you as quickly as possible, because you’re now taking the place of somebody that they love dearly, or somebody that they hate sincerely, and so they need to know who you are.
    
24. We get angry about the small things sometimes, I feel so that we feel like we’re doing something so that we don’t have to tackle the big things. And it’s fine; let people do that. But I’m not gonna now change because of that. Do you know? Like, the worst thing that happens to me is you don’t like me. And then what?
    
25. We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don’t live with them. 
    
26. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. 
    
27. When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that you’re in. Through a comedic voice, you’re talking about what needs to be talked about, whether it’s race relations or politics or anything that’s happening on a global or an American scale. 
    
28. You have to work a bit harder to offend me because I’m from the home of some of the best racism in the world. I’m a snob when it comes to racism.
    
29. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that’s not how people are.
    
30. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s okay. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it’s time to get up to some s**t again.

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