printWhat I mean by describing The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah as an Anglo-American South African will be understood by South Africans like my friend, Dan Roodt, who knows and values the South African culture that was in all its facets.
Except for a residual accent Noah has clearly worked to lose, there is nothing South African about this guy. Or maybe this is the face of the new South Africa?
The young, photogenic Noah clearly spent his formative years watching American TV and striving to clone those he was watching. To us older South Africans who remember the unique humor of our country’s people, it’s sad.
To hone a sense of humor, the guy should have been seeking out old tapes of the Bangers and Boerewors skits (so old; there is no trace of them on the WWW). I’d take a few Van der Merwe jokes, too; those are so part of our culture (the year 1661 is when “Willem Schalk Van der Merwe set foot on the shores of Table Bay”).
One of my favorite Van der Merwe jokes:
Van der Merwe is working as a server or waiter. His English customer asks if he serves wild duck.
Van der Merwe replies: Duck is not wild, but I can make him “stroppy” for you.
“Stroppy” in the local lingo means unruly, hard to deal with, badly disposed.
I no longer watch TDS, but from the jokes Noah is reported to have told—the guys is so unfunny, it’s hard to see how he’ll last.
Another unfunny foreigner introduced by The Daily Show is Englishman John Oliver. Bloody awful. No wonder Oliver left a country known for its acerbic humor, Britain, to come here. He had no future as a funny man back home.