Trevor Noah is in the latest issue of Playboy that hits newsstands Friday.
Since there are no longer naked women in the mag, don’t expect anything too sexy from Noah. He keeps his shirt on and there are no dick shots. But writer David Hochman does get a lot out of him and the piece is more entertaining than one might expect.
The comedian no one really watches — hey, it’s not easy replacing Jon Stewart — discusses life as host of The Daily Show. He also shares his views on the “wild election season,”as well as “life in America and growing up in South Africa” and “why people should give Justin Bieber a break.”
Like many comedians, Noah has endured hard shit in his life, including a stepfather who threatened to kill him and growing up in an all-white neighborhood. He has a book coming out in the fall.
“In the book I write about growing up in an abusive household, in a house where myself and my mom were held hostage by an alcoholic stepfather,” he said. “My mom was shot in the head. That’s not exactly the stuff of comedy gold. But even in the darkest, darkest moments, we found things to laugh about. To have your mom come out of surgery with a hole in her face and the first thing she says when she wakes up is ‘Stop crying. Look on the bright side. At least now you’re officially the best-looking person in the family.’ I mean, who says that? But that’s the family I grew up in. We always found some silly way to get rid of the pain.”
Noah gets sort of deep about filling Stewart’s big shoes.
“The biggest thing I had to learn very early on with The Daily Show was that I couldn’t be the anger for people,” he said. “I had to find an audience in the same place that I was in. I had to find the things that interested me and the things I found funny and had to believe and still have to believe that there are enough people like me who will experience the world the way I experience it.”
His thoughts, much like his show, are only moderately funny.
Some highlights from the interview:
Maybe Donald Trump will blow himself up: “I have no clue. I don’t think anybody has a clue. So many truly bizarre things have happened already. Donald Trump, presuming he continues, is so divisive and so explosive that he can go all the way or else blow himself up. The enthusiasm against him is as powerful as the enthusiasm in his favor. Assuming Hillary is the nominee, people are almost resigning themselves to the fact that she’s the one. With Trump and Hillary, it’s a really strange combination of terror on one hand and ambivalence on the other. And yet, wherever we are in the general election by November, people are going to have to say, ‘Well, you have to choose somebody.’ Fortunately, I can’t vote in this country, which helps a lot.”
On American politicians making dick jokes: “I don’t see it as comedy gold, because it’s gotten to the point where there’s too much comedy, and now it’s so ridiculous that it’s not funny all the time. When presidential candidates are making d**k jokes, what are comedians supposed to do? Maybe I’m not as shocked by it because I come from a country where that happened. It got to the point in South Africa where the politicians were making the jokes.”
Noah is enamored with Bill Clinton: “That would be interesting for everyone, because we’ve never seen anything like it. He’ll be the first gentleman. Maybe he’ll be giving tours of the White House and showing people around. Maybe he’ll be advising on policy. There are so many maybes, it’s impossible to know. What we do know is that he’s very smart, he’s very involved, he’s very informed and he loves talking to people. With Hillary in the Oval Office and Bill overseeing the Easter egg hunt in the Rose Garden or whatever, they could be quite the power couple.”
Don’t hate him because he’s famous: “The biggest thing I have learned in America is that it is expensive to be famous here. You have to pay for things. You have to pay for bodyguards. You have to pay for a driver. You have to pay for a publicist. You have to pay for a stylist. I never used to understand the stress around those things. I never experienced that, and I still try to not experience it. I tell people, ‘I have a stylist at the show, but if I go to events, a lot of the time I dress myself.’ I’d rather give the money to starving children. So if you see me dressed really trashy somewhere, know that some kid somewhere got a meal.”
Read the full interview here.