Under Trevor, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” has broken free from the restraints of a 30-minute linear show, producing engaging social content, award-winning digital series, podcasts and more for its global audience. It is a moment of solace.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. We have moments of pain, we have moments where we're afraid, but laughter is always the thing that can bring us back to the place we wish we were always in. "That's life, isn't it? I feel like that's exactly what life is. On how the book's stories mix danger, pain and laughter The police out there are not gonna be your friend.' And that was a motto that many South African mothers have, many black mothers have."
My mom was very harsh on me, and she always used to say, she'd say, 'I would rather that you hate me, I would rather be the person who disciplines you, because I discipline you with love. "She was a person who constantly believed in existing beyond the threshold of where people told her she belonged. And yet when the country changed, all of a sudden there was a skills shortage, and my mother was able to take advantage of that. She experienced the lowest trenches of poverty, and she worked very hard to raise herself up out of that place, through a combination of hard work, determination and luck, or she would call it 'blessings.' She learned to read and write at a mission school, my mother decided to go into jobs and to get training that really no person could use, because of the jobs that black people weren't allowed into. "My mother was an amazing woman, someone who did not live an easy life at all. "We have moments of pain, we have moments where we're afraid, but laughter is always the thing that can bring us back to the place we wish we were always in." Trevor Noah I grew up in a country where there were white people who would be demoted by the government based on the fact that their whiteness had changed, whether people's hair become too curly or their skin became too tanned - it was an insane system. The government would have called me colored, I would've been deemed colored on my birth certificate, were it not for the fact that my mother lied about who my father was and where I was from. "I grew up as black, you know? The country, or the government itself, would have classified me as colored, because everyone was classified.
On how he was classified by the South African government And for all intents and purposes, colored people have become a culture unto themselves in South Africa." And so now you have to make rules about what constitutes black and white, and 'colored' was a strange decision that the government came up with where they realized this population was growing, which meant people were clearly breaking these laws - did you add them to the majority you were trying to oppress? Or did you designate an entirely different race? And that's what the government did. "Basically in South Africa, the apartheid laws were very specific in the separation of races, and even amongst black people, you would be designated a certain tribal group that you were forced to live with. On apartheid-era South Africa's racial designations Interview Highlights The cover of "Born a Crime," by Trevor Noah. Excerpted by permission of Random House, A Penguin Random House Company. Excerpted from BORN A CRIME by Trevor Noah.