Trevor Noah

Only occasionally did the host, whose last episode aired on Thursday, fully deliver on the initial promise of using his outsider's gaze to satirize America.

[Roy Wood, Jr.](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-intimate-laughs-of-instagram-live-standup-comedy)—a Noah hire and the correspondent with the most multifaceted talent and appeal.) Whoever ultimately gets the job won’t have shoes as big to fill as Noah did [when Stewart left](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/exit-stage-left), but the task is formidable nonetheless. (He speaks seven languages, and in “Afraid of the Dark,” his Netflix début, he runs through at least ten accents.) Noah seemed to reserve his unguarded moments for online-only “Between the Scenes” clips, in which he spoke off the cuff about personal experiences and took questions from the studio audience on the debates of the day. As a viewer who has tuned in to the vast majority of his episodes, owing to the fact that the “The Daily Show” has been a fixture pretty much all of my adult life, I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. (That might be the main reason, aside from the finitude of days in a week, that his fellow-hosts appear not to have simultaneously pursued brand-honing standup careers.) Stewart treated “The Daily Show” like a calling; Noah just seemed like he was there to do a job. But because Noah’s biography has come to comprise a greater part of his public persona than those of his peers, and because we’ve encountered distillations of his comedic voice through his specials, the gap between what he offered on “The Daily Show” and what he’s capable of was ever distracting. Meanwhile, “The Daily Show” ’s tropes—sitting behind a desk, flitting through the day’s headlines—provided only a fitful showcase for Noah’s most exceptional gifts as a comedian, such as his physicality and his extraordinary ear for accents and impressions. Only occasionally did he fully deliver on that initial promise of using his outsider’s gaze to illuminate (or more sharply satirize) America, as when he compared Trump, in a celebrated early [viral hit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPrJxTvgdQ), to an African dictator. His “fake news,” as the program once billed itself, before Trump’s appropriation of the phrase, was delivered by a fake newsman with no need for the pretense of a view-from-nowhere objectivity. Among Stewart’s many innovations on “The Daily Show” was his unabashed willingness to be himself, or at least a version of himself. In contrast, Noah’s tenure, which [encompassed the Trump Administration](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/trevor-noahs-crash-course-in-surviving-an-american-election) and the pandemic quarantine years, often gave the sense of complacency, with a host who seemed much smarter than the material he doled out. [took over as host](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/sarah-larson/trevor-noahs-daily-show-debut) of “The Daily Show” the following year, fleshed out his stage persona as that of a boundlessly curious globe-trotter. Noah, who already enjoyed a large following outside of the U.S., wielded his origins to critique Western assumptions about his native continent (that it’s “one giant village full of AIDS, huts, and starving children”) and to deflate American exceptionalism.