Noah is a post-Apartheid comic who specializes in mining material from melancholic episodes of his own harsh upbringing. His mother, Patricia, is a Xhosa-speaking black woman from Soweto township who fell in love with a white man from Switzerland in the early 1980s, a period when cross-racial romance was still illegal. Noah was born an outsider’s outsider—a light-colored boy in a black community who had to learn to cross multiple lines of difference, including language, color, and culture. Noah put it to a documentary filmmaker this way: “I’ve lived a life where I’ve never really fitted in in any particular way. Even now, people still debate on what I am. People say, ‘Oh you’re black,’ And then someone will turn around and say, ‘But he’s not black, he’s coloured.’ And then coloured people will say, ‘But you’re not coloured.’ And then when you get older it’s cool because you’ve lived everywhere and nowhere, and you’ve been everyone and no one, and so you can say everything and nothing and that’s really what affects my comedy and everything I say.” Perhaps his greatest strength as a comedian is his ability to serve as a translator across all these intersecting lines. In a polyglot world, he’s made it his trademark to explain ourselves to one another.

In the days since Noah’s appointment, on the airwaves and online, in casual conversations around Johannesburg and Cape Town, reactions have run the gamut from brimming pride to utter surprise, which turned to apprehension as the media in the United States and elsewhere latched onto some of Noah’s past portrayals of African Americans and seemingly anti-Semitic, sexist, and otherwise offensive tweets.

The uproar over Noah’s comments has been perplexing for South African comics steeped in the country’s often sharp, scatological, and confrontational brand of humor—particularly since Noah’s style is milder than that of many of his contemporaries. “The controversy just seems ridiculous from our vantage point,” said Kagiso Lediga, a veteran comedian from Johannesburg. Noah has “always been the most clean, polite comic on stage. He’s the one you’d take your mom to watch. He didn’t use obscenities, and never used racist or sexist material in his act. Trevor was our cuddly guy.”

Lediga grew up in the battle-scarred 1970s and belongs to a circle of mostly black comics who are edgier and more aggressive than Noah. He co-produces a popular Daily Show-esque program in South Africa with Loyiso Gola, whose known for taking the stage with brash authority, promptly dropping f-bombs, and regularly challenging the prejudices of his fans.

Noah’s signature, in contrast, is to sheath his barbs and cushion the blow of his most difficult material with slow pitches, wide smiles, and shy shrugs. He delivers his lines in proper English (though he riffs on the six languages he speaks fluently), and dresses in stylish suits and impeccably polished black shoes. He isn’t interested in blustery displays of machismo, or targeting audience members for insults and send-ups. Even his talent for mimicry is usually deployed for inoffensive purposes like invoking the voice of Mandela in a tender way (exceptions include his portrayal of privileged, witless, white American women and his devastating portrayal of South Africa President Jacob Zuma). In other words, Noah is a Boy Scout among lovable scoundrels. That might explain why his comedy has translated so well in Europe and the United States.