Our favorite movies and music we can go back to whenever we want to find comfort, solace or escape. Comedians do that for us, too, in the here and now – although comedy, unlike other performing arts, doesn’t always hold up the same over time. Some jokes reference fleeting fads that make little sense decades later. Some work once or twice but lose their impact upon repeated listening. Some pushed envelopes then, but don’t seem so edgy or revolutionary now that everyone else does it; while others feel outdated or behind the times of current society. With that in mind, we bring you Humor In Hindsight, an ongoing column devoted to stand-up specials and comedy documentaries streaming online that, much like wine or cheese, give us more texture and better perspective with age.

For all of the hot takes written about Trevor Noah’s old Twitter feed when he landed the Daily Show hosting gig two years ago, for all of the 140-character jokes to parse, none of that compares to the 5,000 seconds devoted to discovering the South African as a “fledgling funnyman” in the 2011 documentary, You Laugh But It’s True.

Noah just turned 33 on Feb. 20. He was only 31 when he replaced Stewart; it’s important for everyone in the TV criticism game to remember that Stewart himself was just launching his own self-titled talk show for MTV at that age. It’s also worth noting that critics and NBC executives alike were eviscerating Conan O’Brien at age 31, too, when he was hosting Late Night.

Directed and produced by David Paul Meyer (now a producer on Noah’s TDS), and with Anthony Anderson (black-ish) as one of the executive producers, You Laugh But It’s True (streaming on Netflix, and also on Vimeo On Demand) captures Noah at the tender age of 25, when he’d only done stand-up for two years yet felt ambitious and determined enough to mount his first headlining one-man show in Johannesburg.

The documentary opens, symbolically, with Noah working out in a boxing gym. Out of the ring, he sits, facing the camera:

“Well, I’ve lived a life where I’ve never really fitted in anywhere in any particular way. Even now, people still debate on what I am. People will say, oh you’re black! And then someone will turn around and say, no, but he’s not black. He’s not black, he’s colored. And then colored people will say, but you’re not colored. And then when you get older, it’s cool, because you’ve just, you’ve lived everywhere and nowhere. You’ve been everyone and no one. So you can say everything and nothing. And that’s really what affects my comedy, and everything that I say. And if ever, this comedy thing doesn’t work out, then I’ve got poverty to fall back on. And I’m pretty sure I’ll be cool there.”

Let’s pause for a moment to review the realities of his situation.

Under Apartheid, South Africa not only segregated races into separate townships and cities, but also defined “coloured” as a uniquely official designation to describe multiracial citizens. Marriage and sexual relations between races was forbidden, too – hence, Noah’s title for his memoirs and one of his shows, “Born a Crime.” Noah grew up under Apartheid and was 10 when the nation held its first multiracial elections (which elevated Nelson Mandela to president).

So the very idea of a black or coloured person speaking and joking freely and truly still felt foreign, new and dangerous throughout the country. South Africa only had a white comedy tradition to speak of, and Americans haven’t heard of any of them. Kagiso Lediga, six years older than Noah, helped audiences become familiar there with black comedians.

Noah not only came up younger and hungrier for the big-time, but also now carrying the advantages as biracial and speaking several languages: Sotho, Afrikaans, Zulu, German, Tsonga, Xhosa and English. “For the South African public, that guy becomes like the everyman,” Lediga observed. “You know, he’s not black, he’s not white. He’s just whoa, he’s mine, he’s everybody’s.”

As someone just starting out in stand-up, Noah’s working whatever gigs he can get, and we see him suffer through the indignities of a Microsoft Windows log-on screen shining on and past his face on a projector screen while he works a corporate function, then onstage at a concert when the musicians begin tuning their instruments as he’s telling a joke. He’s paying his dues, as it were, and he’s aware of that.

“I don’t even know myself yet fully,” the 25-year-old tells us. “I think I’m very fave from even calling myself a good comedian. I’m just OK for now.”

And yet. At that same time, he’s got a billboard with his face on it, advertising his first show in a 1,100-seat theater. The nerve of this guy, right?

Cue Mel Miller, who became famous on South African TV in the 1970s: “That’s the problem with young comedians. They haven’t learned the art of comedy. It took me 20 years to get a star. They’re trying to get it in like a year and a half, two years. It doesn’t work.” That’s experience talking, but also white South African privilege, and also an elder statesman in comedy who could be saying the same thing in America. The times, they have changed with the technology.

More appropriate, perhaps, Noah’s own manager at the time, Takunda Bimha weighed in with his perspective: “Ordinarily, I would not recommend for a comedian to do a one-man show at this stage of his career. Normally like a year or two years in, yes you might be a funny guy, whatever, but are you strong enough a comedian now to like let your opinions on the world go out there and be assessed and analyzed?”

If Barack Obama believed in the audacity of hope to become America’s first biracial president, then why not Noah believe in his own audacity of ambition and self-confidence to propel himself to greater comedy heights? It’s easy for us here in 2017 to see how well it worked out for Noah, but it’d be even easier if we learned (as the documentary doesn’t reveal) that Noah already benefited from an extra head-start as a teenager when he appeared on a South African soap opera. Rather, Noah tells us he briefly worked as a taxi driver at 22 before a hijacking incident helped convince him to change careers and pursue comedy.

Is he ready for the big time at 25, though? Plenty of his peers weren’t so certain. “The arrogance that this man shows is ridiculous. There’s a thin line between self-confidence and arrogance,” Miller said. David Newton added: “It’s hard to say anything about Trevor he hasn’t already said about himself.” David Kibuuka, whom Noah since has hired to write for his Daily Show, offered then: “People hate on Trevor…but there is a need for Trevor, to open it up for everybody.”

Noah himself shrugged most of the criticism off, although he did give props to one of his contemporaries, Loyiso Gola (who released his first American-based special on Vimeo last year, Live In New York), calling Gola “the guy” who speaks out more on the more important issues. And Gola fires zingers back at the older white comedians who chastise him and Noah as too young to tell Apartheid jokes, noting that’s like telling Jews to get over the Holocaust.

In both 2009 and 2017, Noah told jokes about how presidents have ruled with varying degrees of success, playing on a theme of whites joking about leaving the country (in South Africa, for Mandela or Jacob Zuma; in America, for Trump). Noah’s Swiss father stopped being any part of his life for years, but as his South African mother, Patricia, tells us, she wanted to give birth to Trevor, “no strings attached.” “He didn’t like it, but he did it,” she says of Noah’s father. “Marriage was not in my agenda, because in those days it was illegal for black and white to cross color and be married.” And when Trevor takes the camera crew to Soweto to visit his grandmother and his childhood home, we learn that even in 2009, his grandmother’s neighbors seemed confused at how she could have a grandson with such lighter skin than her.

But Trevor Noah wasn’t focused on the color of his skin, nor even the content of his Twitter characters, so much as he looked farther and further into his own global future. Just 10 days before his climactic Johannesburg show, Noah flew to Los Angeles to experience America, get onstage and talk with Latino schoolchildren. His advice for them echoed his own hopes for his show back home. He wanted others to “own their destiny.” As he told the teens in an L.A. classroom: “In life you always choose to see things in a good or bad way. It’s your outlook. It’s how you choose to perceive it. So you can choose to perceive things in a positive way, even if they’re negative. And for me, that’s what comedy really is about. Good or bad, I’ll speak about it.”

He’s still doing that today.

A postscript tells us Noah’s shows sold out and then some, producing South Africa’s top-selling comedy DVD of all time, a reunion with his father after 12 years, and leading to appearances in America on both Letterman and Leno, and well, you know the rest.

Now that’s a moment of Zen.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch You Laugh But It's True on Netflix