Born a Crime: Trevor Noah charts his rise from South Africa's townships Read more

The complaint often made about Trevor Noah is that he isn’t political enough. When the South African comedian took over from Jon Stewart last year as the presenter of the Daily Show, a late-night US satirical talk show, many viewers wondered how he could ever fill his predecessor’s shoes. Stewart’s brand of passionately biting humour had defined the programme for 16 years, elevating it to the status of daily worship for liberal America, whereas Noah – although a star in South Africa, with a global fan base for his standup – was an unknown quantity. Fourteen months into the job, the jury is still out. Ratings are down, and critics complain that while the 32-year-old is very charming, and his wry bemusement at the madness of the world quite winning, he isn’t really what you would call political.

Noah used to think so too. “I never considered myself a very political person. Then when I travelled, I realised, ‘Oh no, I am extremely political.’ It’s just that in my country, the base level is so politicised that we don’t think it is.” The least political South African, he thinks, is probably more political than most policy wonks in this country. “And when you go to the US, a lot of people are just like, ‘Meh – I don’t really follow politics’. The way it is right now in America, Donald Trump is pop culture, and everyone is talking about supreme courts and cabinet positions. But that’s how South Africa has almost always been. You couldn’t not be. We were born political.”

To many viewers in America, however, the new Daily Show presenter just looked like a super-confident, probably over-privileged, telegenic young pretender who had landed on his feet. Even on the standup circuit in the States, a friend and fellow black comic warned Noah: “You’ve got to be careful, especially when you’re doing black clubs, because of the way that you speak. The audience, they don’t accept you for a bit, because when they hear this next person coming on stage is going to be from Africa, they’re expecting leopard skins.” Like Eddie Murphy’s African king father in Coming to America? Noah laughs. “Yes, exactly. And so you come on stage and they’re like: ‘You sound like a British aristocrat.’ To them, with my accent I may as well be from Downton Abbey.”

Noah’s remarkable memoir of his childhood in South Africa will therefore come as a surprise to some readers. It is called Born a Crime because Noah was just that – the son of a black African secretary and a white German Swiss expat, born in 1984 under the apartheid regime, which made interracial sex illegal. Noah could barely risk being seen in public as a child, and was forbidden to call his father Daddy if they dared venture to a park together. In the political unrest, Noah lost touch with his father – though they are in contact now – and his dauntless mother raised him alone, largely in Soweto. “I was her way of sitting in the front of the bus; that was her form of protest.”

He writes about being thrown by his mother from a moving minibus taxi to escape kidnap; of the ceaseless smoke billowing from burning tyres across the townships; of having to sleep in a car, so poor that the family lived off mopane worms – brightly coloured caterpillars about which “even people who lived in Soweto would be like, ‘Eh, no’”. His mother married a mechanic who drank his earnings and beat her and her son; she later escaped and remarried, only for Noah’s ex-stepfather to track her down and shoot her in the head. Miraculously, she survived.

The deprivations and dramas recalled in Born a Crime belong to a world a very long way from the luxury London hotel where we meet. Noah is tall and fantastically beautiful, and his bearing is surprisingly low-key. He speaks gently, quite slowly, exuding an unshakably zen-like air of self-containment. There is nothing extrovert, let alone exhibitionist, about him, so I wonder if it feels exposing to reveal so much of himself and his past.

“Yes, definitely. But I enjoy that feeling. I almost understand nudists now; I feel like an emotional nudist. I never understood it before, because why would you want to just run around naked? But then I realised there is a freedom that comes with it. There’s a freedom that comes from exposing all of your bits. Exposing your good bits, and your bad bits, exposing your scars. Because you stop being self-conscious. You realise a lot of the time we’re ashamed of things we shouldn’t be ashamed of, just because we live in a shaming society. If you’re poor, you don’t have to be ashamed of that. If you’re someone in a home of domestic abuse, you don’t have to be ashamed of that.”

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He used to be? “Oh yes, definitely, definitely,” he says at once, as if stating the obvious, but from the memoir’s comic tone, a reader probably wouldn’t guess. “I think that was part of growing up in the house I grew up in,” he reflects. “That’s my mother’s temperament coming through. We didn’t grow in a home of bitterness or where anger was the presiding emotion. Love was the number one emotion we were dealing with and using to process life. And laughter. We turned our situation into something we could laugh at.”

Nevertheless, the absence of anger seems astonishing. When I say so, it is the only time in the interview that his serenity ruffles. “Yeah, that’s something that people have asked me my whole life. And I’m always fascinated by it,” he says, in that way people do when what they really mean is irritated. “When I first came to the UK to do comedy, there was one reviewer who said: ‘Oh well, clearly apartheid was a hoot, according to Trevor Noah.’ No, no, not at all. But you can’t tell me how angry to be about my life. I find that very strange, that people have an idea about how you should react to your own environment. The way my mum and I lived, she had this attitude of, “Why should we be angry in our own house?’ We have lots of time to be angry when we’re going to be tear-gassed by the police and oppressed in the street. But when we’re at home there’s nothing we can do. We’re at home, we’re amongst each other, the government’s not going to see this anger right now, so what is the point of it? What is the point of existing in a feeling that does not move you forward? Because now what’s happening is you’re stewing in your own anger and resentment and bitterness, but the system you’re trying to go up against doesn’t feel any of that. It doesn’t even know. So you’re wasting that energy.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trevor Noah on election night, November 2016. Photograph: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Comedy Central

Until Noah turned 20, he wasn’t even aware that stand up comedy could offer an alternative outlet. He had never seen it on state-censored TV, and the first Eddie Murphy DVD he watched was electrifying. By then the polyglot Noah (fluent in four African languages, and several European ones, too) was making a living in the townships, selling home-made CDs and DJing at street parties, his greatest ambition “to be able to buy food whenever I wanted to. Genuinely”. One night his cousin heckled a hopeless comedian while they were out in a bar, and Noah was challenged to see if he could do any better. He got up on stage, told some funny stories, and by the time he got back down, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.

Over the following decade, Noah developed his stage routine, drawing heavily on the rich seam of apartheid’s surreal absurdities, and on his observations of race relations abroad when he began touring. In 2013 he became the first South African comedian ever to appear on the Late Show with David Letterman, and in 2014 was signed as a correspondent on the Daily Show. He had appeared only three times before he was named as Stewart’s surprise successor. As far as many of the show’s fans were concerned, Stewart practically walked on water, and as Noah says: “Taking over any late-night talk show is a monumental task. Taking over a late-night satirical news show based on the point of view of the host is impossible.”

Did any part of him consider turning the job down? “For a moment, yeah. But that’s just fear. It’s fear of failure, fear of rejection, that’s just the fear we all have in life. But I always think to myself, if it’s impossible then you should always try. Because then it’s a win-win. If you don’t do it, it was impossible anyway. But if you achieve it, you’ve achieved the impossible! When I left South Africa to do comedy, that was impossible. There was no South African comedian, no African comedian, who was a worldwide name. I find it more enticing to do the impossible thing. Because if you fail at the very achievable thing, that would break my heart.”

Having been born into a racial category that his country did not recognise, Noah always felt like an outsider. His grandmother spoiled him as a “white” child, other kids called him a “half-caste”, and he was never sure which ethnic group to join in the school playground. Today he lives in Manhattan with his American girlfriend, Jordyn Taylor, a model, his book is an instant New York Times bestseller, and he presents one of America’s most prestigious TV shows. I thought he might feel more like an insider these days, but he says quickly: “Not at all, not at all. I’m still an outsider.”

He has brought a younger, more diverse audience to the Daily Show, but lost a third of its viewers, and critics accuse him of dulling its impact with his genial style. He brushes this off – “Oh, but if you live your life by how other people see your life then you’re in trouble. You have to live life as you see it” – and says he’s still only 30% towards realising his vision for the show. Would he call himself a satirist? There’s a long pause. “On the strictest definition of what satire is, yes. In a lot of people’s opinions, satire is only scathing, only unfriendly and mean, only goes for the jugular – and there are different schools of satire.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trevor Noah with his Daily Show predecessor Jon Stewart at the 2015 Emmy awards governors ball. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

But when I ask what he now knows about the US, but hadn’t known when he took over, he exhales and considers the question in silence for more than 20 seconds. “One of the biggest things I’ve come to know is I didn’t realise how entrenched people were in their views or beliefs. I always – maybe it’s because I was fooled by American sitcoms. Everyone always learns something new in an episode. They start off thinking one thing and by the end of the 30 minutes they go: ‘You know what, thanks man, I didn’t think like that.’ And I always thought: ‘Oh, this is a place where if you convince a person, they’ll change their mind.’ But no. People are for the most part angrily entrenched in their views, and that’s that.”

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It will be fascinating to see if Noah’s version of satire can change minds in the febrile new atmosphere of Trump’s America. “Right now,” he says, “I’m just cultivating the soil. Then I’ll start planting seeds, and then we’ll see. “ Does he think it will work?

“Well, here’s the thing. Most of us are all just trying to do the right thing according to our point of view. Oftentimes we don’t work on winning each other over, we focus on just being right, or being angry. That righteous anger. So if you are a white person and you don’t even realise the privilege or position that you have, if I have an opportunity to teach you that, would I rather take that, or would I rather take the opportunity to chastise and shame you for what you don’t know? I feel like, if you’re willing, I have an opportunity to change you and learn from you, and you can learn from me. And then, instead of having two ones, we have a two. Which is how we build.”

• Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah (John Murray Press) is out now. To order a copy for £16 (RRP £20), go o bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.