The first time Trevor Noah did stand-up it wasn’t a formal booking or even an open mic—it was on a dare. He and some friends had gone to a comedy show in Johannesburg, and as it closed, Noah’s drunken companions coaxed him on stage. Noah, who rarely drinks and says he usually regrets it when he does, soberly awed the crowd. Within a few years he would become South Africa’s most famous comedian and one of its biggest celebrities.

Noah’s ascent has been rapid—he’s only 31—but in many ways his path to comedy stardom has been typical. After being dared into stand-up, Noah began performing regularly. After a spate of corporate events and low-paying gigs, his home base became The Blues Room, an upscale jazz club in Johannesburg that occasionally hosted comedians, where he worked with Ugandan comedian David Kibuuka to entertain the suburban crowd for no pay.

In August of 2008, David Paul Meyer, a young American film student, came to South Africa in search for a subject. Meyer was looking for an overlooked story, and had been drawn to the South African stand-up scene. “I’d heard of people from various parts of Africa having a sense of humor about their often dire situations to help them cope,” explains Meyer as we sit in a coffee shop a few blocks from The Daily Show studios, where he recently started as a field producer. In South Africa, black comedians could only legally perform after the end of apartheid in 1994. “The first two shows I saw in Johannesburg were horrible,” Meyer recalls. “Guys were literally reading jokes off of a page they printed from the Internet.” On Meyer’s third day in the country, he’d wrecked his rental car and was ready to write off his trip as an expensive vacation, however that night he went to a jazz club in the ritzy Sandown suburb expecting nothing. He left with plans to shoot a documentary about a young comedian named Trevor Noah.

Meyer would soon discover that Noah was different than other South African comedians. Most typically catered to one audience: David Kau to black crowds, John Vlismas to hipster whites, and Casper de Vries to the Pretoria Afrikaans elite. Noah speaks eight languages at various levels of fluency, which has helped him relate to many of South Africa’s cultural groups. (The country has eleven official languages.) Noah's good looks, charm, and spot-on accents and impressions earned him steady laughs, even as he continued to learn the basics of stand-up. Meyer was drawn to these qualities, yet his documentary ultimately focused less on Noah’s comedy and more on his quest for an identity. Meyer seemed to implicitly recognize that Noah’s enormous well of charisma–and the ease with which he shifts into different impressions and characters–often obscure the question of who Noah really is.

Understanding Trevor Noah will require his audience to grasp the apartheid-era classifications that shape his identity as an outsider. Noah was born and raised in Soweto, a neighborhood in Johannesburg that was the epicenter of political protest in apartheid South Africa. Eight years before Noah was born, the Afrikaans government killed 13-year old Hector Pieterson during the Soweto student uprising, and launched the country into an intense period of violent political struggle.