Jon Stewart used his TV platform to become one of the world’s sharpest political commentators. Fresh from his Edinburgh show, how will his South African successor fare?

A new trailer for The Daily Show, America’s much-admired evening bulletin of political satire, makes big play of the birthplace of the man who will take the helm later this month. Smooth South African Trevor Noah saunters into shot, smiling, while the show’s trio of regular comedy sidekicks, Jessica Williams, Hasan Minhaj and Jordan Klepper, play around with a vuvuzela and some basic rugby terminology in a lame effort to ingratiate themselves with the new star. Noah reassures them: “It’s still The Daily Show. Nothing is going to change.”

Across America and beyond, fans of the show share the nervousness of his co-stars. Is Noah a worthy replacement after 16 years with Jon Stewart in the hot seat? Can the new host deliver a similarly potent mix of smart and silly political lampooning?

Noah’s arrival at the show, which enjoys a devoted international following, was confirmed in March as Stewart prepared to step down from a role that had seen him followed as a guru for the politically educated tribes. By then, Noah had become a frequent contributor and had also appeared as a guest on the Jay Leno and David Letterman shows.

All the same, the response from some regular viewers was bewilderment: the question “Trevor who?” trended on Twitter for a while. What is more, Noah’s signing came just as the race for the White House was set to hot up. How will an outsider, Americans wondered, sense the subtle shifts in the mood of our nation?

It is an apprehension that does not seem to shared by the 31-year-old comic. His customary shtick is cool and unruffled, so it is fitting he has prepared for his debut by honouring several commitments to appear at international venues, including a stint at the Edinburgh fringe last month.

At the close of the new trailer, Noah corrects his fellow performers on their pronunciation of the word “zebra” – shortening the first vowel sound. It all serves as a fitting taster for his brand of humour, where much of the comedy lies in the amused delineation of cultural difference. It is, after all, his birthright.

Born in Johannesburg, he grew up in the township of Soweto and was brought up by his mother, Patricia, and his grandmother, Nomalizo, attending a private Catholic school in the city. Three years ago, he introduced himself to British audiences with a story about how, when he was a toddler, his mother had to drop his hand in the street whenever white people approached. She is a Xhosa-speaking black woman and he was termed “half-caste”, having a Swiss father. Such intermingling of races was still illegal then (“Why half-caste anyway?” Noah complains. “Why not twice as good?”).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trevor Noah live.

At one point in his standup set, he regularly claimed that all he ever wanted was to be properly “black”. Yet he also has fun with the notion that he wanted to get closer to his white, German-speaking father, inadvertently learning an overly emphatic version of the language from listening to recordings of Hitler’s speeches.

It is not surprising this performer is interested in cultural difference. It has marked out his life so far and is likely to prove key to his commentary on racial tensions in America. “I’ve lived a life where I’ve never really fitted in,” he said in 2011. “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.’”

In 2009, Noah had to cope with the aftermath of a near-fatal gun attack on his mother. Her second husband – the father of Noah’s two half-brothers – shot her twice, only stopping when his weapon jammed. The comic has since spoken of the incident in public to highlight what he sees as an endemic domestic abuse problem in the townships.

Although pretty dramatic, Noah’s life story is not yet very long. Indeed, his youthful race to fame has shocked some of those who have watched from the sidelines. “Although he has made the US his base since 2011, and has worked really hard on the club circuit on both coasts he’s not a household name in the way that Eddie Izzard or Ricky Gervais have become,” says comedy critic Veronica Lee, who attended his recent Edinburgh show, during which he teased the lack of diversity in the almost uniformly white audience.

For Americans, there is quite another appeal. Yes, Noah is African, but he sounds so different to African Americans – and he may also, Lee suspects, benefit from “a faint association with Nelson Mandela – in popular terms the only South African the average American could name”.

The American television networks have developed a thing for foreign performers in recent years. The Scot Craig Ferguson recently completed a long and illustrious stint on CBS’s The Late Late Show, while Birmingham-born John Oliver’s regular appearances on The Daily Show have earned him his own HBO slot hosting Last Week Tonight and Londoner James Corden has just boosted ratings at the wheel of The Late Late Show.

He joked that, when he was a toddler, his mother had to drop his hand in the street whenever white people approached

Noah is not only foreign, but black too. And yet, because he is not a woman, his appointment has gone down badly in some quarters of America, where female comics Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman and the two Amys, Poehler and Schumer, are all rightly judged A-list talent now.

One of Noah’s heroes is Richard Pryor, but he is nowhere near as wild. “The reality is that Noah has never been a shock comedian or a taboo buster,” wrote Geoffrey York in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. “His act lacks the anger and outrage that often fuel Stewart’s routines. He leaves his audiences feeling warm and content, rather than discomforted or challenged.”

In South Africa, Noah is an established figure with a track record as a TV presenter, with his own chatshow under his belt. His speedy international success has been tough for some other South African comedians to stomach. Experienced performer Mel Miller once suggested that young black comics “mustn’t come bitching about apartheid”, while David Kau, another established standup, has sniped that he never need appear on American TV now since, thanks to Noah, most of his jokes already have.

Watching Noah’s show in Johannesburg in July, David Smith of the Guardian and Observer was impressed by his “charm and polish”, as well as “his surging self-confidence and his mercurial talent for accents, mimicry and physical comedy”. Targets included South African call centres, Jacob Zuma’s antics in parliament and the Fifa scandal.

In the week of his appointment this spring, Noah had to face down a brief scandal of his own, albeit on Twitter. Some internet archaeology had unearthed a few yellowing tweets from 2012 that showed him poking fun at stereotypical Jewish financial acumen (in his defence, his mother has Jewish parentage), at white women’s slight bottoms (“A hot white woman with ass is like a unicorn. Even if you do see one, you’ll probably never get to ride it”) and even at domestic violence. He tweeted that December: “Originally when men proposed they went down on one knee so if the woman said no they were in the perfect uppercut position.”

Some called for The Daily Show to reconsider his appointment and the Guardian’s comedy critic, Brian Logan, also took a fairly harsh line. Conceding that comedians should be allowed to function like “canaries in the mine, testing on our behalf what’s funny and what’s beyond the pale”, he went on to argue this does not license them to say whatever they want.

Twitter, he suggested, is “a context-free zone” and should always be handled with care.

Suddenly, the stakes could not be higher for Noah. He will be playing on one of the world’s biggest comic stages. But it seems that his mother can be relied upon to maintain his sense of perspective. When he told her he had got The Daily Show job, she pointed out that his 11-year-old brother had been made headboy at school: “I’m so happy – both my boys are doing big things.”

The Noah file

Born Johannesburg, South Africa, on 20 February 1984, the “illegal” mixed-race son of Patricia, a Xhosa-speaker from Soweto township, and his Swiss father, Robert. Raised by his mother and grandmother, he attended the private Catholic school Maryvale College. His mother was jailed and fined over her relationship with his father.

Best of times Hearing this spring that he had been chosen to take over from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Worst of times 2009, when his mother was shot twice by her second husband, Ngisaveni Shingange. His recent Twitter shaming over remarks in 2012 using racist, antisemitic and misogynist stereotypes was a minor blip in comparison.

What he says “You just find a cliff and jump off, and you keep doing it, and if it works on a small cliff, then you move on to a higher one, and a higher one, and then finally you get to a big audience and you go, ‘Fine, OK, I’m happy with this material’. So I do test it out on the audience and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Crashing is part of flying, so…”

What others say “Rare is the comic who can unite a diverse audience in laughter while making potentially divisive comments.” Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph critic.