Last night, Jon Stewart addressed the controversy that blew up last week—was it really just last week?—after the internet discovered some “questionable tweets,” aka unfunny jokes, in Trevor Noah’s Twitter feed. The controversy inspired comedian Patton Oswalt to come to Noah’s defense in an “epic Twitter rant”; Patton Oswalt’s epic Twitter rant in defense of Trevor Noah inspired Joe Garden, a former writer for The Onion, to “totally destroy” Patton Oswalt in an epic Twitter rant of his own. The New York Times profiled Noah last week…
Born [in South Africa] in 1984, Mr. Noah grew up in the final years of apartheid, when South Africa’s white-minority government became an international pariah, backed by a dwindling number of allies, particularly Israel, its longtime economic partner and arms supplier. To this day, as a result, many blacks, as well as whites who supported the liberation movement, tend to reflexively criticize Israel and support the Palestinian cause….
Relations between blacks and whites were illegal, and when Mr. Noah was born, his parents could not put his father’s name on his birth certificate. His family had to engage in elaborate ruses to hide the fact that Mr. Noah was their child. In “You Laugh but It’s True,” Mr. Noah talks about being shuttled between his mother’s home in Soweto, a black township near here, and a Johannesburg apartment in an all-white neighborhood where his father lived. At his father’s residence, his mother posed as the housemaid so that they could live under one roof.
A clip from one of Trevor Noah’s performances… after the jump.