Silly me, I was assuming this Trevor Noah they said was going to replace Jon Stewart was one of the regulars on his show and I just happened not to have seen him. But no – apparently they just wrote a bunch of comedians’ names down on file cards and threw them all up in the air and then stabbed one with a spike and that was the new Jon Stewart. Because guess what, it turns out he’s
- an asshole
- not funny
Now if they had sat down and carefully thought about who would be good for the host of the Daily Show, they could have found someone who was neither an asshole nor unfunny. There are people like that. Instead they zeroed in on someone who is both. How inept of them.
Jessica Winter at Slate shares some of the ways he’s an unfunny asshole.
Then people—notably BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara—started combing Noah’s Twitter feed.
There were tweets that showcased Noah’s breezy anti-semitism.
Behind every successful Rap Billionaire is a double as rich Jewish man. #BeatsByDreidel
Messi gets the ball and the real players try foul him, but Messi doesn’t go down easy, just like jewish chicks. #ElClasico
There were tweets that put a spotlight on the polyglot Noah’s fluency in fat-chick jokes.
“Oh yeah the weekend. People are gonna get drunk & think that I’m sexy!” – fat chicks everywhere.
So now that Adele is singing, does that mean it’s over?
And there’s lots more like that.
Smart shopping, Comedy Central.
Ha! I love the title of this post. I have always hated Tosh and never understood why he was ever popular.
Looks like I won’t be watching the new Daily Show.
So I agree that they’re unfunny, mean tweets but they seem to, with maybe one exception, be years old. I’m not willing to write off the guy as a monster because someone went through thousands of tweets to find mean ones. And this dude is hardly Tosh.
And I do think it’s worth noting that Noah is a quarter Jewish. That doesn’t make the jokes acceptable, but I do think it adds context.
Consider the gross bigotry of his Tweets acknowledged and bracketed off.
“So now that Adele is singing, does that mean it’s over?”
That’s honestly puzzling from a grown man. It’s simply not funny, even if you like mean humor. It’s. . .the kind of joke a 4th grader would come up with and be really proud because it was his first.
That’s embarrassing.
@Josh, That’s basically the consensus of a 500 or so comment discussion I’m in. The jokes aren’t funny. But a lot of people are hopeful that he’s matured in the years since the vast majority of them.
I do suspect there are some interesting things to think about and discuss relating to how/whether he identifies with the targets of his jokes. As in, if he thinks of himself as Jewish or enough on the inside to play with it the way I get to play with ‘fag.’ That’s not all of it, however.
He has actually made a few appearances on TDS, where I found him to be clever, witty, and capable of playing the straight man in a comedic bit, which is super important for the Daily Show format. Granted, small sample size, but I was ok with the choice… then I saw these tweets and was all “da fuq”. Regardless of “offensive” or not (yeah), they are very, very not funny.
Noah also has some
mind-numbingly triteinteresting ideas about atheists.The only sliver of hope I can find here is the same one Anne Marie finds… these are a number of years old. Hopefully Trevor’s matured since then. I’m kinda sorta hoping for a Jamie Kilstein style of maturation, where he’s like “don’t go back to that old crap. I was terrible. I know better now, though.”
(Oh my god. Jamie Kilstein hosting The Daily Show. 0_0)
Then again, considering the kind of “humor” Comedy Central pushes today (of which Stewart, Colbert, and Wilson were and are all an anathema to… I’m talking, of course, about the misogynistic, frat boy bully humor of the likes of Daniel Tosh and his ilk), Trevor Noah is likely the exact same person who wrote those tweets. Looks like Comedy Central wants to take The Daily Show back to the Craig Kilbourne (sp?) days… *shudders*
FIFY.
sonofrojblake: Well, you kind of broke it while trying to fix it. “Not funny at all IMO” would have been a better fix. But that weakens your point, doesn’t it…
And I’m left wondering why you’d bother to mention Noah’s ancestry, as if it’s impossible for a Jew to be anti-Semitic. I mean, it’s not like we’ve not heard of misogynistic women. Or anti-atheist atheists. Or, or, or…
Who/what is ‘Tosh?’
How much does Noah’s hire reflect upon him being non-white and believably goyish?
His previous work I’m unfamiliar with and I only have his three appearances on The Daily Show to go on from personal experience. In that light I can’t give him the benefit of the doubt.
However, if my Timehop stream is anything to go by, there are things I said five years ago that make me cringe now. He doesn’t seem to be hopping to say anything like that, though.
Whoever made the decision on Noah must be trying to sink the boat. Pun definitely intended.
The argument against Jessica Williams was “too young, not senior enough”. So what? Seniority is irrelevant here and sometimes a lousy reason to decide. The traits needed in a replacement host are being whip-smart, funny, intelligent and vicious but not malicious. She has all of those and more.
If anything kills off the Daily Show, it won’t be people leaving for greener pastures, it will be management’s poor decision making.
The argument against Jessica Williams was “too young, not senior enough”. So what? Seniority is irrelevant here and sometimes a lousy reason to decide. The traits needed in a replacement host are being whip-smart, funny, intelligent and vicious but not malicious. She has all of those and more.
The main argument against Jessica Williams is simply that she didn’t want it. In fact I think she outright turned it down (could be wrong on that one… don’t quote me on it). Which made me sad, because I think she’s brilliant and would have been amazing.
But we have Trevor Noah instead…
Wow… what happened to my blockquote. Gonna try again:
The main argument against Jessica Williams is simply that she didn’t want it. In fact I think she outright turned it down (could be wrong on that one… don’t quote me on it). Which made me sad, because I think she’s brilliant and would have been amazing.
But we have Trevor Noah instead…
@ johnthedrunkard
If you don’t know, I really hope you never find out. Believe me, your life will be better that way.
Just be glad you don’t know! He is someone who has, through hard work and several years of daily daily fails, earned the title of Unfunny Asshole. (His production company is called Black Heart Productions, if that is any indication.)
I haven’t seen Noah’s stand up at all, but I really liked him on his few Daily Show appearances.The tweets are troubling and disappointing, but really not the same thing as a career built on “fat people sure are dumb” jokes.
Noah will either do ok or he won’t. I hope he doesn’t turn out to be an asshole and does alright because of that.
That would probably be putting it lightly.
@medivh, 11:
Your formulation wouldn’t weaken the point about him being “not funny”. Anyone characterising a successful comedian as “not funny” has just said something rather stupid, since the fact of their funniness is demonstrable. That you, personally, can’t see it has no bearing. You might just as well say “John Lennon was a shit songwriter” or “Picasso couldn’t paint worth a damn”. There are sufficient people who disagree with you that you are demonstrably objectively wrong.
As for mentioning his ancestry, does this really need spelling out? http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NWordPrivileges
My formulation is more representative of the true situation than yours was. If you find my formulation still unconvincing, then at least you’re not being unconvinced by (as much of) a straw man. You know, like the straw man of saying that Noah is as successful as a comedian as Lennon was as a song writer. And then there’s the… seriously weird… implication that ‘creative success’ means ‘freedom from criticism. Ever.’
Note: implication. I’m explicitly saying that you haven’t denoted such, only connoted it.
Re: ancestry; already answered. “It’s not like we’ve ever heard of a Semitic anti-Semite, is it? Oh wait…” And let’s steel man that: it’s not like there’s such thing as a person being one-quarter anything who hates that quarter because they’ve had some early life radicalisation, right? Oh, wait, that one’s so common as to be not worth mentioning any more to any reasonable person.