Trevor Noah, born in Johannesburg on 20 February 1984, hosted The Daily Show from 2015 to 2022 and wrote the memoir Born a Crime. He has hosted the Grammy Awards for six consecutive years, from 2021 to 2026.
Trevor Noah was born on 20 February 1984 in Johannesburg, Transvaal, now Gauteng, South Africa. His father, Robert, is Swiss-German, and his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, is Xhosa. Under apartheid law his mother was classified as Black and his father as White, and Noah himself as Coloured. His parents’ interracial relationship was illegal at the time of his birth, a fact he explores in his autobiography Born a Crime. Such relations were decriminalised a year later, in 1985. His mother and grandmother, Nomalizo Frances Noah, raised him in the Black township of Soweto.
He began school at Maryvale College, a private Roman Catholic school in Johannesburg, and grew up in a multicultural environment reflecting both his White and Black heritage. Raised in a devoutly Christian household, he was also exposed to Jewish traditions and had a bar mitzvah celebration on his 13th birthday.
His career began in South African media. In 2002 he had a small role in the soap opera Isidingo, and he later hosted a radio show, Noah’s Ark, on the youth station YFM. At 21, his friends dared him to try comedy at a nightclub, and after that night he kept performing at clubs and dropped his radio show and acting to focus on stand-up. He hosted educational and entertainment television shows on the SABC, was runner-up in the fourth season of South Africa’s Strictly Come Dancing in 2008, and from 2010 to 2011 hosted Tonight with Trevor Noah, a late-night show he created.
His South African stand-up specials include The Daywalker (2009), Crazy Normal (2011), That’s Racist (2012) and It’s My Culture (2013). He moved to the United States in 2011, and in January 2012 became the first South African stand-up comedian to appear on The Tonight Show, and in May 2013 the first on Late Show with David Letterman. His one-man show Trevor Noah: The Racist sold out at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In 2014 he became the senior international correspondent for The Daily Show, and in March 2015 Comedy Central announced that he would succeed Jon Stewart. He began on 28 September 2015. After the announcement, some old jokes he had posted online drew criticism, and he said that reducing his views to “a handful of jokes that didn’t land” was not a true reflection of his character. Comedy Central stood by him, and he went on to host the programme until 2022.
His book Born a Crime was published in 2016. He has won two Primetime Emmy Awards, hosted the 2022 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and been named one of the 35 most powerful people in New York media by The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 and 2018 and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2018.
Image: Trevor Noah performing stand-up comedy on stage in 2018 (file photo). Photo: slgckgc / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
