Trevor Noah Quotes

“If you laugh with somebody, then you know you share something.”

— Trevor Noah

“I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman ... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.”

— Trevor Noah

If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.

— Trevor Noah

I've never been afraid to fall in love, nor impatient to find it.

— Trevor Noah

“My mom used to get arrested for being with my dad. She would get fined. She would spend weekends in jail.”

— Trevor Noah

“I live in a country where I'd say nine out of ten people know me when I walk through the streets. There's people taking pictures, there's tabloids trying to make up stories. I'm used to that. The same thing when I'm in Australia or the U.K.: I get stopped.”

— Trevor Noah

“My mom, through my dad, rented the apartment next door to his ... he had the lease on both places. But then, she would dress up and act like his maid ... a practical maid. No fantasies.”

— Trevor Noah

I don't think I have thick skin, but I heal fast. It's easy to break through, but I heal fast.

— Trevor Noah

“We live in the Internet age. Everyone wants clicks. Clicks are what sells.”

— Trevor Noah

What I've always said about comedy is if you do it in the right way, you can say anything to anybody because they know where you're coming from. They know it's not malicious.

— Trevor Noah

“I'm not a big Hollywood guy. I don't know how the machine works. I leave that to people better than myself.”

— Trevor Noah

“I'm not an abrasive person. I do speak my mind, but my goal is never to offend. I don't intentionally want to strike a chord.”

— Trevor Noah

“I've always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I've loved playing with it. People act as though it isn't an issue, but it's a recurring theme in our lives globally.”

— Trevor Noah

“Africa's not a color - it's a place.”

— Trevor Noah

America was a thing I saw on TV - that wasn't a real world. That wasn't within my realm of dreaming.

— Trevor Noah

“I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them.”

— Trevor Noah

I want my audience to be my friends - that is when they will get the best comedy. If they see me as a performer, they won't get the best show.

— Trevor Noah

“I was the first in my family to board an airplane. I was the first in my family to get kicked off an airplane.”

— Trevor Noah

“I'm a quarterback. I don't need to score the touchdown. I just need to spot the pass.”

— Trevor Noah

Most of my show is true; like, 90% of everything I say on stage is true. I just have to find the way to make it funny - that's the difficult thing.

— Trevor Noah

“Nobody owns comedy. Nobody owns a premise. Nobody owns an idea.”

— Trevor Noah

“As a comedian, I'm forced to have a tough skin. Until people laugh, they are detractors. You walk into a new audience where nobody knows you, they go: 'Make us laugh. Show us what you're made of. Prove why we should be listening to you.'”

— Trevor Noah

“During my New York run, I injured my voice badly. I was getting increasingly hoarse, and it finally gave up. The doctor said I had two choices. Either cancel things, or try my luck and perhaps never speak again. That's not much of a choice.”

— Trevor Noah

“I like the anonymity, the fact that you're a stranger making strangers laugh. You aren't forcing them to laugh - it's involuntary, and that's when they give the most honest response.”

— Trevor Noah

“I lost contact with my father for many years because of apartheid. For, like, six years, I didn't see my dad. And, now, this was the six years of being a teenager.”

— Trevor Noah

“I'm literally driving in the middle of the night, and my phone rings, and my manager says, 'How would you like to be the host of the 'Daily Show?' I get out the car, and I didn't have legs. You know in those movies where there's an explosion? But instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear the silence. That's literally what happened.”

— Trevor Noah

“I'm not a confrontational person or comedian. I think we can explore more things if one of us is not fighting with the other. I take it easy. But I do like comedians who are very different from myself: I love dry comics with deadpan one-liners. I look on and think, 'That's amazing; why didn't I think of that?'”

— Trevor Noah

“If I'm doing something on stage, and it evokes an emotion, then I might show that emotion, but I also don't believe in being a preacher. If you have a point, that's a bonus. But the funny has to come first; otherwise, you shouldn't call yourself a comedian.”

— Trevor Noah

Maybe it's because I come from a very utopian world of being a comedian, but I'm used to many live comedy performances going on in any city I'm in, and each of us is trying to be the best at what we do. I don't think of it as a competition so much as a thriving comedy economy.

— Trevor Noah

My ideal setting is I walk from the streets, backstage, and straight onto the stage. Two minutes, and I am on the stage. That way, in my head I have gone from my world and then into a social setting with my friends.

— Trevor Noah

The older you get, the more you start to realize that you can't win an argument in a relationship. You can't win a fight with your woman. Because if you lose, you lose. And if you win, you lose.

— Trevor Noah

“The truth is, people don't know me. When people don't know you, they're going to try to get to know you as quickly as possible, because you're now taking the place of somebody that they love dearly, or somebody that they hate sincerely, and so they need to know who you are.”

— Trevor Noah

“There's more outrage on Twitter about a One Direction split or about what one band member said to another than there is about institutionalized racism and something huge.”

— Trevor Noah

“We get angry about the small things sometimes, I feel, so that we feel like we're doing something, so that we don't have to tackle the big things. And it's fine; let people do that. But I'm not gonna now change because of that. You know? Like, the worst thing that happens to me is you don't like me. And then what?”

— Trevor Noah

“We've got so many different cultural groups in my family that I've had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people.”

— Trevor Noah

“When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that you're in. Through a comedic voice, you're talking about what needs to be talked about, whether it's race relations or politics or anything that's happening on a global or an American scale.”

— Trevor Noah

“You have two choices, two paths to take as a comedian. You can tackle the difficult subjects and be harsh about it, be brash, be abrasive. But adding hatred to racism is not going to help everybody. So I like to have fun around it.”

— Trevor Noah

“Often, people who can do, don't because they're afraid of what people that can't do will say about them doing.”

— Trevor Noah

“I know that I cannot change the entire world, but I've always believed I can at least affect change in my world.”

— Trevor Noah

“Progression, in my opinion, is often identifying shortcomings - whether it's views or the things you're doing in your life, your relationships - and trying to find the places where you improve on those.”

— Trevor Noah

Our go-to source is no longer dictated by a small group of cable news outlets. We have to expand our view. Sometimes, a story is made and breaks on Twitter. We have to find a way to react to that, to consume and also disseminate the information from Twitter, which is not an easy thing to do.

— Trevor Noah

“Comedy is a great tool. We [comics] are trying to find ways to use humor to enlighten people without preaching to them.”

— Trevor Noah

I love ebola jokes. When done in the right way, maybe it gets people to learn about ebola, to learn about the stigmas behind the identities held by Africans and so on.

— Trevor Noah

“America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood [that] South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history. It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences - dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned.”

— Trevor Noah

I'm not a political progressive, but I consider myself a progressive person. What makes me a progressive, in my opinion, is the fact that I try to improve myself and by large improve the world that I'm in - in the smallest way possible.

— Trevor Noah

“Comedy is crowded. There are hundreds of comedians in every place in the world.”

— Trevor Noah

“In America, there is no racial segregation. I'm not sure I'm quite familiar with this phrase.”

— Trevor Noah

“Nelson Mandela was in jail when I was really young, and Winnie Mandela was one of the biggest faces of the movement. In South Africa we have a common phrase - it's like a chant in the street and at rallies: "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo." Which means, "You strike a woman, you strike a rock."”

— Trevor Noah

“I want to be in a position where I get to start off fresh. I don't have any preconceived notion of how I should feel.”

— Trevor Noah

“I've lived many places all over the world, so I've always seen myself as a citizen of the world.”

— Trevor Noah