Trevor Noah Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The first purpose of comedy is to make people laugh. Anything deeper is a bonus. Some comedians want to make people laugh and make them think about socially relevant issues, but comedy, by the very nature of the word, is to make people laugh. If people aren't laughing, it's not comedy. It's as simple as that.

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

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

I don't know how to let loose when I'm dancing to the music and the people that made the music are watching me. I've never felt so much pressure in my life.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Comedy is really getting quite popular in South Africa.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

I was doing a show at the Comedy Store which Eddie Izzard saw, and we chatted for a bit afterwards. I didn't really know he was; we just hung out as comedians together, and when he heard my story, he said, 'Why don't you tell that on stage?' I didn't really want to burden people with all that, but he said that I could have fun with it.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

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.

I live in South Africa. I'm proud to live there. I've always said I want to be a comedian from South Africa in the world. I will stay in places for a bit here and there and pop into New York for a while, maybe stay in London for a year, but my home will always be South Africa. I enjoy it too much.

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.

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.

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

We always look at gerrymandering and what it has done to voting in America, but what I realized the other day is that the news has somehow become gerrymandered and is continuing to be gerrymandered in America.

I think any show has the potential to bring about social change. I do not think any one show in isolation can do it. I think it is a groundswell that needs to continue to be bolstered from all ends.

In America, to have news that has explicitly taken a position is a very strange place to be in, and it's a very dangerous place to be in. And that's happening on Facebook, as you saw, and that's happening online. People are just being given their news and not the news, which is really, really scary.

I actually think this whole Brexit thing in the U.K. was a welcome example of being straightforward. With the candidates pulling out quickly, there's no stringing the people along.

No one knows what Donald Trump is doing or planning.

It's very rare to find a place where news itself has a political bent. Normally, let's say in the U.K. for instance, newspapers might explicitly support one party or the other, but television is just straight-up facts that are not influenced by any party from either side. In South Africa we try to maintain the same thing. Unfortunately, the government sometimes intervenes, but for the most part, the facts are the facts.

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

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.

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.

There's news that happens in different spheres and can be made just as funny, but it's not necessarily in the normal news medium.

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.

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

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.

When I first started doing comedy, there was no such thing as a room that had black people and white people in it. That didn't exist.

In an American context, let's say gay rights or marriage policy - that's a progressive thing. I understand that in an American context.

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

Now everyone has eyes, and now everyone has evidence. That's really changed how we tell the news and what we get from it.

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."

I'm always fascinated when people say, "We found rude conversations people had via e-mail." Why are you e-mailing this stuff? It has your signature on it! It has a time stamp!

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.

I often feel like the woman in your life is your driving force. She's your muse. She plays a big role in determining how confident you feel when you walk out the door. She can add 1,000 kilowatts of energy - or drain that out of you. She said, "No, you're not that funny." I thought, She knows better than anyone.

I'm coming from a place where I have seen a different way to handle it, or a slightly different way to go through what is happening, that gives me some perspective. So I think it always helps. It always helps to have someone who has traveled the world or seen a different way to do something. That helps give you perspective.

As an outsider myself, I always mixed myself with different groups...I've never been afraid to go into a different space and relate to those people, because I don't have a place where I belong and that means I belong everywhere.

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.

There are many people out there who don't even think of themselves as being averse to facts, but the truth is, they are not getting it.

I don't think things are getting more insane. I do know that the country is more divided than it's ever been. Tensions in America are at their peak.

In my world, a woman was the most powerful thing that I knew. Still is. A woman made the money in my house; a woman made my food. A woman beat my ass when I wasn't a good kid. Women were behind a lot of what spurred South Africa toward democracy.

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

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

It's an interesting place to begin where the country is completely divided into choosing sides, when the only side everyone should be choosing is the side of America, and then politicians essentially should be arguing about the best way to serve America.