I haven’t been a regular viewer of “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” for quite some time. I didn’t stop watching because I dislike him — to the contrary, I think he’s very funny and clever, and really enjoyed his solo standup show last year (here’s my review). No, the reason is the same I have for not viewing the monologues of any of the other late night hosts: I simply can’t take the non-stop Trump material, night after night. On occasion, I’ll check out a YouTube clip of any of them doing something non-Trump-related, which is how this caught my attention.
During commercial breaks, with the cameras rolling, Noah answers questions from the studio audience. The best of those are saved and posted online. The other night, a guy asked what Noah thinks about Liam Neeson’s recent admission that, many years ago, when a female friend told him she’d been raped by a black man, he wanted to go out into the street and kill the first African-American he saw. The matter came up during an interview on “Good Morning America” and went viral so quickly that the studio cancelled the rest of Neeson’s publicity tour, while he tried to explain himself but only made things worse.
Here’s Noah’s very thoughtful take…