Part of that meteoric rise to fame has been put down to Noah's troubled early life. Apartheid-era South Africa didn't exactly make it easy for a mixed-race kid, but it did provide a wealth of material for him to use in his later stand-up. It's that early experience that Noah has used for a lot of his jokes, as well as giving him the skills that allow him to perform for all audiences. In You Laugh But It's True both Noah and plenty of his colleagues have attributed his almost universal acclaim throughout the comedy world with other performers and audiences to the fact that, growing up, he didn't really fit in with the binary split between races in eighties South Africa. He didn't feel he belonged with either group. As such, he tried his best to relate to both black and white South Africans, meaning he spent his whole early life essentially making sure that he could...perform for all audiences. The Daily Show has a crazy-big viewership, of Americans of all sorts, and Noah's early experience and stand up work mean that he can talk about the sort of hot button topics he's got experience with, and make it palatable to all.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
