Jon Stewart, the theatrically bewildered host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, will yield his anchor chair to Trevor Noah, a South African comedian who isn't particularly funny. Noah's obscure profile threw most Daily Show fans for a loop following Stewart's announcement of his successor yesterday. By day's end, several critics and websites had combed through @Trevornoah's old tweets and discovered a glut of occasionally "problematic" jokes at the expense of women, Jews, sex workers, and Kim Kardashian.
While there's some disagreement as to just how mean-spirited and truly offensive Noah's tweets are, surely we can agree that Trevor Noah, future host of The Daily Show, tells shitty jokes with stale punchlines. Bernie Mac made a prolific career off of being mean-spirited and demographically disrespectful, because Bernie Mac was hilarious and now he's a saint. Tervor Noah is a sack of wheat flour. Just look at these tweets, which fucking suck.
Twitter + Sarcasm = Disaster
— Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) October 1, 2014
A Neanderthal's Proposal
BRUV. Way to single-handedly, and ironically, illustrate why critics are lately so fond of the "punching up" theory of comedy, which holds that a joke is only funny if its target is too powerful for the joke to actually matter in the grand scheme of things. In any case, domestic violence jokes are played, and they're certainly ill-advised on social media. You ain't Bernie Mac!
WNBA, etc.
Let's put aside the truth value of this claim and, instead, assess: when did WNBA-type jokes stop being funny? 2002? Were they ever funny to begin with? There's a Twitter feed specifically dedicated to WNBA jokes, which seems less like comedy, more like punishment for crimes in a past life.
The WNBA: Where maternity leave happens
— WNBAJokes (@WNBAJokes) January 15, 2012
#BeatsByDreidel
Mos Def has a similarly offensive song about this very subject, and I kinda sorta fuck with said song, so far be it for me to disallow the gist of it from Trevor Noah's timeline. #BeatsByDreidel, though? Is Trevor Noah ghost-writing the @IHOP account in his spare moments?
Thai Hookers
Kim Kardashian
"Convince Her"
White Girl Unicorn
The flat-assed white women jokes from the mid-'90s come undone by everything we know about white women in 2015, year of the booty. The only people who think these jokes are astute or funny anymore are, ironically, #basic white women (and Trevor Noah).
Fat Chicks
Shouts out to Jamie Foxx, who thankfully deaded stand-up comedy's bland and monotonous taste for "big-boned" jokes and such at the infamous roast of Emmitt Smith, where Foxx ethered comedian Doug Williams' career. Comedians drown every day, Trevor.