Today The Daily Show announced two new cast members will be joining the show before the end of the year. Hasan Minhaj will come on next month as a correspondent, and Trevor Noah will join the team as a contributor in December.
But who are they?
Minhaj is an LA-based comedian, actor, and writer who's on-point when it comes to racial issues. His YouTube series The Truth ethered Ashton Kutcher's racist PopChips commercial back in 2012 and shows he's ready to take his rants to The Daily Show (watch below). Currently Minhaj is working on Paint the Town, a featured film for the Sundance Institute based on his experience as a first-generation Indian-American. He was also featured as a "New Face" at this year's Just for Laughs festival in Montreal.
In an interview last year with Zaki's Corner he broke down his approach to comedy:
"I feel like comedy specifically the more personal and more specific you can be it almost becomes more universal. What I mean by that is if you peel back the layers and layers of human existence, the feelings and experiences, the things that we feel in our everyday lives growing up it really boils down to the same feelings all humans feel. Fear, love, loyalty, betrayal, all those things that as human beings we all feel as emotions. I feel like if you talk about those specific themes that happen within your specific life or experience no matter how unique that is, everyone that’s experienced that fear, love, loss, happiness, joy, an awkward situation and I think people really get behind that and that’s where it becomes more of a universal thing."
Noah is a South African comedian who's already a major star in his home country. Right now he's on the cover of GQ South Africa. His standup special Trevor Noah: African American premiered last year on Showtime. Like Minhaj, race is also a focal point of Noah's comedy. In 2012 he sold out the entire run of his one man show The Racist at the Edinburgh Fringe.
That same year Newsweek asked if Noah's comedy could jump from South Africa to America. Clearly, the answer is yes. Check out his five-minute set on Letterman from last year:
