Trevor Noah Quotes

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Trevor Noah

Profession : Comedian

Birth : February 20, 1984

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

Trevor Noah

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

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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

Trevor Noah

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

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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?

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah

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.

Trevor Noah