Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah is a South African comedian and former Daily Show host whose memoir Born a Crime is a funny, warm, and deeply serious account of growing up mixed-race under apartheid.

Trevor Noah is best known internationally as the host who succeeded Jon Stewart at The Daily Show, but Born a Crime, published in 2016, is the work that reveals both the depth behind the comedian and the extraordinary life he has lived. The title refers to his literal legal status at birth: under apartheid law in South Africa, sexual relations between a black person and a white person were a criminal offence, and Noah’s very existence was against the law. The book recounts his childhood in Johannesburg and the township of Soweto — poverty, violence, the complexity of South Africa’s racial taxonomies, his mother’s fierce and eccentric Christianity — with warmth, precision, and the structural intelligence of a natural storyteller.

The most powerful thread in the book is Noah’s relationship with his mother, Patricia, whose resilience, faith, and ingenuity kept them alive and whose near-death at the hands of Noah’s stepfather becomes the book’s emotional climax. Noah writes about her with obvious love and considerable honesty, and the chapters devoted to her are among the finest in any contemporary memoir. The comedy is present throughout — Noah has a genuine gift for finding the absurd in the terrible — but it never becomes a way of avoiding the book’s most serious material.

Born a Crime succeeds at something genuinely difficult: it is entertaining and moving in equal measure, it is funny without being glib, and it explains the mechanics of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa with more clarity and humanity than most formal histories achieve.