Trevor Noah is too neat to topple large arenas

After a normally long and painful admission procedure at the Globe, and the audience has each swallowed their five-liter bucket of popcorn, because it is mandatory in the hockey arena, Trevor Noah walks onto the stage like anyone, at any small theater. No drivers, not a lot of laser, light and sound bombardment. He’s just getting started.

But it’s not just anyone. Host of the news and political satire program “The daily show” and a lot of awards galas, among others, the South African is today one of the world’s biggest TV stars, speakers, presenters. And comedians then. But he seems incapable of star style. Maybe he owns something so unusual in our stupid beat-to-the-chest time as humility. Maybe it’s actually Trevor Noah who’s a really serious and nice guy? In any case, this characterizes quite a lot of his stand up, both in terms of content and delivery.

National stereotypes initially leads him into pure courtship: since we are in Stockholm, he declares his love for Stockholm. How clean, beautiful and safe this is, even for a bunch of black guys walking home through town in the middle of the night. And so: how well Sweden handled the pandemic and did not shut down society, but followed the recommendations that sensible citizens make if the state comes up with reasonably logical directives.

The United States and Britain, on the other hand, get their fish hot, especially when it comes to the absence of acknowledgments of how incredibly well the small insignificant continent of Africa managed the covid challenges. Here, Noah is at his best, when his personal commitment strikes through. When he almost gets emotional. But already here three things are also confirmed: Trevor Noah is a very good, classic stand-up comedian. His imitations, for example in other languages, are fantastic. But his humility, that shyness, sometimes stands in the way of the real blackness, the thing that can shake the popcorn buckets out of our knees or grab us. Or make us laugh.

He grazes on it worldwide adult fraud social media and what future archaeologists should think about our civilization where mature people actually seemed to have communicated through happy or crying yellow faces. Yes, it’s a terribly stupid, ridiculous and probably deeply damaging culture for not least our offspring we’ve built, but it’s also a bit too general a reflection to do for a comedian world star on a world tour. Anno 2022. Like developments around the pandemic, imbecile Americans who saw it as a violation of freedom to have to wear mouth guards and other nonsense in Noah’s current homeland.

It’s a pity for such weird peas over everything, Trevor Noah is great, he delivers like a king and he is funny – a section about his youth porn where you actually talked before the penetration and the audience had to wait a bit, which is completely unacceptable that need to do today, is wonderfully metaphorical – and he can build whole sketches around his own racist stereotypes. He’s a nice host for a nice night, and it’s not the worst, but he does not overthrow arenas with this.

And so we are here. There has been no break and no quirky “but-oh-you-are-too-lovely!” Extras. Trevor Noah just quits.

Read more stage reviews and other texts by Niklas Wahllöf