Trevor Noah

There’s a generosity in the way Trevor Noah looks at the world, and it’s contagious. I don’t love everything he has to say, but I love his standup, and I loved his book, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. What I admire is how he takes something complicated and makes it sound human, and funny.
He sees culture from several angles at once, comparing countries and languages and customs without sounding locked into any one of them. The humor comes from that contrast, not from jokes exactly. How one culture reads a thing, how another sees it, how odd both look from the outside. It’s close to how I move through my own American, Chinese, Taiwanese, and partly Japanese and French frames.
But be careful, you may come for the laughs, and walk away with deep thoughts on humanity.