In his last taping of “The Daily Show,” host Trevor Noah reflected on three things he learned in his seven years, but he had to make a joke first.
“You should be happy,” he began. “The African leader’s peacefully leaving. It’s never guaranteed. It’s really hard to believe it’s been seven years at the desk.”
He then launched into what he’s learned in his time at the desk and in America in general.
“I will never pretend to understand America, in a relatively short time I think I’ve been here. I don’t think I know much about anything the more I learn, funny enough,” he said. “But when I thought about it, I realized that there were three main lessons that I’ve learned in my time, being privileged enough to host the show that you’ve been wonderful enough to watch.”
Firstly, Noah dove into the polarized political party binary, doing away with the idea that something is one or the other.
“The first lesson I learned is something that took me a long time to realize: issues are real, but politics are just an invented way to solve those issues,” he said. “Don’t ever forget that. I in the very beginning also got sucked into the whole ‘Republican Democrats’ and ‘this is the way it should be.’ It’s not actually the way it should be, it’s not even the way it is. It’s not a binary. They’re not just two ways to solve any problem.”
To back up his point Noah shared a story of meeting a stranger in Harlem with whom he discussed the restrictions of the American political system
“He said to me, so you know, Trevor, one of the greatest lies they tell you in America, they tell you that they tell you that America is two political parties, Republicans and Democrats,” the host recalled. “And he said, but I’ll tell you now there’s Republicans, Democrats, there’s Black people, and every other person of color was trying to make a name or do something for themselves. ”
“We get tricked all the time, not just in America, but everywhere in the world, into liking or not liking something based more on the tribe that it comes from, the tribe that it emanates from, than what the idea actually is,” he added. “When they put that little r or that D next to somebody’s name in a newspaper article that defines how you feel about it, when in fact, somebody that you may not agree with on most things can do something that you like, they could do something that you agree with. […] I think as we live in a society where we increasingly introduce ourselves with the things that separates us, we forget that real friendships come from the similarities. And then the disagreements, how we polish each other as human beings.”
Noah’s second nugget of wisdom involved emphasizing the necessity of context.
“Never forget that context matters. Never forget how much context matters. I feel like we live in an age of limitless information right now, but we never seem to acknowledge that there’s a shortage of context,” he said. “We process everything in bites, and we don’t realize that we have a lot of information but we don’t have the context that is so necessary for us to process that information, which is so important. Context is everything.”
Lesson No .2 brought about some more humor as well as insight from the retiring host.
“We have information though, we know we know about a flood in Pakistan in a way that we never would have known before. We know about protests in Iran. We know about what the troop movements are in Ukraine We know about a drought in parts of you know, Sudan,” he started with the serious issues. “We know who Pete Davidson is dating and how. Sometimes I feel like we know it before he does. He’s just like, ‘What?’ ‘What?’ Sweet!’”
Lastly, Noah implored his audience to recognize humanity’s natural capability of kindness.
“The final lesson I learned at the show and I learned it not at the show, but because of the show and the news I was covering is: please don’t forget that the world is a friendlier place and the internet in the news will make you think,” he said. “Just don’t forget that. People are a lot friendlier than social media would have you believe. The news is designed to tell you what is happening and generally what is bad is what’s going to make news, but not everything is bad.”
A bonus lesson made the cut as well — that of gratitude — along with a shoutout to his crew.
“The most important lesson my time at the show has taught me is gratitude. It’s taught me to be grateful,” Noah concluded. “Grateful for everything that I have that I don’t even realize I have, grateful to the wonderful people who helped me make every single episode of the show. Thank you to all of them. It was a wild journey, it was the craziest journey that I didn’t predict.”
