Comedian and former Daily Show host Trevor Noah said it was hardly a stretch to choose YouTube as the place to debut his next stand-up special.
From the moment he first visited the site in the 2000s, “it always made sense to me,” he said Thursday night at the video giant’s first Creator Premieres event in New York.
Along with footage from Noah’s The Lost SA Special, premiering next month, the event featured work by creators Julian Shapiro-Barnum, Mark Vins and Cleo Abram, and brief remarks by Sean Downey, Google’s President, Americas & Global Partners. New work from Dhar Mann, Brittany Broski and Ms. Rachel was also highlighted at the showcase, essentially a more content-heavy complement to YouTube’s annual Brandcast event in May.
“Maybe it’s because I grew up in South Africa,” Noah mused about the instant appeal of YouTube, which emerged when he was an aspiring comedian in his early-20s. “We didn’t have cable television or the plethora of channels you have here. YouTube seemed like the most obvious choice.”
He recalled being “a kid in South Africa who had no connection to the world, never traveled, my family had never had the opportunity to travel. And then, all of a sudden, people wanted me to come perform in New Zealand, in Australia, in London, in Dubai, in the Philippines, in Singapore, in Nigeria.”
The embrace of YouTube continued when Noah was plucked from semi-obscurity (at least in the eyes of the traditional entertainment world) by Jon Stewart and installed as his successor at The Daily Show in 2015.
“When I joined The Daily Show, for instance, I put The Daily Show on YouTube, which a lot of people were confused by,” he said of the Comedy Central mainstay. “They were like, ‘But you’re on a channel,’ and I was like, ‘Yes.’ And it was to my detriment because people would say, ‘I love your show on YouTube’ and I was like, ‘That doesn’t help the ratings.’ But it helped the show.”
While progress can be “a little slow” in the industry, it is inevitable, Noah said. “I cannot see any other possibility than a creator-run economy and a creator-run world where the audience, the brand and the creators themselves operate in beautiful verticals that aren’t ever broad.”
Since ending his 7-year Daily Show run in 2022, Noah said he has spent his time “traveling the world and creating with different lenses and from different perspectives,” largely on YouTube. Those experiences have given him a new sense of the relationship between viewer and creator.
Tom Hanks once gave Noah a memorable response when asked how he knows whether a movie he made is going to connect with audiences. “‘Trevor, I don’t know. It might be horrible when you make it, it might be horrible when it comes out, it might be horrible when it goes onto DVD. But then 20 years later, somebody will tell you it’s the greatest movie ever made,’” Noah recalled the Oscar winner telling him.
Given its asynchronous nature, YouTube “has an advantage over other types of platforms,” he said. “A person can meet the content when they want to meet the content. … Great TV shows have died just because they got put in the wrong timeslot.”