Trevor Noah: The Racist

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Trevor Noah has no race. No, really: born in apartheid South Africa to a black mother and a white father, the state afforded the mixed-race child no racial status, a postnatal kick in the teeth which remains as a blank on Noah's birth certificate. It's hardly surprising, then, that the 28 year-old has spent much of his life thinking about issues of race and identity – or "teams," as his thinking has led him to affectionately term them. What's more, in between learning four languages he has clearly found time to think pretty damn hard about it, the result being a fresh and unusual reminder of comedy's capacity to trade in a currency far more valuable than cliché and stereotype.

In particular, Noah is fascinated by the status and power dynamics which follow various racial labels. So he speaks eloquently, for instance, about his grandpa Temperance Noah, a man "so entrenched in apartheid" that he couldn't help but be deferential to his grandson, driving him around in the back of his car to show the "white boy" off. And yet all young Noah has ever wanted is to be "black" – "white" status, he cannily observes, being a pure and protected realm no half-caste can ever aspire to. But where others might use this racial no-man's land as a position from which to lash out, Noah is too smart not to recognise the hypocrisy this would entail. His final satisfaction at being called the "black Hitler" in a German sandwich shop comes as the deliciously problematic culmination to a riotously funny hour from a performer reaching his stride as a class act.