Late night is becoming a launching pad for the South African comedian’s global empire. Catch him at OZY Fest. When Trevor Noah took the reins of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, critics wondered whether he could live up to the reputation of his scathing satirist predecessor, Jon Stewart. Four years later, the question facing the South African comedian is much bigger: not whether he can survive in America, but whether his brand can conquer the world. Don’t believe it? Just consider that Noah, 35, with his made-for-television childhood (literally, now that his best-selling memoir Born a Crime is receiving a film adaptation), gives him a truly global perspective that none of his late-night contemporaries can match. Not Stephen Colbert of the Late Show, nor Seth Meyers at Late Night. Nor even John Oliver, who is British, but reiterates the firmly Anglo-Saxon tone of his talk-show peers. “This is still clearly very U.S.-centric kind of stuff. But he does manage to slip in a lot of perspectives we don’t get anywhere else on late night. He manages to do it in ways that are usually really funny,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. | 
