What we know about 'Daily Show' host Trevor Noah

THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH, 11 tonight, Comedy Central.
Premiere to be shown on all Viacom networks, including MTV, VH1, BET, Spike, Logo, TV Land, Epix and Nick at Nite.

When Trevor Noah welcomes Philly's Kevin Hart as his first guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" tonight, he'll do so as just the third host in the show's history.

(Honk if you remember Craig Kilborn's 1996-98 run, sandwiched between his time anchoring ESPN's "SportsCenter" and hosting CBS' "Late Late Show.")

Noah, who, like his popular predecessor, Jon Stewart, has a last name that could work as a first, is also the "Daily Show" host many of us know the least about.

It's hard to know how Noah's history as a standup who has worked all over the world will translate into delivering the fake news four nights a week, but here's what I can tell you:

He's not from around here. "I am a 31-year-old, half-black, half-white South African who has lived in America for a few years on and off," Noah told reporters in July, as he tried to explain how he might approach some stories differently from Stewart, "a white, 52-year-old Jewish guy that grew up in Jersey."

He probably has what it takes to go deep, something even the fake news occasionally requires. In a standup set performed for TV critics in Santa Monica - he insisted we were a better audience than, say, the Scottish, who apparently make for a tough room - Noah's most effective story, though not his funniest, involved being pulled over for speeding.

"I don't know how not to die" became the refrain for a story about his own nervous reaction to the traffic stop and to the lessons some media tried to find in fatal encounters between black men and police.

And, yes, he acknowledged, he was speeding.

He's smooth. In contrast to Stewart, who always seemed as if he'd prefer to be rumpled even when he wasn't, Noah looks sharper in a jacket and T-shirt than most men do in a suit. He also appears, as one reporter put it, "unflappable."

"I grew up in a home where there was domestic abuse," Noah said. "I grew up in a country where I witnessed violence almost daily, growing up as a child, violence in society, violence in and around the way the police treated people. But I also saw my mother come out of that domestic-abusive relationship. I see her as a beautiful woman today that's come through it and still smiles and finds reasons to laugh.

"I see a country that's come out of that madness into something that is progressive, still challenging, but it is leap years ahead of the way it was when I was a young child. . . . I think I've been tainted by hope and optimism. That's why I'm unflappable, because often I see things from both sides. I'm mixed, not just in my blood, but in my life."

That said, "I do get riled up. There are things that make me angry, but I like to think. I like to think before I speak or act."

He speaks seven languages (so far) and is a pretty fair mimic. "I have an affinity for picking up accents and languages and tones and so on, so that's part of traveling the world and the family that I grew up in," he told reporters in July. "I'm not trying to insult somebody. I don't think anybody's accent is inherently funny.

Noah will probably be less focused on Fox News as a source of comedy. When "The Daily Show" began, he noted, it was based on a then-emerging 24-hour cable-news cycle.

"Half of it is online now," he said. "Now you've got the Gawkers and the BuzzFeeds, and the way people are absorbing their news in sound bites and headlines and little click links has changed everything.

"So, the biggest challenge, and it's going to be an exciting one on the show, is how do we bring all of that together, looking at it [through] a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source, which was historically Fox News?"

There'll be some continuity between Stewart's "Daily Show" and Noah's, because the show's senior producers are staying on, according to Kent Alterman, Comedy Central's president of original programming.

Noah's not likely to be any more enchanted than Stewart was by cable pundits who stoke outrage. Or at least I'm extrapolating that from some comments he made after his standup act. Someone asked him about Jerry Seinfeld's saying that college students had become too politically correct to be good audiences for comedy.

Noah suggested that we're living in an age of "full outrage," and that "some people don't even know why they're angry. They just jump on the bandwagon. They don't even do the research. . . . It's not conducive to us getting to the truth of anything."

The comedian has an unusual take on the outrage that ensued when the excavation of his Twitter feed unearthed some not very funny jokes involving Jews and women, within hours of his having been named as Stewart's replacement.

"I knew that there would be some sort of backlash, or I guess roar, around 'The Daily Show' [announcement]," he told reporters. "An announcement is made somebody is being replaced, somebody is going to say something about it. A lot of people won't like it. A lot of people will like it. I didn't know what the thing would be, though. . . . Will it be the fact that I'm not an American? Will it be the fact that I'm a black person? I didn't know what it would be about, and then they went with that, which is an interesting choice."

He may really be a glass-half-full guy. "If you [say] that a person has 9,000 tweets [and] you think five of them were not to your taste, what I heard is you say that this person has 8,995 tweets that weren't offensive," Noah said.

"I don't strive to be offensive. That's not who I am as a person. That's not who I am as a performer, but you can never control what people find as offensive or not. . . . When you know a person, you know the context of a joke. If you don't know a human being, you don't know when they're joking or when they're not, because you don't know what their baseline is.

"So, that's gonna be one of the great things . . . getting to know my audience, [and] getting my audience to know me."