By the way, Trevor Noah can also be pretty funny. The point may have been lost after he was named the new moral conscience of cable news, known to some as host of The Daily Show. Much of the coverage focused on the jokes he had tweeted, which were often flat or dull. His real gift is in performance, and his greatest strengths are an exceedingly flexible voice and compelling storytelling, neither suited for 140-character bursts.His talent comes into focus more in his stand-up. “I have a job now,” he said Saturday with pristine understatement at Levity Live, a cavernous and soullessly decorated club inside a giant mall in West Nyack, New York. Then he flashed a dimpled smile that could soften the impact of many jokes. He didn’t mention any of the criticism he has received, which might be good public relations, though also seems a reflection of his temperament.As the sold-out show revealed, his controversial public persona is at odds with his onstage one. Noah has an aggressively sunny, highly polished and meticulously ingratiating stage presence. Whereas other comics might use the controversies about past jokes as grist, he doesn’t seem to take any delight in combat. His provocations (and there are some) are nuanced and measured. His delivery is patient, and his jokes, which can often be quite involved, display few missteps or flubs.Without a trace of anxiety or recklessness, he’s a comedian with the whiff of a politician. So you can see why Comedy Central thought he might be the right fit for The Daily Show. But his performance suggests he will also be a different kind of host, at least at first.Over the years, the current host, Jon Stewart, has increasingly channeled a certain kind of wry exasperated anger, occasionally a few fist shakes away from Howard Beale. Noah doesn’t have an ounce of indignation in his act. His default tone is wry amusement, and his mind gravitates toward complexity and optimism quicker than righteousness and complaint. “I’ve lived life without boundaries, which has been great for me,” he said in a 2011 special, “Crazy Normal,” about being raised mixed race in South Africa. “I really, really don’t see colors in a weird way. When I saw my dad, I never saw a white man. It was my dad.”That may echo Stephen Colbert’s satirical critique of white privilege (“I don’t see race”), but since Noah grew up in the shadow of South African apartheid, the context is radically different. The racial blindness he describes is an expression of freedom, but one he recognizes as unusual. He’s not a particularly confessional comic, and his discussion of race feels more rooted in observational distance than personal experience. While he gravitates toward those issues, he’s just as fixated on the divisions of language.He’s long preferred the fish-out-of-water perspective, and his act has the slick feel of a James Bond film, moving from scenes with a Los Angeles surfer to a quick jaunt in Australia before settling into long stretches in the Middle East. His analysis of these cultures often hinges on the sound of words, quirks of abbreviation and incorrect pronunciation (apparently Americans pronounce “zebra” wrong). In his current tour, “Lost in Translation,” he describes being on the receiving end of a racial slur in Lexington, Kentucky, but what really offended him was the grammar.A large part of his stand-up is obsessively detailed humor about etiquette and mores. In a lightly sarcastic tone, he moved from mocking generalizations about mundane details of life (air travel, subway manners) to motormouth flights of fancy. In other words, he’s fluent in Seinfeld.But his other major comedic mode, and the one that may better anticipate what kind of “Daily Show” host he will be, is finely tuned political argument. Analyzing the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, he mapped out a position that recognized the importance of free speech and emphasized the horror of the killings, while strongly sympathizing with those who refused to say “Je suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie.” This section, which represented something of a risk, displayed a deft rhetorical touch and a mind drawn to complexity, but one that hasn’t entirely figured out how to seriously work through ideas while maintaining a high quantity of jokes. Having a staff of writers will help.Noah is a proud polyglot, shifting from one language to another effortlessly in his act. But he’s just as adept at picking up comedy vocabularies. Not only can he do observational humor and chin-stroking political analysis, but when he hosted South Africa’s first Comedy Central roast, he also seamlessly served up bruising red-meat gibes and borscht belt ham like a veteran insult comic.So while he seems overly cautious about jumping into the scrum of political debate, my guess is that he will pick up the language of The Daily Show as well. But the true measure of his success will hinge on how he makes the show his own. The real question will be: What new language will he bring to American television?One hint may be in the most ambitious bit he performed on Saturday, one hinging on the peculiarly harsh consonants of a Russian accent, which he described as the most menacing in the world. He defended this contention by making “fluffy bunnies and teddy bears” sound absolutely terrifying. But he added that the language itself isn’t scary at all, acting out a Russian man speaking English in a villainous accent, followed by him speaking in the same way in his native tongue. The Russian character now sounded much more natural and approachable.It’s an almost musical joke about the incongruity between language and accent that probably few in Noah’s audience knew. That it got a big laugh is something of an outsider’s magic trick, with Noah pulling off the difficult feat of making something sound more foreign and relatable at the same time. It’s a good metaphor for his challenge ahead. - 2015 New York Times News Service..