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As ratings rise, Noah takes show on road

Daily Show’s newest host taping a week of shows in Chicago

By Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune
Published: October 20, 2017, 6:00am

CHICAGO — It’s been a bumpy ride for Trevor Noah.

When he took over “The Daily Show” in September 2015, he was the interloper, the slick, young — and let’s not forget, foreign — guy getting the job that many devotees of the show under Jon Stewart thought should have gone to longtime contributor Samantha Bee.

And he was replacing Stewart, who in more than 15 years had become a comedy giant as he defined the show’s specialty in skewering politics and the media.

It was a can’t-win situation. But Noah, now 33 and two years in, seems to be winning.

With “The Daily Show” in Chicago for a week of sold-out tapings at the Athenaeum Theatre, it is showcasing a host who has signed a new, long-term contract amid ratings that have risen by almost 15 percent over the last year and earned him his largest audiences, at about 1.5 million nightly viewers.

The show’s Donald J. Trump Twitter Presidential Library, a free pop-up museum that was warmly received when it debuted in New York this summer, will be up Friday through Sunday in a room at Chicago’s Union Station.

Then, also starting Friday, Noah will begin a run of sold-out stand-up shows at the Chicago Theatre that, due to demand for tickets, has swollen to six shows since the gig was first announced during the summer.

Noah has done it in part by riding the long comic coattails of President Trump, whom the South African comic identified early and often as a man bearing similarities to certain African dictators. He’s also done it by getting his own story out there through a well-received autobiography, “Born a Crime,” about growing up biracial in South Africa.

And his stance toward America – slightly amused, slightly aghast, a little apart from it – has helped, too. On the last “Daily Show” show before a week off to prepare for Chicago, he recounted with glee the saga of U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., the staunch anti-abortion crusader who was outed having urged the woman he was having an affair with to get an abortion.

“It was just a (pregnancy) scare, which makes this even funnier,” Noah said. “He didn’t even wait a day to confirm it before he abandoned his entire belief system.”

The Chicago shows will be the first time the main apparatus of “The Daily Show” has ventured out of its New York studio since covering the Republican and Democratic national conventions from their host cities last summer.

“One of the biggest things that really, really changed the show and the direction we were moving in and how people perceived us was when we went to the conventions,” Noah said. “Because that was the first time the show didn’t exist in a familiar space, the first time the show wasn’t in the ‘Daily Show’s’ studio, … people now see you slightly differently. And then the election becomes another milestone because now we’ve all experienced a great trauma together.”

Chicago was the obvious choice for a next road trip, said Noah. “Chicago was one of the first cities that really embraced us,” he said. “It was one of our strongest markets when I took over the show, and I’ve been grateful ever since.”

One hint about the timing of the shows is offered in the title the producers have chosen for this week:”‘The Daily Show’ Undesked Chicago 2017: Let’s Do This Before It Gets Too Damn Cold.”

But, really, said Noah, when his “TDS” team planned this back in July, they were thinking more about the ebb and flow of the news than about the weather. “Funny enough we thought this would be a time in the year when the news cycle would quiet down. That’s historically when it happens,” he said. “But as you know, there’s a fire that is burning nonstop at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. … You can’t wait for the news to stop. So for a show like this, just do it.”

There’s a recent history of late-night TV hosts coming here and satisfying audiences more with their star power than their unexpected takes on the city. David Letterman and Jay Leno brought their shows here twice each in the later years of the 20th century. Conan O’Brien was here twice since 2000, once with NBC and once with TBS.

The standard, for these appearances, has been the rote, slightly disappointing riff on deep-dish pizza or Cubs fandom. The rarity has been the fresh eye, as when Letterman made fun of the name Wacker Drive. There’s a line to walk between delivering references that will make sense to the national audience while seeming worth pointing out to those of us who live here.

Noah, of course, is aware of this. A promo spot for his Chicago week calls up the age-old debate between deep-dish and thin-crust pizza before calling out the real pizza abomination: pineapple.

“Now I want to be clear,” executive producer Steve Bodow said, also in a phone interview. “We will discuss deep-dish pizza, but it will go even deeper than deep-dish pizza.”

“We might play with a few of those tropes just to call out the fact that they are tropes,” the host said. “But other than that, it’s coming in with an honest attitude and coming to celebrate the city in all its complexity.

“Obviously we’ll be doing ‘The Daily Show’ as people know and love it from Chicago. But at the same time, we will be focusing specifically on Chicago issues because in many ways, you know, Chicago is a microcosm for America and its issues.”

Noah and others from the show were here last week taping pieces and went “everywhere from the South Side to downtown Chicago to Chicago prisons,” said Noah. Education, crime and the perception of crime and, to an extent, race relations are also on the docket, the producers said.

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