Trevor Noah opens with a joke about taking photos then and now. Today it’s all “picture picture picture, delete delete delete”. Back then it was invite your friends round to survey the hallowed holiday album. The joke returned to mind 90 minutes into Noah’s set, when it dawned on me that Off the Record is a holiday album, in which the South African shares with us observations and adventures (buying clothes in Paris; a trip to the Taj Mahal) from his world tour so far. And it’s a well assembled album, no doubt – the pictures all beautifully composed and framed – even if the landmarks look familiar and the snapshots start to feel like one thing after another.
I feel churlish: Noah is a fantastic comedian, and there’s lots to savour in this, his first set since quitting The Daily Show after a seven-year stint. An early section on that well-trodden standup subject, air travel, shows we’re in extremely capable hands, as the 39-year-old delivers a riff to make Michael McIntyre seethe with envy, about the battle for the armrests when sat in the middle seat. Another choice early routine makes hay with the idea that “white people love being flabbergasted!”, a phrase Noah incants over and again as he illustrates this or that white person wallowing in performative but impotent fury. (I felt very seen.)
Most of the show, though, reports back on countries and cultures Noah has encountered while touring – leaving you wondering whatever did he talk about on the opening shows of the tour? It’s quite the feat to turn these experiences into so much material so soon. But a lot of it rehashes stereotypes: the rude Parisian, the angry Glaswegian, the Londoner resisting eye contact on the tube. That we don’t have real crime in the UK is an observation US-based comics have been making since at least Bill Hicks’s “hooligan” routine. It’s as if Noah, whose technical brilliance isn’t in question, has challenged himself to see if he’s good enough to reanimate some of comedy’s hoariest conceits.
He is. He usually finds an angle on the familiar that jolts it back into funny. But after two hours, I wanted something fresher. An insight, say, into the Noah behind the smooth standup operator, this detached observer of global mores. Or indeed any material with political bite, which we might expect but don’t get from a man who was until recently the US’s satirist-in-chief. In lieu, there’s an undeniably hilarious Donald Trump impersonation, from a comic whose armoury of amusing voices and accents is constantly deployed tonight.
Now and then, the globe-trotting material sidesteps national cliche, as with the droll dialogue with a flummoxed Mexican that finds our host insisting – in Spanish – that he can’t speak Spanish. Noah is so slick at all this, so supremely at ease on stage, that it can feel like coasting; like a holiday for a man who has spent seven hard years at satire’s coalface. You can’t deny he’s earned it, nor that it’s fun to come along for the ride.
• At the O2 Arena, London, until 25 November. Then touring the US from 30 November
