If you’ve been getting excited in the lead up to Trevor taking on his biggest gig yet, we’re sure you watched him deliver his opening monologue yesterday. You may even have seen the likes of News24 and TimesLive singing his praises, phrases like ‘nailed it’ and ‘aces opening show’ being thrown around by our local news sites.

The thing is we’re all kind of biased, so what do the folks over at the New York Times think about opening night for T-No? Their review starts by saying that he has stuck with the winning formula created by former host Jon Stewart and continue as follows:

Sure, the 31-year-old South African-born Mr. Noah is a new face and voice. Likening Mr. Stewart to a comedic father, he joked: “Now it feels like the family has a new stepdad. And he’s black.” Assured, handsome and with a crisp delivery, Mr. Noah was a smoother presenter than Mr. Stewart, who made an art form of sputtering and exasperated face palming.

But if Mr. Noah’s debut was largely successful, it was also because of the operating system — the show’s writing — running under the surface. That algorithm, capable of processing a day’s media inputs into a satirically argued package, is what makes “The Daily Show” “The Daily Show.” This first outing was about proving that he could run the software without crashing…

Mr. Noah read his material with good timing, shifting from sly to authoritative to snarky. What’s less clear yet is if he can be off-the-cuff funny. His first interview, with the comic and actor Kevin Hart, was mostly Mr. Hart energetically holding forth and Mr. Noah laughing…

Then there’s Mr. Noah’s boundary pushing, which earlier landed him in controversy over old jokes on Twitter. On Monday night, he delivered a couple that might have made Mr. Stewart wince — one playing on a pun of “aides” and “AIDS,” another in which he pretended to be crack cocaine boasting to crystal meth, “I took down Whitney Houston!”…

However much you loved Mr. Stewart, the show could use that. If I may allow myself a brief apostasy: Mr. Stewart’s “Daily Show” was a landmark, but in its last few years, it had become too good at giving fans what they expected — thorough, well-researched pastings of Republicans and Fox News, over and over.

If Mr. Noah wants to do what revolutionary product launches do, he’ll eventually give his audience less of what it wants, and more of what it doesn’t yet know it needs.

It seems even in the comments section Trevor was getting some praise – yes, a comments section where not everything descends into name-calling and finger-pointing, think the opposite of what used to happen on News24.

It’s great to see our local lad getting a fair shake on the international scene, no doubt he will grow into the role and hopefully begin to assert himself more as the days and weeks roll on.

[source:newyorktimes]