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Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist

STAND-UP GREATS: Trevor Noah on Reinventing ‘The Daily Show’ and Finding Humor in Hard Times

Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist

NBC News

News, Celebrity, Society & Culture, Pop Culture, Movies, Technology, Tv, Interview, Broadway, Music, Politics, Tv & Film

4.73.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Trevor Noah is a comedian and host who stepped into one of television’s most iconic seats in 2015 and quickly made “The Daily Show” his own. In this sitdown from June 2021, Trevor joins Willie Geist in a park across from his studio to revisit the year he spent hosting from his apartment and how he navigated a news cycle dominated by the pandemic and nationwide protests. He opens up about finding humor in the midst of trauma, the global lens he brings to American politics, and why he decided to return to the road on a stand-up tour.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for

0:07.4

clicking and listening along. Got a great conversation for you today with the host of the Daily

0:11.8

show, also a superstar stand-up comedian, a best-selling author, he runs a production company,

0:18.9

he's got a foundation that does great work around the world.

0:21.3

He is, Mr. Trevor Noah. Trevor and I got together a few days ago on a sweltering New York City

0:26.7

day. It wasn't just that it was hot. It was your swampy, thick New York City humidity.

0:32.7

Got us up to 102 on the heat index. Just peak afternoon hours, too. We really know how to pick the day.

0:38.9

So it became kind of a running joke as Trevor came out for the interview in a park in Midtown,

0:44.8

Manhattan, which was right across the street from the Daily Show studio. He was wearing a green army

0:51.5

jacket, and boy, oh boy, did he pay for that. My goodness, it was hot out there.

0:55.5

I'm a pair of unbreathable denim jeans. That wasn't my best selection either, but we had a few

1:01.6

laughs as we dabbed our brows and our foreheads just incessantly during the interview. But once we

1:08.6

got through with that, it was a great conversation just to set the

1:11.1

scene for you. Backdrop is his studio across the street from this park with a giant billboard

1:17.1

with his own face on the side of it. You're going to hear some fire trucks. You're going to hear some

1:21.0

garbage trucks. You're just going to hear New York City in the summer and imagine it all coming through

1:26.2

the prism of sort of air that's so hot and humid

1:30.1

you can't quite see through it. We talked about what it's like to host the Daily Show from home

1:35.3

for more than a year now in a hoodie and also to process and render into comedy all the wild,

1:42.4

wild, sometimes tragic news that's been coming to the country over

1:46.6

the last year. So a great conversation always right now with Trevor Noah of the Daily Show on the

1:53.8

Sunday Sit Down podcast. Trevor, thanks for doing this, man. Thank you, man. We should stipulate a few

...

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