Reel Rundown: Amid the madness, Trever Noah finds the bright side in ‘Joy in the Trenches’

Shortly after hosting the Grammy Awards broadcast on Feb. 1, Trevor Noah took a relaxing flight home. Yet any sense of peace that he was feeling wouldn’t last long.

Because as soon as he was again connected to the internet, he noticed that he’d received a number of texts and emails. Some expressed sympathy, others voiced support. All the messages let Noah know that, in one way another, those sending them were concerned about him.

What was going on? He soon found out. And as it turns out they had good reason to worry, a fact that Noah explains in his Netflix comedy special “Trevor Noah: Joy in the Trenches.”

And that reason had to do with President Donald Trump.

Noah is a native South African who succeeded Jon Stewart as host of “The Daily Show.” In recent years he has performed around the world, and he begins this show by explaining that he’d originally planned to do something completely different.

“I was gonna tell you some jokes about me playing pickleball,” he joked.

Following the Grammys broadcast, though, everything changed. During the show he made a joke about Trump’s connection to the late Jeffrey Epstein. Not only did Trump fail to laugh, but he threatened to take Noah to court.

“Get ready, Noah,” the president wrote on his personal social media platform Truth Social. “I’m going to have some fun with you.”

Which is something that would, or should, frighten anyone. But being a comedian, Noah responded not by being afraid but by building his whole comedy special around the situation. Much of it is funny, most of it is biting and all of it is performed by someone who is well-versed in U.S. history and politics.

Yet while much of his material is political, Noah is no George Carlin ranting at the powers that be or the hypocrisies that lie at the heart of American societal and cultural practices. At heart, he is a storyteller whose performance style is far less strident than Carlin’s.

And this is the case whether he is relating how much more difficult the life of Martin Luther King was than popularly thought, how aliens might come to regret invading Earth at this particular moment or simply sharing personal tales of his growing up in South Africa.

Regarding his personal life, he talks about how he would gleefully guilt-trip his mother on those occasion when she would forget to pick him up from school. Sharing a far more intimate aspect of himself, he shares how a therapist once told him he is “undateable,” mainly because – as he explains – “I have an inability to not say what is in my head.”

As proof, he relates how he gave the wrong answer to a question a girlfriend once posed to him. When she asked him whether there was something about her that he could change, he fumbled his reply – and the relationship as a result. What he now realizes, he admits, is that “There’s one correct answer” to such a query.

And, along with much of the audience, he pronounces that answer with conviction: “Nothing!”

Still, amid all the hand-wringing Noah does over personal and political issues, the overall message that he conveys is one of hope. During trying times – which the world clearly is enduring at the moment – he stresses that it is important not to ignore the good parts of simple everyday life.

Referring to the special’s title, he shares an anecdote about World War I when the two sides – British and German – shared moments not as soldiers caught up in war but as mere humans living for the moment.

Noah shares about how the two sides once played a game to see who would win the right to a cow that had stumbled into the area between their respective lines. The enemies would even, at times, sing to each other, a sign he says that the soldiers from both armies could, and did, find “joy in the trenches.”

“Just because the big happens,” Noah says, “doesn’t mean that the small stops.”