Trevor Noah demonstrated the liberation of no longer being a late-night talk show host this week when he shared some new stand-up material about the late Charlie Kirk.
The former Daily Show host was sounding off on the backlash that American comedians received for performing at Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored Riyadh Comedy Festival, which began on the heels of the conservative activist’s assassination last month. The festival also coincided with Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from ABC for his comments on the aftermath of Kirk’s death.
“It’s almost perfect comedy timing that this happened now, right? Because had this comedy festival happened at any other time, I think America as an idea would have had more of a leg to stand on as a moral authority,” Noah said on stage at the Comedy Cellar in New York.
“This is the same country where a few weeks ago, you know, Jimmy Kimmel gets kicked off his show—for not making” a joke about Kirk’s death, he pointed out, as Kimmel’s comments were about MAGA’s reaction to the shooting. “I went back to look for the joke that they said… there is no joke,” Noah continued.
And as long the MAGA right keeps insisting there’s “nothing funny” about Kirk’s death, Noah said that will only make him want to prove them wrong.
“You can’t say there’s nothing funny about it… The guy was shot while defending guns. Do you understand how I’m not even writing that as a joke? As a human, you have to admit that is an incongruous funny thing that happens.”
Kirk was fatally shot in the neck by a long-range shooter while speaking at Utah Valley University. At the moment he was shot, he was answering a question about how many trans people he believed have been responsible for mass shootings in America.
The 31-year-old founder of Turning Points USA had long argued for gun access despite the repetitive tragedies, and once declared, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights.”
Noah then compared the scene of the Kirk shooting to the sinking of the Titanic.
“That would be like if the captain of the Titanic was giving an impassioned speech about icebergs right before it happened,” he said. “He’s like, ‘I’ll tell you why icebergs are not as bad as people say,’” he said as the captain before pretending that the ship crashed mid-speech. “The whole thing is ridiculous,” he said.
“Don’t say there’s nothing funny” about how Charlie Kirk died, Noah said, because, “You keep saying that and you’re going to make me find the funny.”
Telling him not to joke about Charlie Kirk doesn’t compute, Noah explained, because “That’s what comedians do.”
“That’s literally what comedians do,” he said. “That’s the whole point of it. There’s nothing funny about most things in our lives—nothing funny about death, nothing funny about life, nothing funny about struggling. That’s the whole point of it, is to find a moment of solace.”
The post Trevor Noah Defiantly Tells Charlie Kirk Jokes to Spite MAGA appeared first on The Daily Beast.
