Brow Beat

Trevor Noah Can’t Joke About the Philando Castile Verdict

A lot happened over the weekend, and, on Monday night, Trevor Noah tried his best to make jokes about it all: poking fun at Trump trying to roll back everything Obama did—“[Trump’s presidency] is a series of control-Zs, punctuated by golf weekends”—Trump invoking a miserably bad Spanish accent to pronounce Spanish words during a speech in Miami, and Trump’s surrogates not being able to get straight whether the president is under investigation during their Sunday morning show appearances.

But there was nothing funny about the Philando Castile verdict, and Noah didn’t try to go for laughs. “How does a black person not get shot in America?” Noah asked. “The bar is always moving. The goal post is always shifting. There’s a different thing to explain why the person got shot. Oh, the person was wearing a hoodie. Oh, the person was running away from the police. Oh, no, the person was going toward the police. Oh, no, the person was running around at night … But at some point you realize there’s no real answer.”

Noah delivered this part of his monologue in a calm but somber tone—a tone that we have seen before from him. It’s the same one he’s employed each time he’s covered an unjust act of police violence on a black life. It’s the same tone he used when talking about Terrence Crutcher, the Chicago police, and Alton Sterling. He doesn’t scream at the camera, sigh with exhausted frustration, or repeatedly jam his pen into his desk as his predecessor might have. Noah is composed, measured, and restrained. It’s emotionally affecting television, and it somehow still manages to effectively convey frustration

Noah went on to point out how the NRA, an organization that claims to seek to protect the rights and lives of legal gun owners in America, has been silent on Castile’s death, the circumstances of which involved a legal gun owner being shot seven times at close range with his girlfriend and her daughter in the car after, upon reaching for his ID, he informed the officer that he was a legal gun owner and was armed. You’d expect that NRA leaderswould lose their “goddamned minds” over this. Too bad, Noah said, the organization’s mission doesn’t seem to extend to black people.