Born into a law that made him illegal

Under apartheid South Africa's Immorality Act, sexual relations between white and black people were illegal. Trevor Noah was born in 1984 as the direct product of such a relationship — a fact that shaped everything about his early life. His parents could not walk down the street together; his mother would sometimes have to pretend not to know her own child.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, published in 2016, is Noah's account of growing up mixed-race in a country whose racial categories he did not fit. He is too light for some groups and too dark for others, a position that gave him an unusual vantage point on how race actually functions as a social construction rather than a biological fact.

Much of the book is about his mother, Patricia, a Xhosa woman of fierce independence, Christian faith, and enormous resourcefulness. Noah writes about her with evident love and also with honesty about how her choices — including a deeply damaging second marriage — shaped his childhood. The chapter describing an attack on her by his stepfather is written with great care and without sensationalism.

Noah grew up speaking multiple languages — Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Afrikaans, and English — and the book is in part about how language allowed him to move between communities that were otherwise separated. He could be invisible in almost any group, simply by choosing which language to use.

The book is funny, often very funny, and that is not a contradiction of its subject matter — it is Noah's point. Comedy, like language, is a survival technology. It creates space in situations that otherwise offer none.