Names and faces

For someone who uses the word “terrified,” Trevor Noah looked anything b ut just days before taking over the The Daily Show anchor chair from Jon Stewart. Noah acknowledged “it isn’t easy to reboot and recreate a new show from an old show in just five weeks,” which he has had to do, stepping in as host on Comedy Central little more than a month after Stewart ended 16 years molding The Daily Show in his own image. Not quite settled into his office at the network’s so-called World News Headquarters, Noah said, “The joke we have in the building is that I’m the Boy King with a lot of responsibility but with a lot of great people who can guide me.” Noah, 31, is a South African comedian whom few had heard of until his hiring, apart from a worldwide fan base including 2.6 million Twitter followers — and, notably, Stewart, who admired Noah’s work and reached out several years ago. Within hours of his being tapped by Comedy Central in late March as Stewart’s replacement, a social media firestorm broke out when a handful of Noah’s old tweets resurfaced, jokes that targeted women, Jews and Ebola victims. Noah countered that a smattering of jokes, like anything unearthed from a person’s digital past, serves as useful evidence of what that person may have been and, more importantly, has moved beyond.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R- Texa s , like many Republican presidential candidates, frequently evokes Ronald Reagan. But as Cruz talked with Stephen Colbert about trying to draw so-called “Reagan Democrats” to his campaign on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the host wondered: How many of Reagan’s policies would Cruz or other candidates agree with? “Reagan raised taxes, OK. Reagan actually had an amnesty program for illegal immigrants. Neither of those things would allow Reagan to be elected today. So to what level can you truly emulate Ronald Reagan?” Colbert asked Cruz, who wants to lower taxes and is against amnesty. “Could you agree with Reagan on those two things?” “No, of course not,” Cruz said. Colbert told Cruz that when conditions changed, Reagan “reversed his world’s largest tax cut and raised taxes when revenues did not match the expectations, so it’s a matter of compromising.”

Noah