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New 'Daily Show' host Trevor Noah coming from 'different place'

With a little more than a week until Jon Stewart puts his fake-news persona out to pasture, reporters at the Television Critics summer meetings got a closer look at his “Daily Show” successor, with a double dose of Trevor Noah that included a Comedy Central-sponsored standup performance in Santa Monica Tuesday night and a morning-after press conference in Beverly Hills.

He speaks seven languages — so far — grew up poor in South Africa and considers himself "tainted with hope and optimism."

With a little more than a week until Jon Stewart puts his fake-news persona out to pasture, reporters at the Television Critics summer meetings got a closer look at his "Daily Show" successor, with a double dose of Trevor Noah that included a Comedy Central-sponsored standup performance in Santa Monica Tuesday night and a morning-after press conference in Beverly Hills.

It's tricky to watch a comedian perform and extrapolate from his act to future performance on a show that's become so closely identified with someone else. On the surface (and so far it's mostly surface), Noah appears, as one reporter put it, "unflappable." But while he insisted, as Stewart long has, that he's doing comedy, not news, he did show enough emotional range to suggest he'd be able to move beyond jokes when occasion required.

Noah, who's biracial, talked a lot about race in his act, including  an American phenomenon he calls "charming racism," and told stories both from the perspective of a black man living in America and of an outsider whose experiences include flying into the U.S. from Africa during the height of Ebola hysteria.

"I don't know how not to die," he said repeatedly as he used a story about his nervous reaction to being pulled over for speeding to talk about recent fatal encounters between black men and police and about the way those deaths were covered in mainstream media.

That's not a funny statement, "I don't know how not to die," but it's a powerful one. and it's not something Stewart could deliver under the same circumstances.

"Jon would have to empathize" when talking about some issues, Noah told reporters Wednesday. "I myself come from a different place."

But not so different that "Daily Show" viewers shouldn't recognize it.

When he takes over "The Daily Show" on Sept. 28, the sets will change "a little bit," but it will still look like a news show, Noah said.

"We're still dealing with the same issues. Issues are not really changing ... just a different angle, my angle."

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