TORONTO – Less than 24 hours after being named as Jon Stewart’s replacement on The Daily Show, comedian Trevor Noah is facing backlash thanks to some of his old tweets.
Twitter users flocked to the 31-year-old South African personality’s Twitter page following Monday’s announcement to find out more about the comedian, who was relatively unknown in the U.S.
After resurrecting some of his old tweets, users have deemed many of his jokes anti-Semitic, sexist and even racist.
Late Monday, Buzzfeed editor Tom Gara went back years in Noah’s Twitter history and began retweeting the jokes.
“Weird that Trevor Noah didn’t do a quick twitter cleanup before getting the job,” he tweeted.
Noah’s first appearance on The Daily Show was in December, at the height of an Ebola scare in Africa, when he did a piece on the differences between South Africa and the United States called “spot the Africa.”
Some are now calling on Comedy Central to fire the comedian.
However, many were quick to point out that Noah isn’t the first comedian to be controversial with his humour.
Noah will be the third host of The Daily Show since it first aired in 1999. The satirical comedy show has won a litany of awards including 18 Primetime Emmy Awards and two Peabody awards.
On Tuesday morning, Noah tweeted, “Twitter does not have enough characters to respond to all the characters on Twitter.” But deleted the tweet shortly after.
The comedian has not commented further on the controversy, nor has The Daily Show.
– With a file from Global News’ James Armstrong
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