Trevor Noah gets why Donald Trump wants to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.
In fact, he supports the move.
"If someone is investigating you and you can fire them, fire them," Noah, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," told a packed house at Centennial Hall in the first of his two UA Presents shows on Saturday night.
Think of this way, he explained: If a cop pulls you over for DUI and you had the power to fire him before he wrote the ticket, wouldn't you do it?
Don't read into that that Noah, who frequently targets Trump on his show, is getting soft on the president. He sees him as an emotional paradox who alternatively frightens him and makes him laugh.
"We're learning about the presidency at the same time as the president," he quipped. "I wake up most days terrified he's the president of the most powerful country in the world and I wake up most days knowing he's going to (do something) to make me laugh."
The Trump barbs were just a small part of his show, which mined his experiences with racism in his adopted America and growing up under Apartheid in his native South Africa. He recalled when he met President Barack Obama just before he turned the White House over to Trump, and he recounted his recent vacation to Bali. At times, the laughter filling Centennial Hall — sustained, deep-from-the-belly laughs that hurt your face because no matter how hard you tried you just couldn't stop smiling — surely must have spilled out onto University Boulevard and floated to the center of campus where they are holding the annual Spring Fling student-run carnival.
The laughter was a welcome respite from the daily headlines about disfunction and chaos in the Trump administration, mass shootings, stock market gyrations and Friday's late-night Syrian air strikes.
Here are a few of our takeaways from Noah's show that made us laugh the hardest:
• Someone recently asked Noah if he was thinking about returning to his native South Africa after Trump called some African countries s*** holes.
"South Africa is not the place you go to to escape racism," said the 34-year-old Johannesburg native, who grew up under Apartheid — the country's form of legalized racism as the minority whites oppressed the majority black populations.
• Noah and President Obama were chatting after he interviewed Obama in the White House as he was about to leave office. At one point, Obama invited Noah to be a part of an event he was hosting for his aides. Noah got a little confused after Obama repeated the world "aides" several times
"Wait, you have AIDS?" he asked Obama and then quickly realized he had just stepped in it. "Here I was, I just asked the president if he had AIDS. 'You must think I'm the dumbest man in the world?' 'Don't be so harsh on yourself, Trevor. I met Trump'."
• Noah considered taking a run outside his Tucson resort Saturday morning, but thought it was too hot; for those of us who live in Tucson, Saturday's sunny but breezy weather felt a little chilly after last week's near-100-degree days.
And while it was the heat — "It's really good to be with you in the oven you call a city!" — that convinced him not to run, it was the thought of ending up on local news that kept him inside the air conditioned resort.
"My greatest fear is ending up on the local news in America," he said, calling local TV news part-tabloid journalism with the way they some stations will report a serious local or national story, then segue into a silly segment about a "dog who married its owner."
"I would go out for a run, fall down and hit my head, and I would end up on your local news. I can see it: 'It's so hot in Tucson Africans are falling'," he said with a straight face as Centennial Hall erupted in laughter.
Saturday's concerts closed out UA Presents' 2017-18 season.
