60 Minutes goes backstage as “The Daily Show” comedian fine-tunes his jokes — and Lesley Stahl finds herself walking right into one of them.
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl a stand-up comedian and host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. On television, the biracial South African brings an international dimension to late-night comedy. Off screen, the 60 Minutes team found, Noah is quick to find humor in daily life and frequently riffs on jokes he makes up on the spot.
“Funny is something that I developed as a tool to belong”, Noah explained to Stahl.
60 Minutes’ cameras watched Noah hone his humor during a rewriting session before a taping of “The Daily Show”, a ViacomCBS property. Noah was reviewing the script with show writers and executive producer, Jen Flanz, when he arrived at a joke about doctors successfully transplanting a pig kidney into a human patient. Midway through reading the script, he had a thought: What if the transplant recipient takes on characteristics of the donor? Writer and supervising producer Zhubin Parang picked up where Noah was going.
