Watch Trevor Noah Try to Explain Apartheid to Jerry Seinfeld

Trevor Noah took a ride with Jerry Seinfeld for the latter’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and talked about how he reacted to landing his new gig hosting The Daily Show. He also awkwardly schooled Seinfeld about racism in South Africa.

Throughout the chat, Seinfeld is pretty clueless about the basic politics of South Africa. Explaining the logistics of apartheid, Noah tells him:

“Free speech was against the law, so let’s start there. After 1994, it now became, it is no longer illegal to be black, so you can now do things. So start by sitting on the benches, start by riding on the bus…‘Can we tell jokes?’ Yeah, you can tell jokes.”

Noah also talks about how his parents managed to spend time together while apartheid was legal and how his mom pretended to be his dad’s maid:

“You couldn’t get married. That’s the whole point of apartheid, Jerry. It is illegal for black and white people to fraternize with one another. You definitely couldn’t be in a relationship. That’s like…my mom would get arrested when this would happen. She had to pay a fine, which was a very large amount of money back then…She’d go to jail for like a weekend, she’d pay the fine and then she’d do it again.”

“This is apartheid—apartheid is literally the perfection of racism.”

As for The Daily Show gig, this is how Noah found out he got the job:

“I’m literally driving in the middle of the night and my phone rings and my manager says, ‘How would you like to be the host of The Daily Show?’

“I get out the car, and my legs, I didn’t have legs. You know in those movies where there’s an explosion? But instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear the silence…That’s literally what happened. And then the worst thing is, you’re in Dubai, which is one of the hardest places in the world to find a drink.”

Their conversation as a whole is pretty unfunny. One weird point is Noah’s dismissiveness about the importance of social media protesting. He says, “People are now allowed to protest in their underwear. That almost defies what protesting should be about.” Not really. Ugh, are we breaking up, Trevor?