"The Daily Show" host Trevor Noah is returning to host the Grammys
"The Daily Show" host Trevor Noah is returning to host the 64th Annual Grammy Awards. The announcement was made as part of a wide-ranging conversation Wednesday on "CBS Mornings."
Noah hosted the Grammys in March, when the ceremony was held outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles to allow for social distancing.
"I was just lucky to be a part of it, you know," Noah said on "CBS Mornings." "And I guess we had such a good time that we were like, imagine if we had people there how much more fun would we have had, and so this year the Grammys is going to be back."
Noah joked that, as the host of the Grammys, he has a lot of responsibilities.
"Like, if I'm not there, who lifts Kevin Hart into his seat, you know what I mean?" he said. "There are important things that I am supposed to be doing on that night, you know? I give Jay-Z emotional support. He's very nervous, and I just tell him, 'It's going to be OK, Jay,' You know? 'You're breaking a record. You're beating Quincy Jones in nominations.' I'm there to give people the moral support that they wouldn't have."
The Grammy Awards will be broadcast January 31, 2022, on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.
On "The Daily Show," Noah said he tries to put on what he's feeling and experiencing with his team.
"We talk about things at home, we talk about things with our community, and on 'The Daily Show' what I try and do is have those conversations, no matter how complicated they get," he said. "You know, like now with the vaccines, with Omicron … yeah, it's complicated, but I'm trying to have honest conversations about it, what is normal, what should we be going back to as normal, what life do we want to live as people, and then … how do you find the funny?"
Noah is from South Africa, which reported the Omicron coronavirus variant to the World Health Organization last week. The variant's discovery sparked concerns that it may be more transmissible than other strains and that vaccines may not provide as much of a defense against it, leading some countries, including the U.S., to impose travel restrictions on countries in southern Africa.
The restrictions sparked criticism that South Africa was essentially being punished for sounding the alarm about the variant.
"What South Africa did was say, 'Hey, we helped figure it out,' and then people were like, 'Oh, then it's yours,'" Noah said, "and it's like, 'No, no, no, we're just helping figure it out,' and so I think this is part of the confusion in the world, is people not understanding what people are actually doing. Like, I feel like scientists are doing a great job, but there needs to be like a middleman who's explaining to people what the scientists are discovering because clearly it goes from science to front page and then everybody just panics."