How can a person who has been subjected to racism throughout his life make jokes out of exactly those racist, sexist ideologies? The capacity to laugh at our own helplessness is the biggest gift life can ever give you.

Trevor Noah has hilariously made the readers aware about the pathetic principles of the racist regime. In a country where you have to choose sides basis your skin color and if you choose the wrong side you might even die, Noah's mother Patricia chose her life on her own. Neither white, nor black, a "colored" Noah never fit in, so much so that he did not fit in his own home.

“Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said. “A black child, I understand. A black child, you hit them and they stay black. Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. I’ve never seen those colors before. I’m scared I’m going to break him. I don’t want to kill a white person. I’m so afraid. I’m not going to touch him.” And she never did."

Despite being the naughtiest, Noah escaped his granny's whipping and many other punishments just because he was colored - biracial, a near-white born from a white father and a black mother, but didn't escape some other punishments which might have cost him his life. The ridiculous, inglorious law mechanisms during and post Apartheid in South Africa stare in the readers' face like an exasperating, impotent truth and Noah doesn't mince words while mocking them.

"Only Catholics can eat Jesus’s body and drink Jesus’s blood, right?”
“Yes.”
“But Jesus wasn’t Catholic.”
“No.”
“Jesus was Jewish.”
“Well, yes.”
“So you’re telling me that if Jesus walked into your church right now, Jesus would not be allowed to have the body and blood of Jesus?” “Well…uh…um…” - So goes one of the conversations of Trevor with a catholic nun.

Patricia Noah's character has sparkled so beautifully throughout the book - her fight against the patriarchal system, domestic abuse, her thirst to ensure her child doesn't turn out to be a weakling amidst the chaos of the society - she has shone brightly and gracefully.

Trevor Noah is not a great literary writer, neither has he attempted to sound like one. The memoir is lucid, straightforward, blunt as blunt could be and yet doesn't fail to give much learning about the country and its long tryst with mistreatment. It has some beautiful anecdotes from Trevor's childhood and some wonderful lessons he learnt and the book is absolutely not devoid of some amazing quotes.

"I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. "

"I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days."

Abel wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”

"And that’s the problem with the world. We have people who cannot police themselves, so they want to police everyone else"