When the news broke that TV veteran Jon Stewart was leaving his post at landmark satirical program The Daily Show after 16 years, speculation ran rampant over who could replace him.
Comedy Central's announcement that South Africa's Trevor Noah was taking over was met with surprise...and in some cases skepticism, as controversy brewed over a number of comments Noah made on his twitter account.
In the run up to hosting The Daily Show, the young comedian's been touring the US - and our correspondent Rebecca Foster was on the scene.
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At a small comedy venue in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington DC, fans were eager to see Trevor Noah's opening night.
While he's well-known in South Africa, landing the Daily Show job has thrust him into the spotlight here in America for the first time.
And tv fans everywhere are eager to see whether he can live up to Jon Stewart's reputation...and whether his background as a South African will give him a unique position as he covers American politics.
LORAINE CARTER, SHOW ATTENDEE
"I think he's going to be excellent. I think he's just as witty, just as great, and he'll eventually be just as popular. So I think he was a great selection."
ERIC FILEMYR, SHOW ATTENDEE
"I think it's going to be great to have an outside voice from someone outside America just because sometimes we're really ridiculous and it takes someone from the outside to point that out. So I'm excited for his observations. And he does a really good job of lampooning his own politics from South Africa so I think he'll do good with ours too."
SAMUEL RUMHIZHA, SHOW ATTENDEE
"Here is a guy who is neutral, who is not really biased and he will probably give it a fair view of how he looks at American politics, maybe with a comparison of what we have in Africa."
But Noah's appointment has not been without controversy. Some critics have found sexist and anti-Semitic undertones to his past comments on twitter. Here's Eddie Scarry, media reporter for the Washington Examiner.
EDDIE SCARRY, MEDIA REPORTER, WASHINGTON EXAMINER:
"We see that twitter controversies are pretty fleeting, especially when it comes to comedians. They're given a certain license that reports or actual news anchors don't have. At issue really is not so much the controversy of the tweets, what he was saying, some of them were fat girl jokes, some people thought they were anti-Semitic in some kind of way. But the real issue is that a lot of people just didn't find them funny. So when he comes in and is doing stuff that's actually written for him by a team of writers and he has time to prepare and it's not so off the cuff like Twitter is, he'll be judged more on that performance and no so much his old tweets."
Whether you are a fan of Trevor Noah, or you have your doubts, all eyes are sure to be on this burgeoning star when he takes over the Daily Show helm sometime later this year. SOC.