The internet is aflutter about Trevor Noah's supposed "clap back" at Meryl Streep following her speech at the Golden Globes. In his reaction to the Golden Globes ceremony on "The Daily Show", Noah reflected on the night's black winners and Hollywood's progress in the representation of black nominees for awards like these. Commenting on Streep's speech, Noah said: "Here's the thing I feel like we could all learn as people, you don't have to make your point by sh*tting on someone else's thing, because a lot of people love football and the arts".
He was referencing Streep's mention that Hollywood is "crawling with outsiders and foreigners", and that if they were to be "kicked out" of the country (a reference to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump's campaign promise to deport migrants) there would be "nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts". Her statement was met with resounding applause from the whose-who of Tinseltown assembled for the ceremony.
Noah critiqued one line of Streep's speech. He commented on the distinction she drew between those who like football and people who can appreciate the arts -- calling her "tone deaf" for it. By inference, when taken in the context of the rest of her speech, Streep was associating football and mixed martial arts with the kind of person who may have voted for Donald Trump. The same people who found his public mocking of a reporter with a disability funny. Tone deaf, indeed.
Then, as if predicting the public outcry about his "clap back" on that part of the speech, Noah said: "If you focus only on that part of the speech, you miss the larger point of the speech" as he praised Streep for "a speech about respect, a speech about empathy and most importantly... a speech about responsibility".