“People don’t really buy tickets until the day of the show so you don’t even know if you’ve sold enough until you literally walk out onto stage,” Trevor Noah says in this David Paul Meyer-directed documentary. Of course, following the sold-out success of 2012’s That’s Racist we know that bums on seats in S.A. is no longer an issue for Noah. What does remain a challenge is creating a signature comedy style capable of sustaining an international career and extracting him from the soul-sapping pit of corporate gigs that a shot of Noah performing in front of a projector screen sums up (“Don’t you want to turn that off,” Noah dolefully asks an unseen AV technician, clearly painfully aware of the impossibility of giving his best with a Microsoft logo floating above his head).

Tracing the build-up to his first one-man show, The Daywalker, You Laugh But It’s Truecaptures the strangeness of Noah’s position as “coloured by colour, not by culture”, and, through scenes of Noah visiting his mother, hints at a complicated relationship with the family that still forms much of his material. But it’s in sketching Noah’s rapid-fire rise in the South African comedy scene – and the ire it inspires in some of its veterans – that Meyer’s documentary comes up trumps. From the vantage point of a Jay Leno appearance, a Comedy Central special on its way and inroads on the international circuit, talk by David Newton, Mel Miller and even John Vlismas of Noah getting a break because of his colour comes off unattractively bitter.