Comedy

Hans Teeuwen © Daan Brand

Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen is a force of nature. On stage he’s like a whirlwind of the bizarre. Beads of sweat fly from him as he hammers through his routine with the urgency of a man with only a few hours left to live. His voice sounds like Jerry Lewis dubbing a European porn film. He shouts, gurns and generally fucks with his audience, beating them into submission. His show is a trip and – if you are able to take a deep breath, relax and go with it – you’ll discover, underneath the tumult, a genius at work.

I arrange to meet him at a café in a hotel near Time Out. We’re informed that the restaurant is closed but we are welcome to do our interview downstairs in an odd disused dining room which feels decidedly like something out of ‘The Shining’.

‘I like it down here, it’s fucking weird,’ Teeuwen says as we head underground. A waitress decides, for no apparent reason, to dim the already low lights and the whole atmosphere suddenly becomes a good deal more intimate and surreal than I had intended. Feature continues

‘That’s good! That’s it! Turn more lights off. We can dance a little bit, yeah? Do you mind if I dance?’ He undulates his wiry frame in the middle of the room much to the bemusement of the young woman. ‘Do you want to join me?’ he says, offering a hand. She shakes her head and makes a swift, giggling exit. This is typical of the man and performer; he is both unsettling and effortlessly charismatic, all at the same time.

When I last saw him perform, he did a short 20-minute set in a dingy club. There was an incredible focused energy about his performance. ‘I need that kind of intensity because I don’t want to give them too much time to think about what they’re watching,’ he says. ‘I want to lure them into this absurdity, and the forcefulness makes it even more weird and strange. It gives it a sense of importance; well, to me. It makes it feel like it’s important, that these things need to be said.’

Teeuwen is one of the few truly absurdist comedians I have ever seen. In England, we have a long tradition of odd, off-the-wall or just plain silly humour but it’s not ‘absurd’ in the way the Europeans understand it. Teeuwen is the genuine article, wheeling from slapping out the theme tune to ‘Popeye’ on his cheeks one second to leading everyone in a peculiar singalong about Nostradamus the next. He quite deliberately plays with abstraction.

‘I’m constantly thinking about the mood in the room: What’s happening right now? How can I disrupt them? How can I fuck with them?’ he wonders aloud. ‘You can only enjoy this show if you just abandon the idea of trying to make sense of it. It’s not narrative, it’s not logical; however, it’s not random. But what exactly the connections are between the things you’re not exactly sure.’

It sounds like he’s thought about this a lot. Is there a defined philosophy behind his work? ‘I’m always very cautious about having idealistic theories about what I do. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because when artists do talk about stuff like that it always annoys me. They then become moralistic, and I hate moralism. I’m amoral on stage because it gives me much more freedom to do anything and to trust my intuition. If you know a comedian has a message then you already know the outcome of the show. It’s limiting and uninteresting.’

However, this doesn’t mean he isn’t prepared to tackle political issues or take a stand when necessary. After the murder of his close friend, filmmaker Theo van Gogh, in Amsterdam by an Islamic fundamentalist in 2004, he became a vociferous apologist for freedom of speech. ‘Theo was a very good friend of mine,’ he says. ‘So I had no choice; I had to speak out against it. Not many other people did. There aren’t that many big mouths in Holland any more. It’s not something I’d have chosen to do – I’d rather just be an artist and do my thing – but this subject matter is too important not to speak out against it and I feel that I sort of have an obligation to do so.’

YouTube is full of clips of Teeuwen using his comedy to challenge fundamentalism on chat shows and, perhaps most famously, in his eulogy to Theo where he brutally and hysterically makes his point. Why does he think so few others were willing to speak up?

‘It’s simply to do with the fear of violence,’ he says. ‘They try and sell it as being either polite or tolerant, saying it’s about not abusing people, not being hurtful to their beliefs, but really they don’t speak out because they’re afraid. I think anything can be written, anyone should be able to say anything they want. If I write something and somebody gets pissed off and there’s a riot, some people would say I started it because I wrote it.

'But writing something is not violent. You can agree with it or you can disagree with it. You could speak out for it or speak out against it; in extreme circumstances you can even take someone to court for it. But that’s the way it should be. A column or theatre show or movie in itself is not violent. To say someone provoked violence with their words or art is bullshit.’

And why might religious fanatics be particularly afraid of comedy? ‘Because humour relativises everything. It puts things out of context and then lets you look at them in a different light. Then you can see the absurdity of it. The absurdity of the idea that God created the earth in six days and on the seventh he rested! So the seventh day was what? “God, I’m exhausted!” It is completely ridiculous, and with humour you can show this. And that’s what they’re afraid of.’

There’s more than a little method in this stunning artist’s madness.

Hans Teeuwen appears at the Soho Theatre with support from Micha Wertheim Jan 18-Feb 2