CityLife

Interview: Hans Teeuwen

Teeuwen is utterly unpredictable

HANS Teeuwen’s show in Edinburgh this year was possibly CityLife’s oddest and most disconcerting experience during August – and at the Fringe, that’s saying something.

So it’s something of a surprise to speak to the Dutch comedian and discover that he sounds perfectly sane.

“Although you don’t know what I’m wearing,” he warns dramatically in his subtly accented English. “A mouse costume maybe?

“The voice may seem quite normal but the circumstances certainly are not.

“I might be murdering someone or strangulating them and you wouldn’t be able to hear it in my voice.”

'Very diverse'

It’s a typically taunting comment from Teeuwen that mirrors the effect of his shows – playful yet slightly worrying, both amusing and utterly unpredictable.

It’s these challenging yet completely absurd shows that have garnered him five-star reviews since he started performing in English two years ago.

Teeuwen takes the Dutch cabaret tradition – “it’s a little song, a little talk to the audience, a little song again, a little act. It’s very diverse,” – and adds his own arbitrary twist.

The latest show sees him perform a puppet show without puppets; sexually explicit song and verse; plus a prolonged and gloriously ridiculous Michael Jackson tribute.

“Probably the most revolutionary thing I did in Holland was the random order of doing certain acts and putting them in an order where they have not a logical connection but more a rhythmic connection.”

'Like poetry'

Indeed that is one of the fascinating elements of show, not knowing what’s coming next. One minute he’s at the piano playing a rude song and the next he’s performing forward rolls across the stage, getting his smart suit dusty. Yet it all seems to flow in a bizarre way.

“Some random things work and some don’t. Sometimes a line works and a line doesn’t work and lots of the times I can’t really explain myself why it works but it just does.

“There’s no logic – it’s just like poetry sometimes works and you don’t really know why. Like David Lynch, there’s something scary about his movies and you don’t know why you’re scared. This is what interests me most artistically.”

But for all of the people that are transfixed by his performances, there are those who inevitably don’t click with it.

“They may feel uncomfortable but they are still unable to dismiss me, then you have them. They still want to know what’s coming next.

Steadfastly apolitical

“But if you take that too far you make it easy for an audience to say ‘oh just go away,’ which has happened also on occasion.

“In England it’s happened a few times actually, but that’s not too surprising because that also happened when I started out in the Netherlands. It’s interesting if you really divide the audience, but my goal is to convince everybody in the room.

“I’d like the Nobel Prize for humour and an Academy Award and stuff like that. And Madame Tussauds, hopefully!”

Back in his native Netherlands he’s just as likely to be known for his outspoken views on freedom of speech as his shows; particularly since his good friend the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was killed in Amsterdam by a Muslim fundamentalist.

But his humour is steadfastly apolitical. A reaction against the previous wave of moralistic comedy in Holland (of the like present over here on the alternative circuit of the Eighties) Teeuwen refuses to preach to his audiences.

“I don’t want to be a prophet or an idealist standing on stage sweating and say my God look at all this wealth and then look at Africa, I’ve never been able to take that seriously.

'Intuition'

“People go to them (comedians) because they’re funny and if they start taking themselves too seriously as thinkers or revolutionaries… your ideas should be hidden in the material.

“Even you, preferably, shouldn’t even be aware of them yourself because if you follow your intuition it sort of sneaks in there.

“But when you start to wave your finger and start to tell people they do this and you should do that, they lose me as an audience.”

Instead, Teeuwen is more interested in provoking a multitude of reactions from his crowd in a completely different and unique way, including discomforting them.

“You can do so much with an audience. You don’t have to constantly politicise everything or make them laugh.

“They make the funny bit even more funny because it’s a relief if that after the discomfort, you can laugh at something. Not many comedians use these techniques and it’s just there for the taking, I think.”

Hans Teeuwen is at the Dancehouse on Saturday, October 17.