Hans Teeuwen Event Review
He may be the critics' darling, but looking around at tonight’s beer-soaked audience, it's clear Hans Teeuwen is still a largely unknown quantity in the UK. Mistaking the ‘controversial’ tagline as code for offensive Jim Jeffries-style stand-up, hoards of 30-something ‘lads’ armed with pints have stumbled into the late night gig. They are in for an almighty shock.
Teeuwen bounces on to the stage, greets the audience, and immediately starts moaning a bizarre musical tribute to Michael Jackson. “Wahaay,” shouts one punter, desperately trying to wrestle back the rowdy atmosphere. But there’s no turning back. Before anyone has the chance to process Teeuwen’s ludicrous opener, he’s skipped into the ‘fairy-tale forest’, a magical place where animals know right from wrong and bad from evil. Two men in front exchange puzzled glances. They take big gulps of beer and try one last time. But it’s no use: Teeuwen is embarking on a homoerotic puppet show with his own hands, one hand forcefully taking the other from behind. Confused and disorientated, the men follow 20 or so others who have had enough, filing out of the Udderbelly and back to a world that makes sense.
As always, there’s a bewildering array of comic ideas in Teeuwen’s set. Most work brilliantly, flirting with the line between the surreal, the absurd and the plain silly. Yet probably the greatest triumph of the Dutchman’s comedy is the feeling of awkwardness he is able to effortlessly build and then release. Beginning a memorable skit on religion he exclaims, “I once knew a man…who was a Jeeew.” Then he stops, letting the audience digest this ominous phrase, allowing them to fret about what awful direction such material might go. Of course, the racist punchline never comes, and instead Teeuwen turns the joke on its head, using the rhythm of the word to show the stereotypes we implicitly attach. This is typical Teeuwen - suggestively political, but never preachy.
In the past some have criticised Teeuwen for being misogynistic, and if there’s one criticism of tonight’s performance, it’s that he tries too obviously to address this. One sketch which positions him as a sexual loser feels forced and out-of-place, and a couple of new songs fail to maintain the comic momentum.
But this is not to say that Teeuwen shies away from the issue of sex. In a recent interview Teeuwen told me: “With the British audience you can talk about the phenomenon of sex, but if you talk about it explicitly people shy away.” Tonight, in his gloriously timed finale, he deliberately pounces on our prudish sensibilities with a song so brilliantly explicit it would be ruining it to explain. Suffice to say, it’s the perfect end to a near-perfect routine, rounding off a show that should be another large stepping stone in Teeuwen’s attempt to conquer the UK.
Read our preview of Hans Teeuwen.