Comedy genius Hans Teeuwen now on Netflix

Darkly funny and brilliantly obscene, Hans Teeuwen has been one of the biggest names in Dutch comedy for over two decades. Hans who, you ask? International students can finally discover the unnerving work of the Dutch king of comedy for themselves, as his English-spoken stand-up show Real Rancour is now available on Netflix.

Netflix offers no shortage of comedy specials, but the show Real Rancour by 50-year-old Dutchman Hans Teeuwen is something else entirely. It’s shameless, provocative, confrontational, and absolutely worth the watch.

Real Rancour

“I’m just a happy-go-lucky guy”, Teeuwen tells his audience at Leicester Square Theatre in London during the first few minutes of Real Rancour, an English adaptation of his set Echte Rancune. “I like to see the sun come up in the morning and go down in the evening, and I like to stroke a woman’s pussy. Like this, but with my special ingedrient: consent.”

After introducing himself and demonstrating his fingering technique, Teeuwen calls his mother a ‘fucking whore’, talks about his favorite skin color (‘brown-yellowish’), proclaims himself the moral leader of Britain, brings a musical ode to his ‘anal sex woman’, proposes to insert two fingers into his anus in a desperate attempt to keep his audience entertained, and blames white people for all wrongdoings of non-whites by saying that ‘if a dog gets mad, you don’t blame the dog, you blame the owner’. And at this point, Teeuwen is not even half way through his show.

King of comedy

Teeuwen has been making a name for himself in the English-speaking world for some time now. The New York Times lauded him as a ‘genius’, and the Guardian has called him ‘one of the most exciting comedians in the world’. But Teeuwen was the undisputed king of Dutch comedy long before he became the moral leader of the Brits.

Born in the province of Brabant in 1967, Teeuwen rose to fame as a stand-up comedian in his twenties. With his remarkable talent for sparking both laughter and controversy, Teeuwen has been a dominant force in Dutch comedy ever since. As part of his show Industry of Love, Teeuwen performed a sketch in which he pretended to have sex with the Dutch queen, Beatrix. Years later, Teeuwen sparked international outrage when he casually claimed that he performed oral sex on Turkish president Erdogan once, when the latter worked as a ‘boy whore’ in Istanbul.

Sporadic appearances

After the murder of his friend and film-maker Theo van Gogh in 2004, Teeuwen decided to stop performing stand-up on the Dutch stage. He made his debute in the UK a few years later, where his English-language set was praised for its boldness and its originality.

Nowadays, Hans Teeuwen focuses on his career as a Sinatra-inspired lounge singer. His stand-up appearances are rare; he returned to the British stage with Real Rancour in 2016 after a six-year gap, and it remains unknown when he will reappear with a new set. As comedy critic Brian Logan wrote, the theater is getting Teeuwen ‘in small doses’. For those who are unfamiliar with his stand-up work or simply tired of microdosing, it’s a good thing Netflix has added Teeuwen to its collection.Hans Teeuwen talking about ‘boy whore’ Erdogan during TV interview

_Advertentie.