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Until the other day I’d never heard of the Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen, but I became an instant fan after reading, in a 2016 Guardian profile that I dug up online, that after the 2004 jihadist murder of filmmaker and raconteur Theo van Gogh (who, it appeared, had been a friend of his) Teeuwen took a break from comedy to become, in the words of Guardian reporter Brian Logan, “a vocal campaigner for freedom of speech – and against Islam, which he sees as opposed to it.” Logan quoted Teeuwen as calling Islam “the most dangerous subject there is, the biggest taboo. And, I’m afraid, the biggest enemy of free speech.” Logan noted that after the prosecution, earlier that year, of the German comic Jan Böhmermann for mocking Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (at the time, German law criminalized insults directed at foreign heads of state), Teeuwen, out of solidarity with Böhmermann, told a Dutch TV interviewer that he’d been a customer of Erdoğan back when the Turkish president was a boy prostitute in an Istanbul bordello. Simply by telling this joke, Teeuwen was risking arrest in his own country. He didn’t give a damn.
It was striking to see a writer for the Guardian, that most PC of British newspapers, applauding the “anti-PC” Teeuwen for “star[ing] down piety, sensitivity and your expectations of comedy with a ferocious glare….You end up just marvelling at his control, his shamelessness, and at the different ways he has of making us laugh.” Logan compared Teeuwen to one of my own favorite standups, Doug Stanhope, noting that Teeuwen, like Stanhope, “often says objectionable things,” but better “a comic who makes me puzzle, interrogate my own opinions, laugh with astonishment and feel the ground slip from under my feet, than one with whom I always agree.”
Two years later, when Teeuwen performed in Oslo, the headline of a news story in Dagbladet zeroed in on Teeuwen’s readiness to challenge “the biggest taboo”: “Islam–Critical Comic Visits Norway.” Teeuwen, wrote Dagbladet’s Knut-Eirik Lindblad, “is demonstrably fearless.”
Teeuwen proved this yet again the other day. On March 12, he posted a video on Instagram in which he wore a black wig, held a white flower, and imitated Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsemas, who, two days earlier, speaking at the opening of the national Holocaust Museum, had defended the free-speech rights of an unruly mob who’d marred the event by waving Palestine flags and chanting “Viva, viva Intifada!” “In a city like Amsterdam, where people still feel the pain of colonial history and slavery,” said Teeuwen in character, “it is incredibly important that people continue to stick together. This sometimes leads to groups developing collective inferiority complexes and being provoked by another, even smaller minority that is more successful than the larger, frustrated group that is more important at a particular time than the smaller, successful minority. In other words, it is inevitable that eggs and Jewish hearts will be broken when making an enriching and diverse omelet.”
Two hours after Teeuwen posted the video, six police officers were at his front door. They claimed to be there because a viewer of his video had noticed an object on the table beside him that looked like a gun. They were there, they said, to confiscate it. “Aren’t you a bit ashamed over this nonsense?” Teeuwen asked the cops as he met them at the door. He filmed the entire visit, was jokey throughout (sitting briefly at the piano, he began to improvise a song about them), and after they left, he posted the footage prontissimo. He subsequently quipped, darkly, that he’d wondered whether they’d come to arrest the Jews hiding in his basement; on a more serious note, he commented that “the most sympathetic” interpretation of their operation that he could come up with was “hopeless incompetence,” while the only other possibility was “corrupt incompetence.” He pointed out that “if you managed to get a search warrant so fast, it’s really ugly.” Switching to sarcasm, he praised the police for having acted so quickly to ensure the safety of Amsterdam’s residents.
The next day, the Dutch newspaper AD ran an extensive story about the incident. Jan van Driel, one of the Netherlands’ leading weapons experts and a frequent consultant on criminal cases, told reporter Sebastiaan Quekel that the item confiscated by the police was not only not a firearm – it didn’t even “remotely look like a firearm….Anyone who knows about weapons can see that immediately.” In fact it was a Webley air gun, which, noted Quekel, “has been freely available in the Netherlands for a hundred years.” The police, said van Driel, had carried out “an unjustified raid and seizure, based on careless and unprepared work. As far as I’m concerned, the police should be given a firm slap on the wrist.” The entire operation, estimated van Driel, had probably cost taxpayers around €20,000. Geertjan van Oosten, a lawyer who specializes in weapons permits, shared van Driel’s disdain for the police officers’ lack of familiarity with weapons – as well as their lack of understanding of comedy.
In response to van Driel’s accusation that that the police had not only misidentified the air gun but had dramatically overreacted, a police spokesperson said that, “given the circumstances and the context of the video,” they could actually have chosen a more aggressive approach and had in fact gone with the less dramatic option. The spokesperson also defended the results of the operation, noting that Teeuwen could have been arrested, but wasn’t, and that although the police had charged him with violating the Weapons and Ammunitions Act, that charge had now been withdrawn. The spokesperson also said that Teeuwen could pick up the air gun at the police station on Friday. In a third Instagram video, Teeuwen said he didn’t want it back and offered to let Mayor Halsema have it as a reminder of her failure “to ensure that the opening of a Holocaust museum took place with dignity in the city of Amsterdam, where so many Jews were taken to extermination camps.”
This last remark served as an apt reminder that amid all the discussion of the misidentified air gun, one question remained insufficiently explored: had the rapid mustering of that phalanx of fuzz (whom Teeuwen, as they walked away from his front door, counted in awe: “een, twee, drie, vier, vijf, zes!”) really been triggered by the sight of that non-weapon on Teeuwen’s table? Or had their actual objective been to intimidate into silence a comedian who’d dared to mock the mayor? In a city that’s notoriously rife with serious crime (a disproportionate amount of which is committed by members of the same “community” about which Teeuwen has been issuing warnings, and making courageous jokes, for two decades, and a great deal of which goes uninvestigated, unsolved, and unpunished), doesn’t it seem just a tad suspicious that an Instagram video by this high-profile entertainer – whose comedy routinely punctures the preposterous lies about Amsterdam’s supposed social harmony that are perpetrated by cynical and cowardly politicians like Mayor Halsema – should have stirred that city’s ordinarily rather indolent constabulary to such swift action?