"To Get Comfortable, I Like to Touch My Nipples..."

And so opened last night's Hans Teeuwen show at the Soho Theatre. I'd read a few reviews and was expecting maybe to laugh once or twice, and even then not a belly laugh, more of a 'huh' than anything else.

Boy, I was surprised. He has a manic energy and the set was best described as unpredictable:

• Opening the show by pretending to be really nervous, then unbuttoning his shirt and groaning whilst touching his nipples
• A song about Nostradamus that sometimes rhymed, sometimes didn't, then went on about how nice his arse looked in green tights
• A story about being an ice-cream man: 'Do you know what I had on the side of the van? Ice Cream', that seemed to end in a pornographic imagining of a child licking an ice-cream, then he said breezily: 'The kids used to come up to me and say, "Tell us a story!" But I couldn't. I just sold ice cream.'
• A heartfelt love poem
• The sock puppet mangled a chocolate bar on stage while Hans sang. He asked a lady in the front row to clean it up. She didn't. He got down on his knees and begged; she still didn't (she was probably busy dying of embarrassment at this stage). The he said, 'I'll touch my bum for you,' then bent over and started, er, fingering his bum. He looked over at her and said, 'If you clean it up, I'll stop'.
• A graphic depiction of how to digitally please a lady (and I don't mean giving her a pink iPod), then rolling up a sleeve, slowly licking his arm, then doing a fisting motion. Is it wrong that the memory of that made me gigglewhile I was on the Tube this morning?
• A jaunty song that referenced the tsunami, Holocaust, a guy not licking his mother any more, and taking a shit then putting it on toast
• The story about getting to Heaven, then having to wank off God (who happened to be a dwarf)
• A story about an alien underwater spaceship and a tangent about how he'd modify it but he couldn't because it wasn't his ship, and if you're going to criticise someone's alien underwater spaceship you should get your own

You get the picture - it was deeply absurd. Mad as a trumpet.

The show ended with a singalong of popular theme tunes (GhostBusters, 'Tomorrow' from Annie, which I hate) using his name as a lyric: 'Who you gonna call? Hans Teeuwen!', for the benefit of those in the audience who found his name hard to pronounce.

He's been compared to Eddie Izzard, because that's the nearest equivalent, but the only things they have in common are the storytelling and the sheer surreality of the skits, songs and other pieces which don't fit together at all. Except, of course, Eddie doesn't sing or play piano, and he tends to talk more to the audience, to tell actual jokes, than to suddenly break it down and go off on some seriously crazy detour. Also, while the stream'o'consciousness vibe is there, it's not the same as jokes that have no real payoff (which is a payoff in itself; the audience laughs because they realise that, oh right, the story ends. Just like that). If anything, you could align him with Bill Bailey - they're both accomplished musicians in their own right and have a keen sense of the absurd.

With this guy, you get the feeling that it's the Id talking. There's flashes of a seriously sick imagination back there, and that's what we like about comedians, isn't it? The fact that they say what sometimes we don't dare even to think, or that they articulate what we feel, think and observe far better than us. With Chris Rock, I laughed because some of his observations rang true. With Hans Teeuwen I laughed because it was the maddest, maddest thing I'd seen in a long time - outside my own dreams.

Oh, and my friend and I met him in the bar afterwards and take a picture. He was thoroughly normal and quite lovely.