A guardian angel seems to be watching over the Utrecht International Comedy Festival (UICF). In 2020, the festival was able to continue in its usual form ¬– it ended a week before the first lockdown. This year, the government relaxed the corona measures a week before the start of the comedy spectacle. It meant longer opening hours, more cards and access without a 1G rule.
The annual UICF, which took place between 23 February and 5 March at various Utrecht locations, calls itself ‘the Dutch version of the Edinburgh Fringe’, with ‘the most stand-up comedy shows per square meter’. The highlight was the two-day Big Binge of Comedy, in which about sixty comedians from Belgium and abroad performed on Friday and Saturday in five halls in the Utrecht music center TivoliVredenburg.
Pub-like atmosphere
The Big Binge offers a generous snack menu: there are comedians from the United States (Liz Miele) and the United Kingdom (Fatiha El-Ghorri, Chris Thorburn, Billy Kirkwood) and there are foreign comedians living in the Netherlands, such as the Flemish Arbi El -Ayachi from Rotterdam and Canadian Neil Robinson, who lives in Amsterdam. Dutch performances cover half of the programme: there are shows by comedian Guido Wijers, winner of Cameretten Thjum Arts, and by younger performers from the UICF talent pool. Some of them are only performing for the second time: there the audience is emphatically asked to be nice. The shows vary in length from a few minutes to 45 minutes.
Tivoli’s pop halls, decorated for the occasion with one standing microphone and a simplistic piece of decor such as a table lamp, a houseplant or a deep-pile rug, lend themselves perfectly to the pub-like atmosphere that fits the genre. Visitors whisper in the dark, pass beers, and front row audiences are guaranteed to be part of audience interaction.
bubble
The programming shows that the UICF wants to show the diversity of comedy. A surprise is the gracious British Tom Crosbie, aka The Performing Nerd, who turns out to be able to recite every page of Shakespeare’s collected works, remember the card order of a shuffled deck and perform bizarre tricks with a Rubik’s cube. There is also music, in the form of dryly comical songs by comedians Lonneke Dort and Roel C. Verburg and musician Johan Hoogeboom (‘I would like to drink whiskey with a beautiful woman / But I’m sitting behind a little blue spa / With you’ ).
Many topics return more often: annoying white people, differences between the Netherlands and the comedian’s country of birth and of course the corona crisis. The latter theme is immediately problematic: many comedians have not been able to attune their stories to the latest current affairs, so that you step into a corona bubble at various shows about annoying Zoom sessions and horrors of working from home with children. With the Ukraine war in mind, the world news of the last two weeks, such lockdown humor feels stale and not quite appropriate.
relieved smile
An exception is the Rotterdam Tim Hartog, who immediately names the Ukraine elephant in the room and makes a comparison between the comedy festival and musicians on the Titanic who “were happily playing while the ship went down”. In his strong show, in which he points out, among other things, our first fear after the Russian invasion (gas prices), he longs for his manageable, relatively crisis-free childhood in Charlois. At a nice, longer scene about a stressful visit to the organic soap store Lush, we can finally laugh with relief again.