In his conference ‘Not now’, Pieter Derks celebrates the old year with a witty mix of big and small news

Halfway through his New Year’s Eve conference, Pieter Derks asks his audience a question: “Are you wondering whether I will be bashing PVV members all evening?” And the audience answers in unison: “Yes!”

Derks had already opened his performance with a word of thanks to the new right-wing cabinet that had “made this conference possible”. He then generously made room for politicians on the radical right. If Wim Kan’s cabaret law still applied to politicians – if you are mentioned as a politician in the New Year’s Eve conference, then you matter – the PVV would have had a top evening with asylum minister Marjolein Faber as the big star and Prime Minister Dick Schoof as a close second.

Derks had nothing about GroenLinks-PvdA leader Frans Timmermans. The statement was perhaps the hardest joke of the evening: on an evening like this, Derks unfortunately had to limit himself to the people who had been relevant.

Moral appeal

After Micha Wertheim’s surprising visual experiment in last year’s conference, in which he intercut several recordings from several theaters, Pieter Derks’ New Year’s Eve conference was now back in familiar waters: an overcrowded look back at big and small news, hyperpolitical and joke-oriented . With Derks as a smart, witty, left-wing commentator, who smoothly connected all the sense and nonsense of 2024.

Naturally, Derks took you back to the chaotic formation and the surprising choice of civil servant Dick Schoof as Prime Minister. Amusing was the comparison he made with Guy Goma, an applicant for an IT job at the BBC who was mistaken for an expert and despite his visible bewilderment and discomfort commented live on TV.

Derks is the type of comedian who immediately provides counterarguments in his satire. Because why declare an asylum crisis, while the country will not come to a standstill? And isn’t the real asylum crisis that people fleeing war have to sleep in the open air? What was uncomfortable with all the substantive criticism of Minister Faber was the joke about her appearance: a comparison with a horse. Shortly afterwards, Derks made a moral appeal to men to initiate changes. Talking about the years-long rape of Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman who had made visible what apparently “normal men” had done to her, Derks stated that “this starts with very small things that we have come to consider normal under the guise of so-called masculinity.” Isn’t mocking the appearance of women in high positions a practice of so-called masculinity?

Derks captured the war in Gaza in a song about six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was murdered when she fled in a car with family, and who had begged for help by telephone for hours before she died. That was a nice ode, with the caveat that he avoided the words murder and Israel. The executioner, who likes to call man and horse, suddenly beat around the bush and interpreted the girl’s death as a stupid story, without a moral, which he did not understand. Isn’t that caution (for some) or cowardice (for others) also a characteristic of this year?

Sleeping Beauty breast enlargement

In response to the suffering in the world, Derks brought up much smaller news – from Joost Klein to the wolf. By juice we all keep it, he noted, not without having fun retelling all kinds of nonsense and bizarre news. In that category, for example, I had missed that Doornroosje had had a breast enlargement in the Efteling during the renovation. As “little news”, Derks also reported the racist fuss about the first colored resident of Duckstad. He nicely turned that fact to the question of how it was possible that a single person in that city could just get a house in the first place – the only joke about this year’s much-discussed housing shortage. Furthermore, as an elitist idiot, you received yet another reminder that this summer you really… B&B Full of Love should have looked.

Derks’ attention to juice was all about a larger observation: that we too often worry about small, perceived and exaggerated injustices. That was the big theme of the year for him. People use anger when it suits them, confusing main and secondary issues. We are “selectively indignant,” he noted, and we are not inhibited in this, because the algorithms and politics only fuel our indignation.

In regular shows, identifying an overarching idea is one of Derks’ strengths, but this conclusion didn’t feel like the most exciting or insightful analysis of this turbulent year. This may also have been due to the fact that Derks did not make it a compelling framework. That left the whole idea hanging in the air.

Fortunately, Derks had plenty of jokes and is extremely adept at putting his material together. The piece about the word ‘ribbing‘, pretending to cooperate, while actually frustrating things. It came back to how soft drink manufacturers and supermarkets deal with the deposit on cans, to which he linked a hilarious personal story about saving and returning cans. Want to donate a deposit? “Fuck that shit. I worked hard for it.”

Shortness of breath popping

They were the funniest parts of this New Year’s Eve: moments in which Derks deviated from short-winded banging about politics and news and introduced himself in his stories.

Such as in the absurdist digression about how he experienced how hooligans can smuggle fireworks into football stadiums, while still being thoroughly searched. His answer – that they hide it in their asses – led to a funny fantasy about inserting smoke bombs anally and removing them again. If Derks would dare to trust the quality of his own anecdotes more Not right now a more balanced debut – and also a conference in which he himself had divided main and side issues better.

Now he had to make abrupt adjustments at the end to get towards his much-desired hopeful ending. Because yes, the world is a mess, he said, but “if we really want to get something done, we will do it ourselves from now on.” In conclusion, he delivered an impassioned rhyme that militantly shouted back to the country’s right-wing voters and politicians: “Keep dreaming of a scary, petty country. What you bend will bounce back someday. In your face.”

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