By Dutch comedian Bob Koomen:

What it’s like doing comedy in another language? I like it a lot.

I started doing comedy in English pretty soon after I started out in Dutch. I had some knowledge of the English language from my one-man Dutch-to-English translation company. I must have made a lot of mistakes in the files I translated, but most of my customers didn’t complain as they hired me because their English was even worse.

I never understood why so few Dutch comedians translate their shows into English, as it takes so much time and effort to create a show, and relatively little to translate it. And it allows you to reach a much bigger audience. And to go to the Fringe. And when I started doing it, I found out it had many more benefits.

There are many more English open mics in Amsterdam than there are Dutch ones, so it definitely helps getting stage time in the early days. A nice bonus was finding out that the international audiences tend to laugh and applaud much more than the Dutch ones. But it also offered a trick I hadn’t thought of:

Especially in the time in which I didn’t really realise what I was doing on stage, my English sets often went better than my Dutch ones. I spoke about this with a Dutch comedy director, Pieter Bouwman. He said that because you can’t perform on autopilot, all of your attention needs to go to being there, which disables you from splitting your focus. You become unable to think about how the audience is responding, or to get distracted about things going on in your life while on stage. 

The result of this is that you are completely in the moment, which people seem to appreciate. Audiences love it when they don’t have to feel any responsibility, when they consciously or unconsciously feel that the person on stage does not at all depend on their approval in the form of laughter. I asked him: so I should make sure my English doesn’t get too good? He said, ‘Correct.’

This only works as long as I know what I’m doing. I’ve also done English sets after only doing Dutch ones for months, approached them with the same preparations I got used to for Dutch shows – and bombed as if I had fallen back years in experience, because I hadn’t yet learned how to fix these situations in English. 

Most of the times, the laughs in the English versions of jokes are where you’d expect them from doing them in Dutch. Sometimes I start a bit in English for the first time with the confidence of how it’s working in Dutch: there’s going to be a laugh here, then here, then here, and then the big one here. But it remains completely silent. Sometimes that’s just a mistranslation, sometimes it’s not realising that what I was talking about was not as universal as I thought it was.

Another interesting aspect of doing comedy in a second language is how it affects your writing. I often get extra sentences or even entire new stories in when I start doing bits in English for the first time. Sometimes in bits that had been fixed and unmovable in Dutch for months or even years. 

I seem to think differently in English than in Dutch, I say or write sentences that I wouldn’t allow myself to write down in Dutch, because I’d find them too sentimental, silly or clichéd. But that sentence might be the door to the next 10 sentences that would make it a great bit.

Director Pieter said it like this: when I write in English, the demons on my shoulders that tell me to stop writing finally shut up because they don’t understand what I’m doing. It’s creating a language barrier between yourself and your judgment. We don’t really understand how creativity works, so the less chance we get to act as if we have something to say about it, the more it can dance.

I went to London to do comedy four times last year. I always intended to make comedy that is universal, I mostly make surreal comedy about how weird your own behaviours are and how weird it is to exist. 

I still was a bit scared that my material wouldn’t work over there, but it felt as if it reached its full potential. I get a slightly different stage persona when I’m doing comedy in English. It gives me some extra vagueness. Sometimes people ask me what I was on after an English set. But I wasn’t on anything, I was just doing my best to speak English. 

I think I got the foreigner advantage. I’ve noticed it in Dutch comedy as well, comedians who come from other countries sometimes have this advantage of having an angle and a manner of speaking that is very different from what people are used to. It was on stage in London that I realised I can be a foreigner as well, I just have to go to another country.

• Bob Koomen: Pear is on at Just The Tonic at The Hive 1t 8.30pm

Published: 18 Aug 2026