'Safe Spaces Are Sheer Madness' – A Chat with Holland's Most Controversial Satirist

Hans Teeuwen is a household name in Holland, but in the UK he'd more likely be described – as hackneyed as it sounds – as a "comedian's comedian". On the press release for his forthcoming return to London, Stewart Lee writes, "In the future, when Teeuwen's genius has been recognised by The British, you will boast that you saw him way back when." Bridget Christie wrote a piece for the Guardian last year in which she described his 2008 Edinburgh Fringe show as "an unnerving, discombobulating, exhilarating experience".

Teeuwen, however, frames his cult status on simpler terms: "I don't think the phrase, 'Let's go see a Dutch absurdist!' works in the UK."

I met Hans at an upmarket café that's walking distance from his home in Amsterdam, shortly after he'd announced his return to the Dutch circuit – selling 60,000 tickets in one day for dates across Holland and Belgium. These shows will be in Dutch, but his approaching dates in the UK throughout October and November will be in English – his words translated via a mechanical delivery that only serves to add to the surrealism.

In keeping with the fevered persona of his stage show, Teeuwen made for nervous company at first, but soon warmed up. "I was always interested in making people laugh," he said, taking a sip of his tea. "When I was really young I was fascinated by clowns – the whole idea of making people laugh was fascinating to me."

At a glance, Teeuwen's comedy can seem a little immature and "silly", in that kind of dated, Python-esque way. But if you watch enough of it, it becomes darkly enthralling – as if watching a man on the brink who accidentally found an audience. The darker edges of his comedy are best demonstrated in his routine on "Respecting Women". Teeuwen starts by professing his deep respect for the female sex, then freewheels into a comment on the needlessness of the clitoris and the role of women in relationships. He uses his own inimitable delivery to make a subversive comment on misogyny and female genital mutilation. As satire goes, it's unsettling stuff.

Accordingly, his appearances in the UK haven't always been met with the best of responses; he was booed off the stage at Latitude in 2008. The incident was documented in a New Statesman review of the festival. Recounting the crowd's response, the reviewer writes, "'Fuck off!' yell two men behind me. There is a roar of mob approval." Teeuwen's memories of the gig are clear: "I started describing a vagina the way you would for martians. 'Think of the children!' someone shouted."

Teeuwen first came to London in 2007, following the murder of his close friend and collaborator, director and activist Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh was killed in 2004 by an Islamist extremist after he made a film that criticised the treatment of women in Islam. Since then, Teeuwen has become a major activist for freedom of speech. While he seems absurd and chaotic onstage, his advocacy for free speech and limitless satire is very real and very routed in the social climate of the modern, Western left. "I'm very, very, very disappointed in the left," he said. "I think the rebellion against political correctness is essential. If you want to tackle serious subjects and problems, we have to be able to name them without barriers of attack."

Teeuwen grew up in a small village in the south of the Netherlands. His father taught PE and he had no real theatrical genes besides a mother in the church choir. A childhood obsession with Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy morphed into a teenage obsession with the unorthodox styles of Monty Python. In the early 1990s, Teeuwen started performing comedy in Holland, honing in on a style that relied on confrontation and hostility towards the audience.

"Ultimately, the goal is to include everyone in the fun, so there may be some resistance at first, but then when you break through that, so many possibilities suddenly occur," he said, his face lighting up. "It's not really a goal to upset people – inevitably it happens sometimes, but you wanna break through some barriers, some taboos; that's the ultimate goal. It can also be an interesting dramatic situation when, for a short time, you really have them confused and they are not really sure if they like you or not, or if you're OK or not. It's a dangerous game to play."

It is a game Teeuwen is unflinchingly devoted to playing. Soon enough, our conversation turns to safe-space policies at universities – a movement Jerry Seinfeld has argued is killing comedy. "The whole idea of safe spaces is sheer madness," said Teeuwen. "Protecting people from opposing ideas in university, a place of learning?!"

This idea of a stalemate in the discussion – something he calls "intellectual laziness" – seems to be what irks Teeuwen the most. He is of the belief that political correctness and safe-space policies have become more of a muzzle than a progressive means for tolerance. In response, I lay out my own view: that you can confront whatever you wish in your comedy, but you have to respect people's right to be offended. In short, the freedom to say something doesn't necessarily mean that it should be said.

"Everybody can be offended as much as they want, but it's not an argument," he replied, visibly exasperated at having to spell out his views. "So you're offended – so fucking what? Your feelings are not an argument; they're completely irrelevant. Don't come. If you don't wanna listen to my comedy, don't come. If you don't wanna hear certain views, then try and avoid them. It's not that I'm standing on your doorstep with a megaphone – that would be a problem. It's not an intellectually valid argument."

Teeuwen's place in the political world came about because of what happened to Theo Van Gogh – an incident which multiplied in relevancy in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. "I don't want to become too much of a symbol of Islam criticism; I just want to keep saying how I feel," he explained. "I want people to know that it's not racist to oppose ideas, even if they are religious."

For the most part, Teeuwen's advocacy of free speech sits apart from his comedy. Activism in comedy is welcome – "Comedy should be whatever people want it to be, no rules" – but it's not integral to his work. In fact, the half-baked political activism taken up by certain comics is something he actively rejects.

It might seem like hypocrisy – an outspoken comedian who champions the upper limits of freedom of expression, frustrated at peers who fancy themselves as politicians – but Teeuwen's involvement in the discussion seems to have dominated his career as a comedian to a frustrating extent. His response to Van Gogh's murder eventually led to a self-imposed hiatus from live comedy and a move into lounge singing, which has only just been put on hold.

As our conversation began to wrap up, I asked him if he ever wishes that he was still just a comedian. "This is the time [in which] I live," he sighed. "It'd be like asking somebody in 1939 about the War. It's happening. I can go to the theatre and pretend that it's not there, but it is. This is the time that I live in, so naturally these things will influence my material."

It would be misrepresentative to call Teeuwen an agitator. It's sometimes hard to tell whether he's stuck in a time warp with the rest of comedy's disgruntled "political correctness gone mad" brigade, or if he's actually just a disappointed comedian who believes the power and potential of stand-up comedy as an art form is being hampered by a culture of oversensitivity. At 49, Teeuwen is probably somewhere between the two. "It only stirs me up to be as offensive as possible because then it becomes interesting, then you feel something; it spurs a reaction," he explained.

Having given up on trying to commercially crack the UK the way he has Holland, Teeuwen's comedy will most likely always belong to the few – the advantage of that being his freedom to try to find humour wherever he sees fit. Through years of turbulence and absence, his method remains unchanged. "I react to something and say something – for some reason it's funny and it makes people laugh. Humour is very, very complicated."

Hans Teeuwen is touring in October and November. See www.hansteeuwen.com for details.