Dutch comedian - Sinterklaas

[pieter]

Dear folks,

I have tried to translate the stage performance of the great Dutch standup comedian Toon Hermans. He was famous and loved in the Netherlands. Either people liked him or disliked him. He was a Southern Dutch, Limburg fellow.
Toon Hermans was born in Sittard. He began performing in the 1930s, achieving local, regional and, eventually, national fame in the Netherlands as a comedian during the post-war decades. Together with Wim Sonneveld and Wim Kan he was considered one of the "Great Three" of Dutch cabaret during the 1950s and 1960s. After World War II, Sittard expanded rapidly and many new neighbourhoods were built. The coal mines in the region were the driving force of a booming economy, until closed in the 1960s and 70s. It now has large industrial zones and office premises. So Hermans grew up in a poor and hard working miners community.

Cheers,
Pieter

The Translation of Hermans comedy show



I just give you an idea, I wasn't raised with presents. Presents? I can't remember I have ever received presents as a child.
Even in december, with Sinterklaas, I did't receive them, presents. From this man Sinter Klaas I never received anything (laughing audience - this joke contains a painful truth, Toon Hermans came from a poor family, that was the reason he didn't receive presents) Sinterklaas acted like if I didn't existed.

I consider Sinterklaas to be a grisly man. I don't like that figure Sinterklaas. I consider him to be a tedious character.
With his white horse (Schimmel). Yeah, I don't like that guy. I dislike few people, but I really dislike this man.
Sanctimonious! I don't like that guy. He is an unsympathetic individual. And his helper is also a fool.

You know that I find that helper, Black Pete, an irritating fellow. A very irritating person with his laughing.
You, know he Always stands there laughing at you. Don't you remember that?

He sings the first words of a sinterklaas song with and says: ..."hehh...idiot!". 5 december on the roof. Very cold weather, and he (Black Pete) stands laughing there.
I find them a weird couple. A silly couple. Yeah, I consider them to be a dum couple! I don't like them, neither of them.

I have never received anything from them. I put my shoe under the chimney in the evening. I was glad they were still there the next morning. (The audience bursts out in laughter)
Don't like these people. Singing those stupid songs. "Hear who knocks there on the door, children…" Nobody!

Have you also sung these silly songs?

I don't like this fellow. This whole Sinterklaas fellow. Nasty person, dishonest. There were children who had presents, the trains drove through the living room.
At my home nothing drove through the room, yes, we ourselves, I was the locomotive. (Laughing audience) With some poor baggers behind me. Thank god we were a large family,
else it had been a poor little train.

I don't like the fellow, don't let me laugh, an old chap I have to call kapoentje. I have Always considered it a dum party. You sung yourself unconcious at the heater (stove, fireplace).
With that dirty cool steam in your head.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door,
Sinterklaas entered.
I can still see him coming in.
Such a shabby thing.
Had a bedspread on.
I knew that bedspread.
Yes, it was from the front room.
It was always on the table there.
I could see on his back where the ashtray had been.

He has never been to our house.
I told you then he came in with a bedspread ... and that ashtray on it, you know?
That is not true.
I am now older and wiser and I no longer tell those kinds of stupidities. I now tell the truth on stage. Or I won't go on it anymore.
I hate that guy so much.
He never came to us.
Never never.
On scattered evening we were singing at home, with six children. But he never came in, never.
You could hear rumble in the hallway. And the door also opened. Then you thought, he finally came.
Nothing!
Do you know what he did?
Put the hand in the room.
You saw a white glove that flickered some nuts in the room.
My grandfather still broke his ankle over the rotten nuts. They had to take them to the hospital on scattered evening.
Then I asked my mother: Why doesn't he come in?
Then she said: He can't, jungske (young one inn the Southern Limburgian dialect).
He's so busy.
He's so busy.
Nothing from where, he sat all day long at Vroom & Dreesman (= department store).

[pieter]

Toon Hermans liked to make jokes and sketches about his poor childhood, and of course Sinterklaas, Snieklaas, also played in his cheerful theater language. But in his writings, Toon could just as well shout at the Good Saint (Sinterklaas) and Black Pete: "As far as I'm concerned, those two can be canceled."

Toon mentions Sinterklaas for the first time on stage in the one-man show of 1961 (year of the TV recording), illustrating his poor childhood. "As a child I put the shoe on once with Sinterklaas ... When I got up in the morning, the laces were out." In 1967 he sang 'a dirty song' about the Sint. "You probably sang it too. Sinterklaas celebrates his birthday, I put my shoe on hold ... I know he's stuffing it ... with 'yes, if only I knew' ... I always thought: in my shoe no 'yes, if only I knew'.

[pieter]

A silly couple



The sadder the memories, the harder the audience laughed. But did you know that Toon Hermans really hated Sinterklaas and his servant? In the book Overdrijvend Wolkenvelden he calls Zwarte Piet plainly (and looking back fairly prophetically) a fabrication from the time when "black people were still under the rule of the whites. I have nothing against that holy man from Spain. He did a nice job for poor people children, but that Sinterklaas and that Pietermanknecht from our time, I think that is a silly couple, so we immediately have the word tradition at hand in defense, because we want to cover up the commercial behind it, but as far as I'm concerned The fact that adult people stick to a long white beard and put a pointed cap on their heads, hoist themselves in a soup dress and then fool little children is something that Ir does not want to do. give some presents, I think, but you don't need those two crazy people for that. "

[pieter]

Sometimes Toon Hermans himself felt a little Sinterklaas. "The children are waiting for me, and I am going to sing gingerbread cookies and throw handfuls of jokes into the room. I will turn it into a colorful evening ..." he wrote in Levensboek, as a reflection on a childhood memory when he sometimes dressed as Saint.

"I enjoyed watching winter shopping, especially in December, the so-called gift month, from that window down the street. I could sit and watch for hours the mobility of all those people from my high window. In the days from 'See the moon shines through the trees', I was about ten years old, I dressed myself as Santa Claus, I was a lean skinny Saint Nicholas, and without a servant I sat down on the high window dressed in my holy one on the eve of the party I had made a miter made of cardboard Well, miter is what a lot has been said, it was only the front, the back didn't matter, you couldn't see it in the front because I was practically motionless at the window on a chair was sitting.

My mother had given me some tufts of white cotton wool, two of which I stuck to my eyebrows, and the rest I stuck under my nose and on my chin. I remember wearing Bonmama glasses and draped a white sheet around my shoulders. I was wearing aunt Fieneke's gloves and in my right hand my father's walking stick, he had to represent the staff. It might not have been gold, but it had a real silver stool. Mr and Mrs De Jong were not at home that evening, so I was able to perform my first Sinterklaas show undisturbed. I sat at the high window for at least two hours to wave to the children who were standing on the street below.

I thought it was a wonderful sight when walking among the shopping crowd of people lifting their children and pointing upwards: "Look, there is Santa Claus up there." When Mr and Mrs came home I was still there. They immediately saw the seriousness with which I played my role. I can still hear her say: "Look, there is Santa Claus. That is a surprise ... "Whether these were all the signs of my love for the theater, I don't know. Yet many years later, when I was face painting and I heard the noise of the people in the room through the loudspeakers, I sometimes thought: I am Sinterklaas. "