Wim Kan was on TV for a while! The patriarch of the New Year's Eve conference, who died in 1983, spoke out about the recent farmers' protests. “Those farmers are proud of themselves. They have banners everywhere. Crazy, huh? You are proud of your wife or your children, but not of yourself.” Nostalgia at its best. But the continuation of the joke could never have come out of Kan's mouth. “Proud farmers masturbate all day long. Why else do you think there is a red handkerchief hanging everywhere to dry?”
Micha Wertheim, the BNNVARA New Year's conference 2023, conjured Wim Kan from an AI hat. Because, Wertheim predicted on New Year's Eve: artificial intelligence is moving so fast that next year you might be able to opt for “a conference caller with the body of Claudia de Breij, the face of Peter Pannekoek and the voice of Theo Maassen” who will do it. talks about “the tension between fruit and vegetables.” Or you choose “a lecture on the theory of relativity given by Caroline van der Plas, in Swedish, while she tap dances in her living room.”
The fact that Wertheim would be doing the New Year's Eve was a surprise to many. Wertheim has hardly had committed material in previous performances. We now know that he was surprised himself too. He has “regretted it all year” that he said yes. Why hasn't Brigitte Kaandorp been asked, he wonders. “She is loved by all walks of life, incredibly funny and able to comfort people with her beautiful songs. She has also never done the New Year's Eve conference.” BNNVARA's answer: “We also had a woman with Claudia de Breij last year. It's time for a middle-aged white heterosexual man again, because there is still such a thing as tradition.”
It's a lame boomer joke, and Wertheim also makes it in a cringe-inducingly sedate setting. With a large mustache, he stands in a suit against a background full of clocks on one enormous clock as a stage. But that turns out to be all the point.
Snor-Wertheim says that an oliebollen baker congratulated him. With what, Wertheim wonders. With the hottest year ever recorded? With the war? And which one, the old familiar one in Ukraine, or the new 'Israel-Palestine'? Or Myanmar, Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh or Syria? Or with the growing gap between rich and poor? The list goes on for a while. Snor-Wertheim becomes increasingly angry.
Mustache versus donut sweater-Wertheim
And then Micha Wertheim in completely different clothes suddenly turns off a TV. Huh? A Micha Wertheim appears on screen wearing a rather funny woolen donut sweater, in a different theater, in a different setting. He is sitting on an easy chair in a small living room, with a remote control pointed at a large TV. He's looking at his mustachioed self on that TV. But with the remote control, oliebollentrui-Wertheim answers exactly the question you as a viewer had after that long list of misery: do you actually want a 'funny' summary of a year like 2023? No. And so oliebollentrui-Wertheim turns off the TV. Gone is the old-fashioned mustache-Wertheim with his lame, harsh, old-fashioned jokes about 2023. Oliebollenstruiter-Wertheim even angrily addresses his audience about it when people laugh at a bad joke from mustache-Wertheim.
Oliebollentrui-Wertheim can apparently turn the mustache senior on his television on and off whenever he wants. And damn, 2023 can still be corny, if the TV supposedly turns on exactly when mustache-Wertheim is busy with a quasi-meaningful sing-along in three-quarter time. Apparently the audience can already sing along to the chorus: “Because you know what you lose, but not what you find!”. And full of pathos: “A lot of things also went wrong in Israel and Gaza. That caused great annoyance in the world. I'd rather not take part in all that misery anymore. Give me a holiday from the river to the sea…” Wow, that's a bad joke, Wertheim quickly zaps away.
Get rid of screens
The modern Wertheim prefers to talk about a larger trend: thanks to increasingly smarter AI, we only see what we want to see on our screens. That makes the whole world seem interesting, and that makes everyone think they are very open-minded. While in the past you all had to watch the same thing on TV (“There was one Teleac course in Portuguese folk dancing on television. Eight million people watched it.”). According to Wertheim, the realization that there are things that you do not find interesting, but that someone else does, makes you tolerant people. “You build up resistance to the unknown. I don't want to say that everything was better before. Everything used to be worse. But that was better.”
Should we go along with the word 'intelligent' when it comes to artificial intelligence, Wertheim wonders. That was invented by the same billion dollar companies that call social media 'social'. Truly intelligent would mean that ChatGPT does not serve a student a five-page paper in one minute, but says: “No, you idiot, we are not going to do that, because that is why you are at school.” Instead, no one dares to ban phones in the classroom, Wertheim mentions as a poignant counterexample, because “God forbid that children find out that in addition to virtual reality, there are also concrete people who are fundamentally different from you, with thoughts and feelings.” And if there is an organization that says that you have to prepare children to deal with a body and feelings, then all hell breaks out.” Wertheim is dead serious about it: get away from the screens that are made to catch your attention at every moment.
Double Drost effect
Halfway through the performance, illusionist Victor Mids enters the living room. It comes from the past, says Mids. It's a joke that you will only understand if you also watched Mids' program MINDF*CK before New Year's Eve. Wertheim appeared in it as a neighbor from whom Mids came to pick up a package.
Wertheim appears to have meticulously prepared this double Droste effect in several ways. Oliebollen sweater-Wertheim will also appear briefly during New Year's Eve 2 for 12 on NPO 2, just when he was 'going to the toilet' on NPO 1. The oliebollen baker, who has now appeared on the scene, is now zapping Wertheim's TV. Zap: NPO 2, where Wertheim passed 2 for 12 runs. Zap: a terrifying comedian's Chimaera by Claudia de Breij, Peter Pannekoek and Theo Maassen: “The pulp of applesientje does not come from orange. That's carrot grate!” Zap: Wim Kan about farmers. Zap: a tap-dancing Swedish oratorical Caroline van der Plas.
Great Common Denominator
Because we no longer all watch Teleac courses, society lacks a 'major common denominator', is Wertheim's not very surprising conclusion. The solution offered is so profoundly lame that only Micha Wertheim can get away with it, because with him you can always think that you are simply not smart enough to understand his deeper ironic intentions. A cyclops walks onto the stage: it is, yes, the Great Common Denominator. You slap your palm against your forehead, sigh, then chuckle against your wrist.
So Van Wertheim is not a New Year's Eve to shout out joke after joke in 2023, but Wertheim is not the comedian nor is 2023 the year for that. On the other hand, he beautifully lives up to the expectation that he would shake up the decades-old format, because he has already reinvented the cabaret form countless times. And let's hope that in a year we will be watching Brigitte Kaandorp.
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