Helga Voets

The Oudejaarsconference (New Year's Eve performance) of the year 2023 by the Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim.

The bigger the audiences for Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim’s shows became, the less he had to do to make them laugh. In one early show, he suggested that the audience would be better off without him. So in 2016, he acted upon this suggestion with an experiment that made theater history: he wasn't physically present onstage but somewhere else. The audience wasn't aware of this in advance, though they did get a hint in the form of a pre-recorded "live" radio interview from a remote studio. "I see my audience as my children," Wertheim says in this interview. "You have to educate them, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years. At first you have to constantly be there watching them, but there comes a time when you have to trust them to get on with it without you." With some help from a robot, a printer, a stereo and a set of headphones, the members of his audience were able to make their own performance.

Stage registration of the sixth comedy special by the Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim. The comedian notices that he has found his own audience through the years. But Wertheim also notices that his audience projects their own biased opinion on the performance, and there's nothing that Wertheim can do to change that opinion.

Stage registration of the fifth comedy special by the Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim. At the start of the performance, the performance appears to be unfinished: Micha Wertheim is still writing and the comedian has a writer's block.

Stage registration of the third comedy special by Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim. A show about the "news addiction" that dominates the current media landscape, and about the problematic functioning of rhetorical devices like irony and satire.

Stage registration of the second comedy special by the Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim. This performance takes place in a dream, a dream in which Micha Wertheim shares all kinds of confessions, for example about how he manages to cope with the knowledge that he is probably not a real genius.

Stage registration of the first comedy special by the Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim. The central idea of ​​the performance is: 'Some people think I'm arrogant, but I spit on them."