In the midst of not one, but two UK tours, Derek Mitchell joins Pepper&Salt to discuss his UK tours of Double Dutch and Goblin, live performance and the three second rule.
How would you summarize your show?
I’m taking two shows on the road. The first is called Double Dutch, and I’ve been touring it for over a year all around Europe and the UK. It’s about me and my experience as an immigrant living between the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States. It’s full of stand-up, characters, sketches, and stories – it’s fast-paced and very silly.
My other show is called Goblin, and it’s a comedy theater show that, though funny, is also pretty dark. It’s about a teenager in the 2000s – your classic insecure emo kid with a big heart – who grows up to become something monstrous: the co-owner of a spin studio.
I hope everyone comes to see the shows. I have to say, I’m especially proud of Goblin – it’s a pretty unusual show, and I’m very passionate about what I think it’s doing and saying.
What was the writing process like?
I developed much of Double Dutch by doing work-in-progress shows around the Netherlands at the beginning of 2024. Goblin has had a much longer and more comprehensive development process.
Over the course of it, I’ve worked with lots of talented people, especially my director, LBW, who helped me translate the concept in my mind into something that could work on stage. I also worked with dramaturg Sammy Glover and technical designers Han Sales and Heading North. It took years of testing – mainly in London – to get the balance of comedy, drama, darkness, lightness, and character-based play just right.
What led you to focus so much on the ‘Double Dutch’ aspect?
“Double Dutch” is an expression in English that means gibberish. Historically, there was a great deal of mercantile and cultural exchange between England and the Low Countries in the early modern period. English people found Dutch – though somewhat intelligible – notoriously difficult to understand. So, ‘double dutch’ logically came to mean gibberish.
I like the phrase because it connects to the material I do about Dutch cultural quirks, but it also more broadly points to cross-cultural confusion and miscommunication – the bedrock of a lot of the comedy I make.
How would you define ‘the culture of gibberish’?
I’ve lived between different places and countries for over half my life and have had to adapt quickly to cultural and language-based differences. Luckily, I’m fascinated by these differences. Most immigrants have to navigate these things one way or another, and one of the biggest realizations is that the things that belong to us culturally matter a great deal. But if you didn’t grow up with them or they’re not important to you, they can often seem like gibberish.
It’s the job of outsiders trying to become insiders to make sense of these things and understand why they matter so much to others. This is something I explore in the show, and I think it’s also an important thing for people to consider in general.
How do you plan to challenge the concept of the ‘three-second rule’ when it comes to making up your mind about someone?
This rule is definitely at play for anyone making online content – you typically have one to three seconds to convince someone to keep watching once they stumble upon it. Because of this, I do take that approach in my digital comedy work.
While digital creation can feel impersonal and market-driven compared to live performance, I think there’s something to be said for the responsibility of the storyteller to bring the audience into the story and hook them from the beginning. That’s definitely what I’ve tried to do with Goblin.
Without giving too much away, since these themes of cultural competency, stereotype, perception, and assumption are broad, what are some key points you explore in the show?
In Double Dutch, I explore how the available categories of identity and experience often fail to fully express who we feel we are and the complexity of our experiences as we grow and move through the world.
In Goblin, the protagonist grows up in front of the audience’s eyes. The audience witnesses their transformation from a naive, hopeful teenager who believes in the good in the world to an adult who has had most of that belief beaten out of them under the influence of a much older, abusive partner. The themes that come through are about agency, choice, and complicity.
In your press release, was using the phrase ‘all of England’ as a stand-in for the UK – given that you are also touring in Scotland – intended as a joke about Americans’ view of the UK?
In the videos I make online, I play around a lot with stereotypes about different cultures. In most places, a dominant perception of what culture is – what the ‘right’ way to speak or behave is – pervades media and social life. But, of course, people’s actual identities, experiences, and ways of talking and being are incredibly diverse and almost never fit into black-and-white categories.
In my show, I play around with primary stereotypes of Americanness, Englishness, and Dutchness. But in doing so, my aim is always to make clear that these categories are imperfect and ill-suited.
What do you hope audiences take away from these shows?
From Double Dutch, I hope people reflect on the in-betweenness of different parts of who they are. We often take for granted our membership in things like nationality or where we’re from.
Goblin, in contrast, is about growing up, the cyclical nature of abuse, and how it can involve good people in very bad things.
How do you think these themes will resonate with audiences?
I think both topics are very relevant right now. Immigration is unfortunately a hot-button issue in political discourse across the West. Many people have strong opinions about immigration without understanding what it takes to be an immigrant or what the lived experiences of immigrants are.
The questions raised in Goblin connect to broader conversations sparked by figures like Russell Brand and Johnny Depp – famous abusive men who have hurt people along the way. How we understand abuse and how we, as a society, deal with it is still an open question. To prevent future victims, we need to start engaging with these difficult conversations.
How has performing live compared to making sketches for the internet?
They’re two completely different art forms. I’ve actually been doing live comedy much longer than I’ve been making things and putting them online. I was one of those people who was compelled by COVID to start posting online for lack of anything else to do.
But I started out as a sketch comedian with my sketch partner, Kathy Manura, when we were students in the UK back in 2015. Online, you have the edit at your disposal, so you can throw a lot of things at the wall, see what sticks, and then pick the best one. On stage, you’re much more at the mercy of the room – the energy, the give-and-take with the audience. I love both.
What are you looking forward to most about your tour?
I love touring! I’ve been touring for over a year now and have done almost 250 shows in about a dozen countries. I love meeting audiences from different places and connecting with them.
In both shows, I interact with the audience, and they help shape where the show goes and where the funny comes from. To me, this is the most rewarding part of being a live performer.
By Katerina Partolina Schwartz
Photo Credit: Dylan Woodley DM
Pepper & Salt 
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