On a tiny stage in a subterranean comedy club a Dutch comedian is making the Edinburgh Fringe his own. Starting out pretending to be so nervous that he’s stuttering, ending with a song about Nostradamus, his act is nonsense, real nonsense. And yet as he plays Popeye the Sailor Man on his cheeks, or tells shaggy-dog stories about his magician father, he’s selling it with all the intensity of Ian McKellen playing Lear. Amping himself up like Jim Carrey or a young Steve Martin, he is blissfully, painfully funny – even if none of us quite knows why. Then again, he’s only playing a 20-minute set, at the end of a variable bill of Dutch comedians. Can Hans Teeuwen really be this good for a whole show?

We’ll find out later this week, when he plays his first full English-lnaguage shows. And if anyone can overturn the comic stereotoype of vowel-churning Netherlanders – Goldenmember in the third Austin Powers film; Harry Enfield’s gay policemen – it's Teeuwen.

He is a household name at home, where he has played huge tours and sold half a million DVDs. He’d probably be knocking them dead in Nijmegen tonight if he hadn’t applied his anarchic instincts to his own career. “It got to the point where I could predict the future,” he says. “And if I can predict the future I become uneasy.” So four years ago he vowed to stop performing in Dutch. To start all over again.

Sitting in an office at the Soho Theatre – “very, very good for my English to do this” – Teeuwen, 40, has a glint in his eye backed up by a careful comedy brain. He’s far from the slightly menacing madman you see on stage. “Well, what I do is acting,” he says. “And if you do surreal stuff, nonsense stuff, you have to act out everything to give it some significance. That’s part of why I stopped – it’s exhausting.”

If that sounds precious, you haven’t seen Teeuwen. In Holland, where he would perform for more than two hours, he used to refuse to play more than three nights in a row. Here, he’s playing a one-hour show, five nights a week, in a 140-seater: “It’s a nice lesson in humility,” he chuckles. “That’s always good for an artist.” He started out in a double act, Heist, in the early 1990s. But after a year together they had a car crash coming home from a gig. His partner, Roland Smeenk, died. “I was in bed for six months, depressed. Then I had to start again.”

Going it alone, he spurned the leftist agenda of some comedians – not because he disliked their politics, more because he didn’t want to hear them on stage. “There are lots of comedians that have a message. I hate that. I want to be amoral on stage. It gives you more possibilities.”

So it’s ironic that this apolitical performer has become a spokesman for freedom of speech ever since he stopped performing in Dutch. “I never wanted to be political,” he says, “but I had no choice.” In November 2004, his friend the film director Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered by an Islamic extremist, Mohammed Bouyeri, incensed by a documentary van Gogh had made about Islam’s treatment of women.

When Teeuwen unveiled a statue to van Gogh in Amsterdam, he made a speech that mixed passion, humour, and a filthy song that told believers just what they could do with their prophet. He went on to defend that song against three Muslim women on a television show they hosted, Bimbos en Boerkas (Bimbos and Burkas). “Everything with a certain status has a certain power,” he told them. “Power always tends to corrupt, and has to be ridiculed.”

Actually, he points out, he had always put meatier material into his act. But he would be wilfully extreme about it: “With really serious subjects you can be subtle, but you can also go, like, floooaaargh! – as if you are not aware there is a taboo at all. That strikes me as funny.

“But if I used that same method with Islam in one of my shows now,” he says, “I would be in big, big trouble. I was brought up in a period of time in Holland where anything could be said. Ten years ago I remember comedians saying: ‘There are no more taboos, what are we going to do?’ Well thank God – literally – we found one again.”

Teeuwen is a wild and crazy, ambitious and analytical guy. He’s launching his own comedy website in March. Last year he toured with a jazz band, singing Sinatra songs. He’s serious about his singing too. “I want to have alternatives,” he says. “The way that I’m funny on stage, I think that there’s a time limit to it. I don’t know many people who are all that funny after 55.”

Can Teeuwen become a genuine star all over again in the English language? No European comic since the great Victor Borge (Danish) has really done it. But Teeuwen has the talent, and the sensibility, for his nonsense to make sense the whole world over.

“A lot of English humour is about embarrassment,” he says. “ The Office is all about that, Extras too. Maybe it’s your class system. But we don’t have that in Holland. We don’t look up to people. Don’t think that you’re more than anyone else, you know? Everyone has to be as equal and flat as the country itself.”

Hans Teeuwen is at the Soho Theatre, W1 (0870 4296883), from Friday

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