About Jeroen van Koningsbrugge

“Did you read about that Van de Koningsbrugge, that cabaret artist?” Just leave it to my parents to mispronounce the name of a famous fellow countryman. It's Claudy de Breij, Daphne Dekker, Saskia van de Noort and so on. But gosh, no, I hadn't read it because I was on vacation, so tell me, tell me.

‘Well, that Van de Koningsbrugge or whatever his name is, he has a bunker under his house and in it he has food for 35 years. Quite something, right?’ I thought a thousand things but mainly: how big is his house, man, if it can fit 35 years' worth of food?

We talked about it for a bit. That many brilliant joke makers also have a bit of a dark side. Mike Boddé struggled with depression, Hans Teeuwen has a user manual of a few pages, and Marc-Marie Huijbregts lies flat on the floor for three days before his show starts. And Jeroen, he has a bunker. I thought it was sweet and caring, but yes, also a bit cuckoo of course.

I didn't think about it further until I watched Beste Kijkers yesterday on RTL4 and Jeroen explained how it was. He is writing a script about an apocalypse with Beau van Erven Dorens and therefore has a little backpack with dried food in his house. Because, you should know, Jeroen lived with his family in Malibu, LA for two years (by the way, his wife Marie-Claire wrote a really nice column about it for us and there you are required to have dried food at home due to the wildfires. For each family member, you make a little backpack containing three days' worth of dried food and, and here it comes, that dried food must be shelf-stable for 35 years. So hello journalist, it's not that he has food for 35 years, he has four backpacks with three days' worth of dried food that remains good for 35 years.

So Jeroen van de Koningsbrugge isn't that crazy after all. Just a caring father and a good citizen. And one of my favorite funny people on TV. There you go.