You probably don’t think of the bureaucracy of the European Union and the slow-moving cogs of its policymaking process as a rich vein for comedy material.
The Schuman Show, which started off in a Brussels basement venue that fit 49 people, now regularly sells out a 480-seat theatre on three-night runs. Named after Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister who is considered one of the architects of the European integration project, the show pokes fun at the EU institutions and European politics.
Kelly Agathos, a Greek-American improv comic, started the show in 2021 with Lise Witteman, an investigative journalist who works for Follow the Money.
After moving to Brussels in 2010, Agathos spent nine years going around the houses of the EU. She worked in the European Commission, as an MEP’s assistant in the European Parliament, for an NGO, as well as in the British embassy before Brexit. “I’ve done the tour of the institutions,” she says.
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She then left her job to pursue improv full-time a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. When things began to reopen, she started talking to Witteman about putting together a comedy and satire show about European politics.
The Schuman Show’s audience is largely drawn from the thousands of staff who populate the EU institutions in the Belgian capital, or those who seek to influence or follow the goings on of those institutions. Some of the punchlines, such as the European Committee of the Regions’ lack of real purpose, will sail over the heads of someone outside of the clique of officials, politicians, lobbyists, journalists, diplomats and policy officers.
The show’s run in May included a skit about a far-right MEP’s assistant facing espionage allegations, the sex appeal of the Greens co-leader Bas Eickhout, and a musical number parodying this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
“We slowly scaled up a show from a basement that fit exactly 49 people. Then we went to a 250-seater, it sold out overnight. We were doing one show a month, we were selling out in a matter of days, then so in 2022/2023 we made it two nights, and this year we made it three nights,” Agathos says.
The problem of having to find bigger and bigger venues was one they had to deal with a lot earlier than expected. “I thought it would take a little longer to build,” she says.
“This season we started doing every second month because it’s a big production now, we have a film crew that films things and puts them on YouTube.
“A lot of it is in-jokes that the people in here will find funny because they know, for example. the Committee of the Regions, but nobody quite understands the function of having a Committee of the Regions,” she says.
The EU institutions and officials could do with taking themselves “a little less seriously”, reckons Agathos. “There is a lot to make fun of, and there is also a need to point out the hypocrisy.”
The hope was people might pick up a better understanding of what the EU does from the skits. “It just felt like an oversight that there is such little comprehension in member states about what goes on and it’s just us nerds that talk about it among ourselves,” she says.
The production is pulled together by a team of writers and performers, most of whom have day jobs in the “bubble”. One of that number, Barry McKeon, a lobbyist in Brussels by day and comedian by night, is from Co Wexford. He writes a lot of the songs in the show and does a pretty spot-on Angela Merkel impression.
Ironically for a show satirising the EU institutions, it itself has somewhat become part of the wider associated orbit. “We hear all the time that people do it as an office outing, or they do it as a social outing, they meet up in the bar afterwards and it becomes a little bit of a networking thing. So we actually in that way have become such a typical Eurobubble thing,” says Agathos.
“The majority of our audience is of course the bubble, but there are people that come from the outside, the girlfriend, the spouse, the friend of a friend and they do enjoy it, they don’t get everything,” she adds.
“It doesn’t surprise me that so many people working for the institutions would embrace a show that reflects the content of their work. We talk about interns, we talk about lobbyists, we talk about commissioners, MEPs. They see themselves there, or someone that could be their boss, or is their boss.”