Steele is the sole performer in this year’s incredibly popular English Comedy Night at Ghent’s Comedy Festival. In fact, it was English Comedy Night that drew her to Flanders in the first place, back in 2003. This year, Steele will perform her new one-woman show Adventures in Waffleland. As the title implies, it’s all about what it's like to be an American expat living in Belgium.
She should know. Married to a Fleming and living in Ghent for four years, Steele has accumulated a wealth of topics for her show. It might seem awkward, lampooning the very people she is trying to make laugh, but “Belgians usually love my perspective!” she insists. “They love laughing at themselves – it’s a sort of laughing at/with thing, really. Also, I think it can be fun for them to hear how strange some of the stuff they do seems to a foreigner. I love their goofy little foibles, and I think they get that.”
Ghent’s Comedy Festival, part of the larger Gentse Feesten, includes comedy for kids, an all-female line up and some big Dutch-speaking names, like Thomas Smith from the Netherlands and the Flemish comedian Bert Gabriëls. Held in a gorgeous 13th-century stone building in the middle of the city, it is a nice reprieve from the Gentse Feesten crowds. Normally, English Comedy Night consists of a handful of comedians, but organisers are confident enough in Steele to let her carry the evening this year.
Her show’s title, she says, stems from her's – and most Americans'– rudimentary knowledge of Belgium: waffles and chocolate.“I still to this day have never had a proper Belgian waffle. Weird, huh? First I was always on a diet, and now I'm a vegan. But I fully intend to eat the first vegan Belgian waffle I see, if for no other reason than to have the full Belgian experience.”
In addition to her cultural comparisons, she can’t help but incorporate some of her personal life, such as loving cats (she is the owner of 12). “The cats can't help but being mentioned as I spend so much time hanging out with them. Honestly, I've even started picking up some of their mannerisms; if I'm annoyed, sometimes I'll hiss, for instance. I can't believe I admitted that. Clearly, I need to get out of the house more.”
Her vegan diet – no meat, fish, eggs or dairy products – is starting to creep into the act as well. “People have all sorts of strange reactions when I tell them I'm a vegan. Sometimes they just can't wrap their heads around it and say things like, ‘so you still eat chicken, right?’ Or sometimes they even get angry about it. One guy, upon finding out I didn't eat meat, opened his mouth to show me what he was chewing, as if that was going to lure me into ordering a hamburger. Odd, very odd. I just hissed at him.”
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