Derek Scott Mitchell, 32, is an American actor and comedian, whose short videos observing Dutch, English and American foibles have gone viral on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

His sketches, released before a new tour, unpack the “gibberish” of writing a Dutch email, mastering Dutch culinary highlights, learning to be a bus driver or dentist who just wants “to fill mouths with blood”. (And, of course, cycling).

How did you end up in the Netherlands?
I was 19 when I came here. It was a desire to go, somebody mentioned that Amsterdam was nice and I thought: I’ll come here first and then I’ll go to other places in Europe. I got a job working at Boom Chicago, made a lot of friends and had a really nice life in a relatively short window of time. I’m a Dutch citizen now.

How do you describe yourself – an expat, lovepat, immigrant, international?
An immigrant. I support anybody self-identifying how they want to, but I do think that if you’re an expat, it’s good to embrace the fact that technically you are just an immigrant. Any time I mention expats, it erupts.

People say: “Oh, if you’re an expat, you’re being a white person who doesn’t want to identify as an immigrant”. But I’ve also met people who are immigrants of colour who like ‘expat’ because it’s a less racialised term. I’m probably also an expat; I’m probably also an international.

How long do you plan to stay?
I’m from the suburbs of Chicago in the United States and had a not international-facing childhood at all. My family got passports to visit me once I lived outside the country and it was the most midwestern American upbringing you can imagine. I hated being a gay kid in high school in the 2000s, applied for an international school in Canada and got a full scholarship. After I worked as a bartender at Boom Chicago, I got two degrees in England.

This is my home now, so I’ll probably always have a foot here, but I tour a lot and I work a lot in other countries. But, guess what? Climate disaster is looming. None of us knows where we’re going to be living. This place could be under water within the next century.

Do you speak Dutch and how did you learn?
My mom’s whole side of the family are Dutch-American [although] they don’t speak a word of Dutch. I’m fully fluent: I’m married to a Dutch person, we only speak to each other in Dutch, and I perform in Dutch sometimes.

I learned by bartending, self-study, and with a good friend of mine, Polly, who lives in a houseboat and moved here in 1970. I go over every week for coffee and she and I just speak in Dutch. And that was really helpful because she understood the pitfalls and the challenges of learning the language.

Dutch people walking into a bar, even in Amsterdam, never expect to be speaking anything but Dutch when they order a drink and when they realised I only spoke English, they would laugh at me – not in a mean-spirited way, but that was a devastating experience. It was my drive to perfect it, to get it right so that nobody would be able to know.

What’s your favourite Dutch thing?
Moderation. The three countries that I live in and play a role in my life are the United States, the Netherlands, England. All you have to do is go out for a meal in America, all you have to do is go out for a drink in England, to realise that those places have really big problems in how they consume things. And how that consumption shapes their lives.

Dutch people will just cancel plans if they’re not really feeling well, if they just need to rest a little bit. Dutch people don’t have social obligations. I think that’s an expression of moderation, because Anglophone people generally think they owe other people a lot more. We take everything so personally.

Sometimes we need to rest, sometimes we need to eat, but the way that we do those things is culturally coded-in.

How Dutch have you become?
I really thought for a long time that I could just become Dutch. And I think part of the journey is about realising you can’t really ever change where you were born and raised, or your cultural DNA. You can come close, but it’s asymptotic [like a curve that will never meet a straight line on a graph]. One hundred percent integration will never happen, and that’s part of the texture of who you are.

Maybe a perception that you need to integrate to a perfect degree is the source of the anxiety that keeps so many expats from daring to try and speak Dutch or to forgive the Dutch their directness in that journey. I meet a lot of people who don’t have very good will towards the Dutch.

That’s possibly because Dutch people have been uncharitable towards them, but I think there’s also an element to which these people have misunderstood Dutch people and how they communicate.

I promise you, they’re not trying to be mean. But if you move here and you’re expecting social environments to cater to your sense of decorum and socialisation, you’re in the wrong place.

Which three Dutch people (dead or alive) would you most like to meet?

Baruch Spinoza, the 17^th century Dutch Jewish philosopher: Baruch Spinoza’s parents fled to the Netherlands after the Spanish Inquisition in Portugal and it’s thought Spinoza spoke Dutch with a Portuguese accent: they were very much legally on the outskirts of Dutch society and that is to a degree how internationalism has always worked in the Netherlands. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Americans who want to move here and have an “Emily in Paris” moment have no understanding of the rich and complex history of internationalism.

I’d love to meet Spinoza because there’s no record of anything from him other than the densest philosophy that you could possibly imagine: he basically tried to prove the meaning of life using maths.

Ramses Shaffy, the late Dutch singer and actor: I bet that would be a trip!

Halina Reijn, the Dutch actress, writer and Baby Girl director: I want her to put me in one of her films because she’s killing it and Baby Girl is so good. When I first moved here, I would see her on stage all the time, and she got a lot of sh*t for being a beautiful woman who dared to be crazy on stage. Now everybody loves her.

What’s your top tourist tip?
Those Damn Boat Guys boat tours. It’s the best tour in Amsterdam, you can eat food, have a drink, BYOB, and smoke a joint on the boat if you want to. And the tour guides are all very, very funny and will give you a glimpse of a kind of hippie, laid back, fun Amsterdam that’s probably in line with your impression of what Amsterdam is like.

Tell us something surprising you’ve found out about the Netherlands
There’s a deeply conservative part of the Netherlands, a Bible belt. I think internationally, there’s an idea that the Netherlands is this bastion of progressivism. And that’s really not the truth at all.

[Even so], Dutch policy makers don’t seem aware that, for example, around things like sex work or marijuana legalisation, other countries genuinely use this place as an example. And in a kind of cavalier way, they’ll just roll back certain policies that have now been precedents for policy-making in other countries.

If you had just 24 hours left in the Netherlands, what would you do?
I’m hoping it’s in the summer. And if it is, then probably a boat ride in Amsterdam, then sitting on a terrace until the sun goes down, with friends. And then seeing where the night takes us…

Derek Scott Mitchell was talking to Senay Boztas.

He is currently touring the UK and the Netherlands with his show, Let’s Double Dutch.