Tour review

Ben Elton is well aware of his evolution from the politicised firebrand who was the public face of 1980s alternative comedy to elder statesman of the stand-up scene, valiantly trying to battle fogeyism. ‘I’ve gone from a young man talking about what I knew to be true to an old man talking about what I don’t understand,’ he surmises.

But he’s not going to go gentle into that good night, and his first show in five years is a honest tug-of-war between his progressive instincts and his curmudgeonly ones. 

‘I’m still radical,’ the 65-year-old insists at one point, yet he can rant and rave about the ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Maoist’ policing of thoughts and language like the most gammon-faced GB News culture warrior, even while championing the progressive ideals behind woeness. 

Likewise, he doesn’t want to be the grumpy old comedian ‘banging on’ about decrepitude, but he can’t help himself from talking about the good old days when he used to be able to trust his arse to behave and when hair grew out of his head, not his nostrils.

There’s a slight feeling of having his cake and eating it with both the cultural and the personal side of this show, but it feels like an authentic summary of his attempts to fight the cliché that everyone becomes more reactionary as they get older.  

On the political side, he believes that the left is its own worst enemy, arguing his side’s over-zealous intolerance has led to the rise of dangerous demagogues like Donald Trump especially because it’s much easier to be pig-ignorant arrogant blowhard who doesn’t care about anything, than, say, fretting about the environmental consequence of every little action.

It’s this ‘authentic stupidity’ that Elton asserts is the biggest threat to humanity – especially as ignorance becomes perversely celebrated as a virtue – even while the comedian is also fearful of the rise of artificial intelligence that his tour title mirrors.

And although this is a show partly about doubt, Elton is very certain in his uncertainty. Although he’s traded in the trademark sparkly suits for polo shirts, the motormouth delivery is still there, learning purposefully forward as he forcefully gives the audience several pieces of his mind.

In truth, it can all be a bit much, just over two-and-a-half hours of full-on haranguing (including much-needed interval) with little change of pace or intensity, and not all of it gold. Do we need to hear another comic of a certain age wondering whatever happened to pubic hair, for instance? Aptly, this is a segment that could be heavily trimmed.

Yet he also proves he is still relevant, and never more so with a significant routine about assisted dying – getting more prominent on the political agenda thanks to Esther Rantzen, but not a subject many comedians tackle. It’s personal given how his parents, his mother especially, spent their later years, but Elton discusses this without sentimentality. Instead, passion, conviction and jokes are what underpin this important routine.

The idea of taking her for a ‘last meal’ before heading off Dignitas segues into grouchy observational stand-up about restaurant service, while his teenager server feeds into Elton’s thoughts about the generational divide that underpin the entire show.  

For his audience who have aged with him – most heads are grey or bald here - he offers a useful guide for how to tell millennials from Gen Z by their markings, while amusingly noting that the reason the young occupy the moral high ground is because it’s the only property they are likely to be able to get their hands on.  

On modern mores that wind him up, the tautology of the phrase ‘learned experience’ probably upsets him more as a writer of great precision than anything else. But he’s very astute as to what changing language means. How ‘let me share my truth’ edges out ‘in my opinion’ as it’s less easy to argue with, for example. Or how the word ‘community’ has been degraded from an inclusive tern to an exclusive one.

It’s surely blinkered of him to insist his was the only generation to have got feminism right, but he’s keen to stress he welcomes the burgeoning diversity of sexualities and genders – even if in his own domestic life he and his wife can’t always avoid falling to traditional gendered roles. It’s part of that double-edged approach of embracing a more sensitive world, while also mocking both it, and his not-always successful efforts to understand it. 

His comments about feeling ‘othered’ and marginalised as a straight, white, rich, cis, older man are ironic, but also reveal more than a grain of ‘his truth’.

He’s less happy about sensitivities around cultural appropriation, arguing that artists should not be bound by direct personal experience. Should any younger person overhear these possibly unfashionable opinions, they are mitigated by a silly act-out of  his Jewish side wanting to cancel his gentile side and vice-versa.

Elton’s always offered a mix of the political, personal and generic, demonstrated here by the way he pivots  in a heartbeat from climate change to a man with Henry Hoover’s suction pipe up his arse. The show even includes a knob gag he wrote for Ronnie Corbett in 1998, while a routine about the sexism inherent in James Bond evolves into a pleasing discussion of what Daniel Craig should have done had he really wanted a gritty, realistic 007.

At his best, Elton builds an all-encompassing philosophy of the world, while acknowledging his viewpoint as being a flawed one, however much the vigour of his delivery exudes certainty. And there’s plenty of food for thought in this concentrated, tightly written show, whatever place you hold on the generational spectrum.

• Ben Elton: Authentic Stupidity is on tour until November 18. Dates

Review date: 19 Sep 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Bedford Corn Exchange