A central section of Ben Elton’s new show addresses euthanasia, with the 65-year-old strongly asserting the right to die for those who feel they have run out of steam. Reader, that point has not yet arrived for Elton, who packs into his indefatigable touring set a volume of material to shame comics half his age. With Authentic Stupidity, he maintains the momentum of this second act of his standup life, having returned to the stage after 15 years away with 2019’s Ben Elton Live.
The thesis, as he would have it, is that our times are defined – and threatened – less by artificial intelligence than by “authentic stupidity”: our status as “homo halfwit”, a species rapidly squandering what little intelligence we ever had. Our movies are stupid: there’s a great riff on Daniel Craig’s aspiration to make “honest, gritty” Bond films, and what that might actually mean. Our language is getting stupider – cue our withering host on 21st-century therapy-speak. Our dining experience grows ever more stupid – witness Elton taking granny to her last meal before Dignitas does its business, a situation mined for the preposterous black comedy you encounter when life and death meets “how would you rate your restaurant experience?”
Does some of this land fogeyish? It does. “I know I’m sounding like an old curmudgeon,” says Elton, and he really doesn’t want to. One of the charms of late-period Elton is his dogged openness to new developments in culture, his reluctance to sound the usual “things were better in my day” note. That’s a political principle, I think, at war now and then with his dismay at how things are panning out. But the resulting curiosity and even-handedness is much more potent than the “modern life is rubbish” cliches of much middle-aged standup, and yields some great anthropological set-pieces, like the inventory of the generations he performs here, from boomer to Z.
In practice, we get a man warmly endorsing new developments in culture (like gender fluidity, and the lowered standing of the straight white male) while regretting how those developments sometimes manifest themselves. Identity politics, and its “over-obsession with the minutiae of intersectionality”, is a bugbear; so too the idea of cultural appropriation, a soft target here for Elton’s ire. But the usual target is bewildered old Ben himself, his body in disarray (there’s a droll dialogue about fart control between his arse and his brain) and his “boring straight couple” marriage mocked. Even here though there’s thoughtfulness amid the ridicule, as Elton interrogates the gender roles revealed when it comes to putting the bins out, and his own complex feelings about them.
All of this is couched with disclaimers, supposedly to appease the cancel-culture brigade – a tedious device in other hands, but whose deployment is playful and measured here. Yes, the state of things in 2024 is bewildering for boomers like Ben. But his fun-poking is thought-through, never mean-spirited, and should find a sympathetic audience not only among his fellow bewildered, but maybe even among those doing the bewildering.