Ben Elton’s always had a lot to say. You don’t write countless sitcoms (including Upstart Crow, The Thin Blue Line, The Young Ones and Blackadder), pen 16 novels, Four West End plays and four musicals (including Queen’s We Will Rock You if you’re not an ideas guy.
And it’s fresh ideas which have always driven his ground breaking Stand Up comedy routines plenty of which will be being explored in Ben’s brand new stand-up tour – his first since 2019 (the previous one having been 15 years before that). The show’s called Authentic Stupidity, and it’s all about theridiculous things we humans do and think.
“The tour title is a little joke about how we’re all saying that Artificial Intelligence is this great threat to humanity, which of course it is, but I reckon the biggest threat is actually Authentic Stupidity! Never mind AI, let’s start by worrying about AS! But really all my tours could Have been called Authentic Stupidity, because they’re always comic explorations of the essential absurdity of existence. I think all good comedy is” explains Elton.
“I’ve always done that in my routines. Sharing my own fears and joys and exasperations. Just being as funny as I can about the shit that’s on my mind”.
“Every part of my comedy is an exploration of human inadequacy,” he says, using Blackadder as one of his earliest examples “Blackadder thinks he’s so clever but his vanity, his jealousy and his ambition screw him every time. We need to accept that we are not everything and that we don’t know everything. If we did that I think we’d do less harm to ourselves and to the planet. The world would probably be a lot nicer and safer if we all embraced our inner Baldrick!”
That’s not to say this is all misanthropy, though. “In some ways, the world is better now. I think younger people have started to accept that weakness is OK; that weakness is merely an acknowledgement that you might need help, that you aren’t necessarily the thing you want to be or that people expect you to be. All these things that we used to hide are coming out more.”
There are, of course, aspects of modern life that have emphatically not improved, in his opinion. And while insisting he’s not a luddite, he’s acutely aware of where technology is going wrong. (His most recent novel, Identity Crisis, has some clever themes about how technology is deployed in the stoking of culture wars with nefarious intentions.)
“Personally, I would rather the internet wasn’t around because, although it’s an ingenious and useful, it’s destroying democracy as we speak because we’re too stupid to tell the difference between verifiable facts and undiluted arse porridge,” he says.
“And now we’ve invented AI, I mean how stupid is that? If a terrorist went on television and said, ‘We’ve come up with a machine that will literally make human beings redundant we’d send in MI5! We’d think this is a genuinely existential threat to the future of humanity. But because this is a bunch of tech bros and billionaires in California, we’re all just going, ‘Oh well, apparently it’s going to be able to write new Beatles songs.’”
So is he looking forward to his new tour? “Absolutely there’s just so much to talk about. Finding the funny has never been more important”.
Interestingly, Elton doesn’t think of himself as being a great comic performer; for him it’s all about his writing, which he’s repeatedly proven himself to be great at, ever since the cult sitcom The Young Ones hit BBC Two in 1982.
“Look, I think I can be pretty funny in my delivery but it would be nothing without the material. I’m not a natural clown who can get a laugh just pulling a face”, He recalls taking his wife and then young children to the home of pal Rowan Atkinson, with whom he worked on Blackadder, The Thin Blue Line and Mr Bean.
“Rowan was handing out the cakes and the cat was lurking nearby and appeared about to pounce. Rowan removed the fondant fancies and then without any knowledge of doing it, he did a little mime of an outraged cat,” he says. “For a moment, he inhabited the creature in front of him and the kids and us fell about. It was perfect. I couldn’t do that. I could be funny in conversation, but my funny bones are all about the words.”
He’s doing himself down a bit though: he did a cracking job hosting the one-off revival of Friday Night Live – the variety showcase of comic talent – for Channel 4 in 2022. The show wouldn’t have won the Bafta against some stiff competition if he wasn’t a great performer. The Guardian described his set as “bracingly topical and outspoken”, while The Times said: “Elton has still got it, oh yes he has.”
It’s fascinating learning how a comedian’s early forays into stand-up can shape their persona. Those accustomed to today’s (relatively) polite audiences would blanche at the often-brutal atmosphere of the Comedy Store in London, where Elton – along with the likes of Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, French & Saunders and Jo Brand – cut his teeth.
“Back then it was two shows a night, the early one at 10pm, then one at midnight, in a strip club in Soho. It was 1981, Brixton was in flames, Thatcher
was starting her ten-year war on society and sometimes audiences were tense and angry,” he explains.
“People weren’t tuned into what we now call alternative comedy, which I would describe as the comedy of ideas, where you use your own principles and beliefs to form your own comedy. That’s certainly what I did. People were used to comedians who told jokes and part of the joke might be about dealing with hecklers, so there was this idea that that was what a comic did – they dealt withhecklers. I hate hecklers. I’ve never heard a witty heckle. They’re mythical.”
If you’re on stage trying to make a point, to deliver a complicated idea using a riff that’ll reach a satisfying conclusion, you need people to listen. How on earth do you do that with some drunk being authentically stupid?
“I developed what was probably an overly combative style just to shut the idiots down” says Elton. “It took me a long time to get out of the shadow of the gong.”
But over a life time of hugely successful stand up he’s learnt to have faith in audiences’ – partly because they’re now paying to see him specifically, unlike in those days when they’d show up and be presented with a line-up of unknowns. “I learnt not to trust them, thinking that, if I paused, someone would shout out,” he says. “I can pause a little bit now, but I still don’t pause much because I’ve just got too much to say.”
