Mutual fears and confusions, delights, exhilarations and outrages with Ben Elton

Ben Elton brings his Authentic Stupidity tour to the Astor Theatre for two sold-out shows on Thursday, March 13 and Friday, March 14, with tickets now available for a third and final show on Monday, April 7. BOB GORDON chats with him about AI, PC and real world stupidity.

So the tour has been going really well from everything I’ve read. How have you found taking a show out on the road again, given your last tour was in 2019?

Yeah, actually, it’s not as long a gap, because COVID made my last tour two years longer than I thought when it started. It was supposed to end in 2020, and it ended in 2022. This is an even longer tour; I seem to be doing more stand-up now than I ever did. I’ve been a bit like Bob Dylan, you know, the endless Rolling Thunder tour, except I probably might have been called Wet Path. But I’m actually doing 100 dates in the UK, and then I’ve got the Australian and New Zealand tour. I played Amsterdam, I played Oslo, you know? I mean, I’ve even done some European gigs.

I’m doing it more than ever because I’m loving it more than ever. I mean, being a stand-up is a great job for an old man, because you’ve got an awful lot of bewilderment to unpack. When I was young, I was very sure of myself, and all I had to talk about was what I know. Now I’m old, I’m less sure of myself, and I’ve got a whole world of what I don’t know to unpack, as we now say, and that’s a very great position to be in as a stand-up. So I’m loving it. The material makes me want to play the gig. It’s a whole new show, and it seems to be going better than ever. I feel I’ve entered the best phase of my life as a stand-up. I really do.

I believe it’s covered in the show about how, apparently, attaining a certain age as a comedian means any comedy that makes fun of the times is simply coming from a grumpy old man. How do you counter that, or do you?

I’m not in the business of countering what’s written about me. Oh, God, I’d need about 100 lifetimes to do that. But look, I talk about it on stage. I say, ‘Here I am, banging on about how I don’t understand this or that about what Gen Z is doing, and you think I sound like a grumpy old man, shouting and swearing about all the stuff that infuriates me? Well, I’ve always done that. I was a grumpy young man (laughs). I was shouting and swearing about what infuriated me 40 years ago, before Gen Z were a twinkle in Gen X’s eye.’

So I don’t have a problem with that. I’m doing what I’ve always done, but I’ve got a broader perspective and many more years on the clock, and I think that makes my material even funnier. And also, I’m very enthusiastic about much of what I see around, you know? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not piling into Gen Z unequivocally; in fact, I, as always, get most of the brickbats in my act, and the conclusion is how much inspiration I take from the new ideas that are coming up.

So no, I don’t think I’m a grumpy old man, but the reviewers have enjoyed the fact that I am digging deep into a certain bewilderment because honestly, some of the ideas on gender and sexuality, we just never saw coming. I always thought I was a radical. I always knew where I was going with left-wing and radical ideas. And suddenly there’s a whole different palette of ideas coming in from left field, which I’m negotiating along with everyone else, and I think I do it with sympathy and humour. I see both sides of many coins, and I’ve remained uncancelled so far. So I feel I’m doing okay.

In previous decades, a lot of people would have been a lot more accurate about what would potentially be happening in the next five or 10 years. But the last decade has kind of been a bit of a cracker, really…

Yeah, and not just in gender and identity politics, but also in technology. I mean, nobody could have imagined that we would literally, blithely, and blindly invent machinery that is in clear danger of replacing us. I mean, the idea of an animal form—which is what we are—to humanity in any other animal form clearly shows you’ve got more sense than us because we’ve been working away in order to create a world where we’re no longer needed.

Well, many writers are up in arms about Artificial intelligence, but you’ve gone a different route writing a show called Authentic Stupid. It’s a bit of the old school mixed with the current commentary, but we do see a lot of ‘authentic stupid,’ especially in the last couple of weeks…

Yes, well, stupid is very popular (laughs), and unscrupulous politicians are leaning into our propensity for enjoying a bit of stupid and encouraging it. So suddenly you’ve got grown-up politicians of proper parties saying that complicated world issues can simply be fixed because, ‘I want them to. I will fix it’. You had Boris Johnson saying, ‘Get Brexit done.’ You’ve got Donald Trump saying, ‘Trump will fix it.’ I mean, this is authentically stupid. I mean, you can’t get much more stupid than looking at the complexities of our world and saying, ‘All you need is me to throw my weight around for five minutes and everything will be perfect.’ I mean, that is genuinely fucking stupid, whatever your politics.

I don’t dwell on that much, though, because that’s obvious to everyone. I hope in my act, I reveal interesting truths that perhaps hadn’t occurred to people so much. Slagging off Donald Trump is not exactly, you know, he’s not exactly fertile ground, because he sort of does it himself. That’s the problem with these modern right-wing politicians. They embrace their outrage. They’re stirrers. They’re trolls. They troll themselves. They say, ‘Look at me. I said this now.’ Remember, his most famous remark early on was, ‘I could shoot someone dead on Pennsylvania Avenue and they’d still elect me.’ He hides in plain sight as a political idiot, and it’s won him a hell of a lot of popularity.

What do you think has changed about you as a stand-up comedian over the years, also bearing in mind that audiences change…

I don’t know if audiences do… well, they certainly get older for me. I mean, young people do come to my acts, but obviously the vast majority are Gen X and Baby Boomers because they’ve known me for years. I haven’t been on the telly much in 25 years, so why would young people even know who I was?

What’s changed about stand-up for me is I now enjoy it. That’s the big change. I used to find it invigorating and creatively exhilarating, but basically not very fun. It was always a struggle to be understood. I mean, I knew what I was doing, and I played some very big halls back in the old days, and I was a very hip comedian, but the years have actually allowed me to really come to appreciate stand-up more and more as an art form, as a medium for ideas. And I actually feel I’m at the top of my game.

When I came back in 2019 after a 15-year break, I’d made a huge leap. I’d gone from being somebody who was still almost current—even though I was in my early 40s—I was still directly connected to that 22-year-old who first got famous, and in a way, I still looked like a current comedian who was sort of at the cutting edge. Then suddenly 15 years passed, and I sort of left all the generations, and now I was an old comedian, and I was no longer feeling the need to, I suppose, be at the cutting edge. I was able to be more reflective and perhaps have more humility about my confusion as opposed to my certainty.

And I suddenly discovered that, whereas in my early days, I was doing material about what I knew, what I was certain about, suddenly I was doing material about what was confusing me and what was confronting me and stuff that I was having to think hard about, because these were ideas that I hadn’t been a part of. A new generation was forming its own ideas, for good or for bad. We’ve seen the rise on the right. We’ve seen the rise of a sort of Maoism on the left, where suddenly we’re back to Orwellian hate crime, where if you don’t follow the exact line, you need to be reeducated.

We’re in an interesting time, and I’m looking at it from the outside because I am of retirement age, so in a way, it won’t be me that finds the solutions, but what I can do is address it from a point of view. I’ve been looking at the world publicly for 45 years, and now I’m looking, in a way, backwards at a generation that’s coming up behind me. And I’m certainly not having a go. I mean, as always, most of the comedy I do starts with my own foibles and my own inadequacies and how, as you get older, you realise just how fucking inadequate you are.

Live Nation recently did a Facebook post about your Australian tour, and the reactions reminded me of some Facebook posts that were on Billy Bragg’s page before he did a tour of Australia a couple of years ago. There were a lot of excited comments, but a few along the lines of, ‘He was funny until he went all political.’ It was a similar reaction to Billy Bragg’s posts, and it left me thinking, ‘What have you actually been listening to all these years?’

(Laughs) Yeah, Billy Bragg was more political, probably, with the first sentence he ever uttered than anyone. Billy Bragg really entered as a fully formed far-leftie. I’ve never been as leftie as Billy. I’ve always been… I guess I’m really a Social Democrat, because I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t believe in communism because I think we can see that absolute power always absolutely corrupts.

I don’t think I’m any more or less political now than I ever was. I was never quite as political as people like that bloke thought I was, and I was never as unpolitical as other people have thought. I talk about everything, and politics is part of life, but I don’t talk much about party politics onstage. I never did. You know, if there’s an election, I’ll tell you what I think. Of course I will, but my political investigations are more general. As I say, there’s no point taking the piss out of Donald Trump, and there’s not much point taking the piss out of Peter Dutton.

What you see is what you get, and when the time comes to vote and to speak out, I’ll speak out. But when I’m on stage, all are welcome to my gig. I do a whole riff about how I welcome people of all sorts at my gigs because, in the long run, we are all in this together.

What do you make of career comedians who complain now and then that it’s impossible to be funny now due to political correctness?

Well, it’s obviously bollocks. I mean, some of the people doing the most complaining have got Netflix specials worth tens of millions. I would love to have their problem. I think that’s rubbish.

Look, I don’t say there isn’t a problem on the internet with cancellation; I do think there is a whiff of Maoism in the air. I think we have entered a problematic period where there’s a sort of cultural revolutionary absolutism. Certain people seize on certain orthodoxies that they police with absolutist zeal, and if you don’t allow for argument, then you will breed resentment. I talk about this a lot on stage; if the fringes of radical thinking refuse to accept that some people find the new ideas confusing and confronting, then the result will be Donald Trump, because they’ll just sort of keep their silence and then vote. And I think that’s what happened.

I think, as ever, the left is its own enemy. It fights within itself. It allows the zealots, the absolutists on the fringe, to own the debate, and suddenly voices of reason are being drowned out. I think there is an issue with the cancellation pile-on, but I don’t think it’s happening onstage. I think, on the whole, as always, you have to consider what you’re saying, and I’ve always considered what I’m saying. And I talk about gender on stage. I talk about trans, and I do talk about my confusion with some of it, but I think I do so in an uplifting and a sympathetic way and a human way. And so far, I’ve remained uncancelled. So no, I don’t agree with that, but I do think there is a certain problem.

I mean, for instance, Jerry Sadowitz, a British comedian who I have no particular reason to love, he slagged me off many times, but he has always dealt in outrage. He has always dealt in outrage, and he did an Edinburgh show a couple of years ago where he did use racial comments about (former UK Prime Minister) Rishi Sunak, but he was clearly doing it from the point of, ‘I am being deliberately outrageous.’

I didn’t see it. I read about it. I’ve never seen his act. But anyway, suffice it to say the theatre cancelled it. There were complaints not from the audience but from the staff. I thought that was very worrying, because if a genuinely self-proclaimed outrage merchant can’t be outrageous at the Edinburgh Fringe, I think you do have problems. What will happen is you’ll end up with people like Musk saying, ‘No one’s allowed to say anything, so what I want is absolute free speech.’ So we’ll have fascism on X, and we’ll have pornography wherever we want it. So I think the problem is, if people of good hearts become overly zealous and don’t stand up to the absolutists on their own side, they’ll hand the future to the right, and the result will be the election of the likes of Donald Trump.

So that’s a very long answer to a basic question: ‘Is cancellation killing comedy?’ No, it isn’t, but we do need to keep our eyes open and remember to have the courage to stand up to the people who we see as on our side, because frankly, over-policing the language and over-emphasising the righteousness of their cause can often be at the expense of other people’s confusion.

So with all these things that are discussed in the show and the openness to different thinking and different opinions, what do you hope that audiences walking out the exits each night might take away from it?

Well, come on, Bob. I mean, the answer will be boring, but it’s true; I hope they’ll take away an exhilarating evening of hilarity, which has given cause to think and have fun with that. I mean, if I haven’t got a mountain of thunderous laughter, then I’ve failed because I’m selling myself as a comic. And people have a right. I’m not going to lecture them; I’m not going to depress them; I’m going to amuse them, but I’m going to amuse them over interesting shit, you know?

And the best thing that ever happens is that people often say, ‘Gosh, I laughed so much. It was only afterwards I started to sort of think about all the things you talked about, and it was great. We talked about it all the way home.’ I get a lot of that, and that’s lovely. I don’t want people unpacking it while I’m doing it because I’m appealing to their funny bones. I’m appealing to their comic instincts, not to their intellect. But in order to make that funny, I’ve got to really rigorously interrogate my own intellect, and at the end of the evening, I love to think that the audience are going, ‘Gosh, what did he say about that? That was interesting, wasn’t it?’

And that’s lovely, but what I want people to take above all from my show is an evening well spent in the company of a large group of fellow humans celebrating our common humanity through the recognition of our mutual fears and confusions, delights, exhilarations, and outrages, and that we’ve shared all that together through comedy.