Ben Elton: a comedy great gives modern life a grilling

Telling it like it is, the comic looks set to remake himself as the darling of Middle England

Ben Elton was there at the birth of alternative comedy and became inextricably identified with its combative, snarky, politically correct attitude.
More than 40 years on, with his sitcom-writing legacy assured (not least thanks to Blackadder), an impressive roster of ideas-rich, best-selling novels under his belt and a long-running musical to his name (We Will Rock You), he’s now the prime witness to the demise of intelligent life.
As implied in the title of his new show, Authentic Stupidity, the issue gripping him is not so much the advent of AI but the way humanity is undermining itself through innate species idiocy. At one level, this is a man of a certain reactionary age (65) railing against the age itself. He has realised, he says, that “life is not a journey towards wisdom and understanding, it’s a freefall into total bewilderment. I no longer know what the f— is going on!” But beneath that (applauded) admission lies a shrewd assessment of the trajectory we’re on: in many nominal advances, there’s a regressive step – stupidity glorified.
Broadly, this thesis means noting, for example, that the internet has trashed democracy through a related deluge of misinformation. But the devil is in the details. Old motormouth – whose mental cogs and vocal-cords remain on overdrive, in contrast to a bodily decline detailed with unstinting relish – observes how taps in public toilets went from being succinctly twisty to irksomely push-button to dementingly electronic (a mock ballet of futile, frantic gestures reminding us that Elton is as much an accomplished clown as an arch-commentator).
Some of the targets are fairly predictable; lamenting the dumbing-down of Hollywood films, or the vacuity of the pious new parlance (“lived experience, “my truth” and so on). But he’s alert to becoming an old git, retains a winning turn of phrase and overall the united gripes of Ben Elton are more than the sum of their parts.
Every time you think he’s playing it too safe, he’ll bait cancellation with a risqué riff (praising sleazy Roger Moore-era Bond, for instance) or turn his derision upon himself. There are a lot of barbs at the expense of millennials and Gen Zers but the boomers come in for trenchant ridiculing too.
His ebullience and intelligence combine to particularly blackly comic effect as he broaches assisted dying by imagining a final supper for a gran that’s botched by the pointless protocols of a would-be hipster eaterie. As for his own end, he’s free of any sentimentality: “When I’m dead you can stick me in the green compost bin!” Judging by his adoring reception in Nottingham, he won’t get off so lightly. Telling it like it is, he looks set to reinvent himself as the darling of Middle England.