Ben Elton is heading back to Kiwi shores in April for his award-winning live show. Photo / Trevor Leighton
Ben Elton is heading back to Kiwi shores in April for his award-winning live show. Photo / Trevor Leighton
Brutal honesty, biting wit, and a boatload of charisma are just some of the words that come to mind when describing a chat with Ben Elton.
During the course of our roughly 20-minute conversation, the literary legend and scintillating stand-up covers everything from the universal nature of comedy to “billionaires floating in their yachts off Malibu or blasting off into space in their man dildos”.
If that’s anything to go by, Kiwis are in for a real treat come April when he returns to Kiwi shores for three special stand-up shows.
With more than 40 years of work across literature, stage, TV and live comedy, Elton certainly knows his stuff and pulls no punches when it comes to saying what’s on his mind.
His slew of successful 90s and 2000s novels like Popcorn and Dead Famous are a staple in book collections around the country, and follow themes like celebrity culture, excess, and the impact media has on the mind.
He’s an artist in the purest form that documents the human experience, and he does it pretty damn well.
“I don’t normally give my tours titles,” he confides in me while sipping his tea.
This one, for a change, is called Authentic Stupidity and looks to explore “the outer limits of human idiocy” and why it’s something we should probably start keeping an eye on.
“I normally just call [my tours] Ben Elton Live because that’s what they are, and I think audiences know I’ll always deliver new material. It’ll always be a new show, and I haven’t felt the need to give them some pretentious title like, you know, heaven or evolution or whatever.”
The Brit, who also has Australian citizenship, was last in Aotearoa in 2021 (on a Ben Elton Live tour) on the cusp of the Covid-19 pandemic, a topic he thinks people are sick of hearing about.
“I commented on the Covid situation a bit, but people didn’t want to hear it, they were looking at it every day. It was a strange experience as everything about Covid was strange. I found it all very confronting.”
Elton sees his comedy as “much more general and universal”, than typical observational humour, taking his own experiences and trying to relate them to others.
“I mean, if I’m on live television, I might make some topical jokes, but my two-hour stand-up routine is much bigger than that,” he said.
“I take the same comedic view when talking about, you know, my own sense of inadequacy and wondering whether I need Viagra or not and talking about the collapse of democracy in the face of internet brain rot.”
For him, it’s less about targeting people’s different sense of humour and more about finding common ground.
“I don’t buy into this idea of sort of local audiences. Of course there are local characteristics, but comedy is universal,” he noted.
“The great thing about humanity is there’s so much we share, and one of the great privileges of being a stand-up comic is that you get to understand just how much we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.
“We all share the same fears, the same exhilarations, the same petty vanities, the same, you know, desire to do better.”
If you're looking for honesty, Ben Elton is the guy to give it to you. Photo / Trevor Leighton
Authentic Stupidity will see Elton’s comedy focus in on the world we’re living in now, and its changing attitudes.
“[It’s about] what it’s like to be someone at 65 who used to be part of the radical change and is now trying to process the bewildering pace of change that young people are experiencing now,” Elton said.
“On this occasion, I just thought it would be funny because everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence as the greatest threat that humanity is currently facing because we seem to have invented something that could replace us.
“I’m saying the greatest threat humanity’s facing is actually not artificial intelligence, its Authentic Stupidity, the same one we’ve always faced. We’re just not capable of looking after ourselves or our planet.”
But what exactly is Authentic Stupidity you may ask?
“The best example I can think of authentic stupidity is that we’ve allowed a bunch of unelected, unaccountable tax-avoiding billionaires floating in their yachts off Malibu or blasting off into space in their man dildos to invent imposing machinery on us that they themselves admit will put us all out of work,” Elton jokes.
“I mean, if a terrorist announced they’d come up with machinery that would put us all out of work within 10 years, I think we’d send in the SAS and shoot the b****d. It’s because it’s a bunch of billionaires, we kind of just shrug our shoulders and go, okay, you know, whatever.”
A personal favourite of mine, I ask Elton about the impact that Popcorn (a book about copycat crime a la Natural Born Killers) has had in the last 26-odd years and if its themes are still relevant in today’s social media age.
“It’s a good question, Mitchell, because you know, there is a play and often there’s talk we should revive it, because it was a big hit in the 90s, won an Olivier Award and all that.
“But I think it’s of its time, because that was written in a time when media was still very focused on individual films. The media is now so disparate and there is so much real violence that you can access if you want, and horrendous pornography that is at the click of a button. The copycat killing debate, I think, isn’t really relevant anymore because of the internet.”
Perhaps a period piece would be more appropriate, Elton muses.
Having “always wanted to be in entertainment”, Elton also recalls that his love for theatre and how it helped shape his literary career.
“I got cast in an amateur production of Peter Pan when I was 11. I was one of the Lost Boys, and it was at a local village hall.
“I absolutely loved it so much, and all I wanted to do at that point, I thought I wanted to be an actor.”
Queen drummer Roger Taylor, writer Ben Elton and Queen guitarist Brian May.
From working in amateur dramatics in his youth, he’s now collaborated with the likes of Brian May and Elton John.
“Obviously working on We Will Rock You [a musical based on the songs of Queen] was life changing for me and I was actually out for dinner with Roger Taylor only last night.“
And while performance is one of his great joys, he was still “first and foremost a writer” when he was up on that stage.
“I’ve written this material. It’s almost performance art, Mitchell, that’s what I would say, with a lot of swearing.”
As to his next project after the tour, which has garnered rave reviews across the globe, Elton said he had “no compulsion” to put pen to paper but admitted a new book will hopefully happen at some point.
“I think the reason I managed to work so hard over all these decades is because I’m not as driven as people think I am.
“I’m perfectly capable of taking time off, and I do a lot.”
