Ben Elton Authentic Stupidity

Photography By Trevor Leighton

For any artist, to be able to delve, single-handedly, into the cultural sphere, and make a sizable-enough dent that it still resonates 30-something years after its debut, is nothing short of impressive. For the award-winning actor, writer and comedy-legend, Ben Elton, it’s just another day at the office. He’s still going strong. And he doesn’t see himself slowing down.

His name alone everyone knows. Whether it be from his achievements as an author, for which he’s published over 15 novels (several of which are number-one-bestsellers), playwright, actor or director, Elton’s immense repertoire has been earth-shattering, to say the least.

Just hearing his name casts your mind back to the 80’s with his alternative comedy styling.

Being the brains behind the seminal and groundbreakingly beloved BBC2 show, The Young Ones (alongside Rik Mayall), and subsequently creating numerous seasons of Blackadder, or writing Upstart Crow, Elton has hit the cultural sphere as punchy, in-your-face and high-octane comedy.

Continuing to use his writing chops with West-End plays musicals, such as We Will Rock You, The Beautiful Game (that he wrote with his mate, Andrew Lloyd Webber), and Close Up: The Twiggy Musical. Elton’s multi-award winning career as both performer and writer encompasses some of the most memorable and incisive comedy writing.

A serial award winner, he has won three BAFTAs, two Laurence Olivier Awards, and the Eurovision Golden Rose D’Or Lifetime Achievement Award, to name but a few.

Following the success of his critically-acclaimed, sold-out show in the UK in 2019, after a 15-year hiatus, the unprecedented Godfather of stand-up comedy, is coming back to kiwi shores this April with his tour, Authentic Stupidity.

We had the great opportunity to sit down, face-to-face with Ben Elton and talk to him about Authentic Stupidity and his upcoming visit to New Zealand.

How does it feel bringing Authentic Stupidity to these shores?

Well, it’s always a pleasure if there’s an audience that wants to see me. I am not (and never will be) jaded by the thought that there’ll be a theatre full of people who want to hear what I’ve got to say. I work very hard on my material and think a lot about the contents. I’ve done that all my career. The fact that after 45 years there’s still an audience who’ve aged with me is great. It’s generally an older audience, but not exclusively. Anywhere that has an audience I’m always happy to go.

Coming to New Zealand is always special because it is a beautiful country. It’s particularly suited to my loves—the outdoors, the scenery. My favorite part of the British Isles is Scotland and North Wales. New Zealand reminds me a lot of them. It’s funny…I married an Aussie from West Australia which is all beaches and desert; I should’ve married a Tasmanian! That’s my favorite Australian state. I’m also very happy in Western Australia.

Coming to New Zealand will be fun. We’re going to have a holiday here, which will be special. We’ll be going down to the South Island.
I’ve done 100 gigs in Britain, and every single one meant everything to me on the night I did it. Same anywhere else, especially New Zealand. I’m doing Australia at the moment. I’m very, very happy to be wherever I am.

Want to give me a brief summary of what audiences will be seeing in the tour?

It’s pretty much what I’ve always done. It’s a long show—an hour 10 in the first half and the same in the second. It’s high-intensity stand-up with lots of ideas crashing about and forming some vague hole. I called the show Authentic Stupidity, but I could’ve called any of them that. My comedy is embracing the absurdity of existence and highlighting how surreal and weird we all are in treating ourselves and our planet. I’ve spent a lifetime mining my own foibles and discovering that people share them. That’s the beauty of comedy, with it being a community activity. Everybody is laughing at themselves in a way.

It isn’t brutal comedy, which isn’t comedy at all. Brutal comedy is hatred, I feel, which is massaged into prejudice and producing a lie. I saw a comic once who came of stage and was like, ‘I hate f**king dwarfs’ and everyone cheered. It was a gleeful brutality, which I find deeply depressing. Good comedy, I think, is seeing the weakness in yourself, finding the funny in it and bringing the audience to the realisation that they share that weakness, or joy, or anger.

People always ask anywhere I go ‘what’s different about us!’ I know it’s a disappointing answer, but I always reply that I’m sorry but there’s nothing different about you. The real fun is when we highlight what we all feel, and what we all share. That’s universal. Everyone tries to impress a wine waiter. We’re scared of people seeing our true selves.

I’m sure even Donald Trump, secretly, in his bed at night is scared he’s going to be found out as a deeply inadequate, scared person whose bluster is based on nothing. We’re all the same, I think. We all share a common humanity, and that’s where my comedy is based.

Your comedy often touches on quite pressing issues facing humanity. What do you think a big issue is today, and how would you go about using comedy to address it?

I don’t think I’m using comedy to make the world a better place. I know I’m not a politician or preacher. I’m not a man of faith of any kind. I’ll vote, and do my best, and go on the protests. When I’m on stage, I’m there to find them funny. When I do a joke about climate change I’m not trying to fix climate change, but share in the common astonishment of where we’ve managed to get ourselves to. People often say: ‘political comedy and satirical comedy doesn’t ever work! Look at you, you didn’t bring down Thatcher in the 80’s!’ That’s not what satirical comedy is about. It’s not setting out to change the thing. It’s an expression of the people and their times. A painter looks at a landscape and tries to interpret it to the best of their ability. They’re using it to promote their art. I suppose that’s the same with me.

All the current problems with the world are part of what I talk about but I’m not doing it in order to fix them. I might fix us a bit, by making us recognize the absurdity of it all, one way or the other.
But what are the big problems? Well, until the imminent resurgence of facism globally I would’ve said the absolute pressing moral and physical issue of our days is climate change and chaos and destruction. I consider that still to be the principle. From the places of power, most significantly Washington, I think the crisis has gotten more acute. Maybe we’ll wipe ourselves out with a nuclear war before we have time to drown ourselves from the rising oceans. We are currently facing a cluster-f**k of crisis and we have a bull-in-a-China-shop leading what used to be called the ‘free-world’. It’s impossible to quantify the s**t-storm we are in at the moment. Which is why I strongly recommend everyone comes along and has a nice night at Authentic Stupidity. I genuinely see comedians as the fifth emergency service. Things are so scary out there. Laughing at the bewilderment is actually quite a healing thing, I think.

Authentic Stupidity, the title of the tour, is a play on Artificial Intelligence. It’s a joke on AI—it’s not about it, though. AI, I think, is clearly an existential threat to humankind and it’s going to put us out of work. I think we need work and purpose. I don’t think endless leisure is a good thing. It’s not like the billionaires are going to buy everybody a yacht. They’re gonna do their job and keep their yacht. While AI is terrifying, and people say: ‘yeah, but it might cure cancer’, I render it meaningless and I don’t want to be alive to find out if it actually works. I don’t want to live a meaningless life, where nothing I do or think has any significance because it’s already been preempted by a machine in the clouds. I try not to get depressed about it; I’m very much an optimist. It’ll sort itself out, if we give it a chance.

In the tour I’ll do what I always do, which is unpack the absurdity of who and what we are and what we’re doing on this earth.

Looking back over your acting, writing and stand-up career, how do you think you’ve evolved as an artist?

I don’t think I’ve evolved a lot. I’ve always written vigorously and copiously in all I do. I was writing some good stuff and some crap stuff in the 80’s. Probably the same could be said in the 2020’s. I’m just glad I can still make a living out of it. I think I’m a better comedian. I think I deliver my material slightly less frankly and aggressively. I learnt my comedy trade in the School of Hard Knocks. In the 80’s, people weren’t used to a comedy of ideas. They were used to comedians who told jokes that were sexist or racist. There were many good practitioners back then that weren’t d**ks. I still love the Brits from that age—Les Dawson, Morecambe and Wise. I was part of a bit of a movement that claimed stand-up a vessel for ideas. The audiences were very robust and ‘male’, it felt. Jenny [Saunders] and Dawn [French] wouldn’t play the Comedy Store, because there’d always be a bloke who’d shout out: ‘show up ya t*ts!’ We still live in a pretty depressing world, but probably nowadays most blokes would realize that they’d look a bit of an idiot if they did that. I’m not saying sexism has been conquered, but certain freedoms that men used to have have been righted.

I developed a very fast, aggressive style at the start. Very assertive. I’m not naturally a very aggressive or assertive person. My comedy has become a little less assertive. It’s no less passionate. I probably talk just as much as I did. I’ve learnt to trust the audience, which is good. I have learnt to realize that they will go with an idea far enough, even if there is 30 seconds of no laughs.
I don’t think I’ve changed much as a writer. I guess I’m less scared. I suppose it’s easier to be less scared of failure when you’re coming towards the latter part of your career. Even if I fail now, I’ve got a few hits notched up so they can’t take those away! I don’t obviously want to fail. I do everything to the best of my ability. It’s no longer career-defining. I’m more relaxed as an artist as I was in the 80’s.

Who are your biggest inspirations?

I learnt through osmosis. I love all comedy. From Chaplin to Laurel and Hardy, all the way up to the Carry On films. I love cheeky comedy, or big comedy. I love a double entendre, and something cerebral, like Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen. The Pythons, I was 10 when they exploded and I don’t think I could ever imagine anything being funnier. The 60’s and 70’s were a great time for British entertainment, when we had great sitcoms. Dads Army, Fawlty Towers, Steptoe and Son. Morecambe and Wise were my great heroes. I thought Eric Morecambe was simply sublime. And Ernie [Wise] too. I liked anything good. I guess good comedy isn’t defined by left-wing or right-wing, or whether it’s trying to make a point or whether it’s just being silly. Good comedy is whether it’s honest and true and whether it appeals to the funny bone. Comedy that kicks down is never really funny. But comedy that embraces will be uplifting. I was fortunate to have good stuff on the tellie when I was younger—a lotta s**t, but also some really good stuff. I was influenced by all of it.

I don’t watch much tellie now. My favorite comedy of the last decade has to be Curb Your Enthusiasm. That’s work of true greatness. I thought Fleabag was good too. I’ll see a bit here and there. I don’t necessarily seek-out comedy; a bit of a busman’s holiday for me.

I don’t watch stand-ups. I am completely uninterested in other stand-ups. That doesn’t come from any part of snobbery, but I just don’t want them in my head. I’m an immense fan of Billy Connelly. I wrote him a fan-letter once, which resulted in a correspondence which I treasure. It’s an artform that I hold dear to myself. I’m a stand-up because I want to express myself comedically. I have a very subjective use of my talent. Everything else is objective. If I’m writing an episode of a sitcom, or a musical, or a novel, I’m in various heads of various characters. Whereas when I’m on stage by myself I use my passions and interests to fire up the comedy and the audience just comes along with me. It’s very exhilarating, to have that raw, honest feedback from an audience. If you were to fail, you’ll be failing very publicly and you’d be ‘dying’, as they say…Never happened to me, I’m pleased to say. There have been a couple of gigs that have been slow or fast. I know what I’m doing. When I get on stage I’ve written that material. I don’t get up and start mumbling and improvising. It’s very thrilling; when I get a laugh, I am sharing that moment with an audience and it’s an instant critique. A laugh is the best review I could possibly get. It’s instant and organic. It’s not what a critic does, where they go home and rip it apart. They tell me what they really think by laughing. My material is quite complicated, so if I’m getting a laugh it means I’ve done a good job at being understood. It’s a very thrilling thing. I’ve done 110 gigs so far, and I plan to do 40 more. It’s not like it isn’t hard work. It’s great onstage, but being in and out of hotels is quite a pain. And I’m quite old! Doing two and a half hours of full-throttle comedy is quite tiring, but Jesus the audience doesn’t half give you an incentive to keep going!

I had a look at your tour schedule. Didn’t you play Adelaide in Australia last night? And now you’re in NZ today, and then back to Aussie to play Sydney tonight? You must be knackered!

The UK tour I was doing six nights a week for months. This is a much easier tour because the distances are smaller!

But still, I’m busy! I played Adelaide, essentially, last night. I just dropped into New Zealand to do this press. I’m not on any social media. I have to do proper press to advertise my tours. When Stephen [Fry] does a tour, he tells six million Twitter followers that he’s got a show on, but I don’t have that option. Social media would drive me mad. While I’d like to have that opportunity to tell everyone that I’m on stage, or I have a new book out, it’s not worth it for me. I couldn’t bare jumping into that horrendous pool. I’ved spent my life avoiding hecklers, so even the idea that I’d be sticking my ass up and saying: here it is, kick it. I’d engage, I know I would. Someone would say something stupid. I’d find a need to reply. A young comic wouldn’t have that luxury. I’m still well-known enough to get on the radio, or hop in a face-to-face interview and the old media would still know me so I can get on stage.

Do you have any advice for any young, budding writers, or actors, or comedians, starting out?

I only have had one piece of advice, which is what Polonius gave to Hamlet, which is ‘above all to thine own self be true’. The artist has to please themselves. If you set out to paint a picture that you think will appease an audience over your own needs, it’ll be a s**t picture. What painting, I ask myself, do I want to paint? Then, at least, I’ll be appeasing myself. Comedy even moreso. Comedians often are trying to to think what the audience would like to hear and go for an easy joke. As a comedian, I think about what I find funny. All art should be completely, unapologetically selfish. You should please yourself because that’s the only honest way you can create great art and only by doing that please others. If you’re trying to please them first you’re putting the cart before the horse you’re trying to please them first. That’s why Hollywood produces so much s**t because they think: what do people like, or what was successful last year? They put out a work and show it to 100 Focus groups and narrow it down to the weakest denominator.

No body would’ve seen Python coming, or the Woody Allen comedies, or Ad Fab or Fleabag. That’s the artist expressing themselves and pleasing themselves honestly, hence delighting an audience.

Any exciting plans or projects for the future?

Well, yes, a lovely holiday in New Zealand! The Southern Alps! Sophie’s going to join me. I’ll be turning 66 down in Christchurch, which is the retirement age in Britain. I don’t plan on retiring any time soon. There’s still a lot to do. I have a brand-new production of We Will Rock You in Stuttgart to direct, and have a new book out in the autumn. I’m keen to keep it going. I don’t work for the sake of it, but if I have something to say I do have an on-going desire (or compulsion, but not as far as dysfunctionality) to create and express myself.

That doesn’t seemed to have dimmed in the 45 years I’ve been doing it so it seems I’ll be doing it a little bit longer. Whether there’ll be an audience or not, I don’t know, but I won’t be chasing them. I’ll be saying: ‘here’s my truth, I hope you enjoy it.’