Ben Elton review – bracing return of a sexagenarian all at sea (original) (raw)

‘It hasn’t been easy,” says Ben Elton, “trying to decide what to talk about.” You don’t say. His new standup show is stuffed to bursting with Elton’s takes on identity politics, post-truth, and every other cultural phenomenon since he last performed live comedy 15 years ago. It’s not a perfect return: there are missteps, lapses into fogeyism, and sometimes it’s more sermon that standup. But there’s big-hitting stuff here, too, and – as passionate as ever, 30 years on from his Thatcher-bashing heyday – Elton’s open and inquisitive engagement with the thorniest corners of modern living is bracing to experience.

Having watched Messrs Carr, Gervais, Chappelle and others recently, I was ill-prepared for this level of humility from a middle-aged male standup faced with a fast-changing world. That’s the subject of Elton’s show: not only that “I don’t understand any more”, but that today’s world is so confusing, he now worries he never understood anything in the first place. What’s refreshing is that Elton – rather than fleeing towards old certainties – embraces the confusion, at least in principle.

There’s a have-cake-and-eat-it dynamic at play, in that he repeatedly asserts his support of new developments in culture (particularly relating to gender and sexuality), while exploiting the humour of his predicament as a sexagenarian at sea in the modern world. He takes “pale, male and stale” on the chin, admitting this is “a limp, wrinkly Caucasian scrotum of a show”. His material on sexuality as a spectrum and trans awareness (“I used to know I was a man”) is disarmingly open-ended. So, too, a section on Germaine Greer’s journey from feminist hero to feminist pariah, the final line of which gets a laugh despite clearly not being meant as a joke.

Does that mean Elton isn’t in control of his material? Occasionally, perhaps – a section on his father’s Alzheimer’s is awkwardly framed. But, more often, he treads deftly the delicate line between respect for a new generation’s truths and vestigial loyalty to his own. And he repeatedly finds the funny while doing so, with his striking line about all men sharing Harvey Weinstein’s bathrobe, a lurid future projection of his kids’ generation conga-ing to Kanye in their care homes, or his vision of what Tomorrow’s World might have looked like had Maggie Philbin really known what was in store for us.

As he cartoon-stomps around the stage, the rhythms of 80s-era Elton are vividly summoned by, say, his early routine (“I’ve got the Alz”) about his fear of looming senility. Yes, conservatism creeps in, particularly after the interval, as he laments the advent of the internet, sourdough bread and craft beer. It’s usually self-aware and sometimes very droll, as when Elton protests at other people’s fingers “fossicking” (lovely word) in the rock salt. But the contention that everything was better “when I was a kid” gets a little over-insistent.

There’s too much in the show – he’s no sooner started on Orwellian workplace terminology than he’s jumped those tracks to decry the Americanisation of the UK. Then – after he ardently debunks the myth that Boris Johnson is funny – the jokes fall away and Elton sounds a sonorous alarm at our looming “new dark age”. At its best, this is a show that’s intensely engaged with how we live now, from a comic who’ll grant you pale and male while humbly contesting the sell-by date.